Saturday, January 17, 2009

False Science, True Science and Poetic Science



In a larger scope, poetic thinking absorbs even a certain kind of polity. In the BBC series, The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski, standing above a rivulet, which was once a dumpsite for the ashes of the Jews cremated at Auschwitz, distinguishes true science from false, pernicious science. The science of the Nazis was inherently false because it was attenuating and dogmatic. It was a reductively rigid, exclusive and wrong system by which to merit the value of certain people over others. Such, Bronowski says, is not science at all, but violence. True science is creative, expansive and inclusive. In this capacity, true science is qualitatively poetic. This peripherally answers a question posed by Derrida in Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Derrida, in the jacket note of the book:

Why is it that invention cannot be reduced to the discovery, the revelation, or the unveiling of truth? No more than it can be reduced to the creation, the imagination, or the production of the thing?

Invention is both discovery and creation because the expansive nature of the cognitive process that allows for invention is creating concepts and figures in its absorption of any revelation. The inventive mind creates to understand. It cannot, in fact, absorb information without creating. True science grows outward as an inclusive mode of apprehension. False science cannot grow outward because it is premised around exclusion. If the positive qualities of rhetorical expansion were not crucial to a correct understanding of the world, the difference between it and less inclusive modes would not be necessary to articulate.

False science is not only dangerous it is not poetic. The qualities of rhetorical expansion are condensed in poetic works. Poetic works, or the work that poetic works do, typify the way the creative mind apprehends the world. By greater study of poetic works, greater understanding of inclusive epistemological faculties follows. In a similar manner by which Gilles Deleuze politicizes the unconscious, Freudian mind, as exhibited in literary works or otherwise, I am suggesting that the political domain of cognitive processes goes beneath even unconscious storage of memory and repression. The political domain is an emanation of a mental operating process that is, in its manner of tropological apprehension and errant inclusivity, fundamentally poetic. Poetry is aligned with polity but not by Freudian auxiliary. Psychology is secondary to the primary, poetic, mental operating system. Poetry is the functional frame of the human mind when creating and understanding.

True Science is Poetic.

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