Life without boundaries

Teaching this workshop on Darwin has brought up several discussions on the personification of Darwin. Many of the students took a quote or a thought from Darwin and extrapolated from it, sometimes wildly, to speculate on his personal motivations for his science or the effect of his science on him personally. While they were interesting to read they were often ill-supported - there were many weak hypotheses that Darwin hated his father, and some stronger hypotheses that he was a man of his times and his theories were therefore shaped by Victorian society and all it's baggage.

We can all agree that absolute objectivity is a farce. No matter how objective anyone tries to be, whether they are an observing scientist or a gavel-wielding judge, humanity will always have its own perception as a lens-wall between itself and the naked truth.

But where science tries to minimize the warp in our vision that is ourselves, poets play with that warp to look further into the weird world of perception. That contrast makes it really useful to look at the duality (or non-duality) of the two by juxtaposing objective truth and artistic ("emotional") truth. In a recent article in the NY Times, poet Juan Felipe Herrera stated that poetry is "a way to attain a life without boundaries." In an article linked to the one on Herrera, the reviewer describes how we often look for actual truth in poetry when really what is there is "emotional truth". By trying to find ourselves in the story, we loose some of the meaning and place feelings and events on the author that aren't really there.

Perhaps the difficulty is that we often need a different kind of truth than we are offered. Darwin offered dry but accessible treatises on science, yet many students want to see him as more, as the hero (or villain) of a historical drama about the triumphs and travails of genius. Where poets offer an exploration of feeling, we often look for fact. In the end I think wisdom is understanding not only what you see, but how you see it.