Damien Broderick wrote (27.12.2001/13:44) :
> Is it fiction or science which is holistic rather than
> reductive? Science, we guess at first, is surely the very paradigm
> of the reductive, stripping the meat and fat from the bone, boiling
> down the flensed carcase into a skeletal substrate, all sumptuous
> life reduced to numbers. But that's true also of the mechanics of
> fiction, as narratologists show us: every imagined action, in folk
> story and Tolstoy alike, derives from a handful or two of types,
> functions, actants, deployed in words built from an equally small
> number of distinguishable acoustic or graphic segments.
There is a lapse in your argument : you compare what science aims at
to what fiction IS, as analyzed by narratology, the science of
fiction.
The way I see the most important distinction between science and art
is this : what science aims at is truth ; and truth, in its unchanging
character, has nothing to do with us, living things. It may be nice to
know, and useful ; or it may be depressing (when people first realized
they were mortal) ; or it may be indifferent. It doesn't care about
us. Once discovered, it's there to stay. Contemplating it will cheer
you up one day ; then make you sad the next day. You will change, but
it won't. It doesn't care about you.
On the contrary art is made for us. By nature it is "on our side", on
life's side.
And it is so even when it aims beyond "the imitation of life". You can
be made for the living beings without representing life (think of a
very "abstract" piece by Bach) -- as you can represent life without
designing the representation for living beings (think biology).
So the two activities are really different because of what they aim
at. But as activities they have many similarities, as both are
creative, and searching for truth can be a very lively and passionate
thing.
Jacques
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