"I think of poetry as a means to study nature, as is science"
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming, Poet
Science is an effective source of knowledge, but it does not offer an answer to every type of question. The first contact with a pattern in nature is usually accompanied by an aesthetic experience. We see this in national parks where people flock in droves to be awed by the flora, the fauna, and the landscape. They come to experience more than to analyze.
An aesthetic experience in nature is a visual, auditory, olfactory, or kinesthetic likeness that is stimulated by some natural happening. Aesthetic experiences in nature represent the joy coming from our senses. Seeing a majestic mountain peak, hearing the beautiful song of a bird, the smell of fresh rain, or feeling a rush of wind are all experiences of beauty provided to us by nature. The resulting feelings are forms of perception that are just as important and vital as the analytical. Art and science are both forms of understanding and are both pathways to the analytical. The aesthetic and the analytical are two different but complementary modes of perception. They are two different ways of seeing.
To fully engage nature, one appreciates nature through its beauty and understands nature through man's science. For humans, engaging beauty is a right brain activity while analyzing nature takes place in the left hemisphere of the human brain. Both sides of this brain are at work processing the same information in two different ways.
The right hemisphere uses intuition and leaps of insight. It is intuitive, subjective, relational, holistic, time-free, perceptual, whole-pattern, and spatial . The left hemisphere addresses the verbal and the analytical. It analyzes over time, whereas the right hemisphere synthesizes over space.
There is a synergy that results when art and science are brought together. This is particularly true when beholding patterns in nature because art and science work together to help us understand the workings of a natural object (its content of form and function) as well as its relationship with its environment (context). Art and science form a synergy that expands the senses resulting in exploration, creativity, adventure, and discovery.
Art, according to Ayn Rand, is a human abstraction of reality. When extended to the beholding of nature's patterns, the "artist" is nature itself. Human involvement comes in the beholding. In "The Romantic Manifesto", Rand goes on to say that "Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were precepts".
According to Peter Saint-Andre, the purpose of art is to expand the range of man's consciousness, or his knowledge, beyond the perceptual level . It brings things into the realm of the humanly knowable and converts concepts into the equivalent of concretes.
The aesthetic perception and synthesis of nature requires very different tools than those required by the science of analyzing patterns in nature. Instead of computers and mathematics, the world of beauty requires engagement, perception, and contemplation. Where science seeks abstraction above all, art revels in the particular at the same time that it presents an image or vision of some aspect of nature. Aesthetic perception offers the power of deep focus. For example, when one focuses the right brain through sketching or photography, one sees patterns and relationships that are otherwise overlooked.
According to Alan Lightman:
"…Scientists work on questions with answers... By contrast, for artists, the question is often more important than the answer, and often the answer doesn't exist... The arts and humanities offer the sciences an essential store of other ideas, images, metaphors, and language... Such images and metaphors arise both from direct sensual experience and from the language of artists who portray that experience....The most important gift the sciences and the arts offer each other is a recognition and synthesis of their different approaches to thinking, their different ways of being in the world."
Both the aesthetic and the analytical, the two cultures of art and science, are essential partners. In the synergy of their partnership in the human mind, they effect the beholding of nature and her patterns in ways that neither culture could do alone.
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