Art and Culture

Can Art Convey Truth?

Ways of feeling are not ways of knowing.

Red and blue mirrored figures of The Thinker. Canva.

As a scientist, I tend to get labelled an anti-art bigot when I tell my friends that, unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth. My assertion is greeted with an eyeroll and a shrug of the shoulders, or, by humanities professors, with disdain and opprobrium. To them, I’m just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school. For example, a discussion of the topic at the Heterodox Academy in June resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane. I’m writing this essay to explain my position.

First I should address the anti-art bigot charge. Just because I see art as a source of something other than the kind of truth uncovered by science does not for a moment mean I’m dismissive of art. My undergraduate education included courses in Greek tragedy, Old English (I can still read Beowulf in the original), modern literature, ethical philosophy, and fine arts, creating in me a desire to keep learning, to keep being inspired, to keep discovering art. I have derived and continue to derive extraordinary pleasure and betterment from art and other branches of the humanities. Science gave me a career, but** **the arts have given me at least as much in life as science has. But what I’ve gained from art has not been truth.

Let me stop here and define what I mean by “truth.” I am referring to propositional truth, which The Oxford English Dictionary defines as “something that conforms with fact or reality.” Such truths can in principle be shown by empirical study to be either true or false, like the claims that “evolution happened” or “James Joyce was born in Dublin.” Such truths are the main component of “knowledge,” widely defined as “facts verified by a consensus among qualified people.” In contrast, subjective knowledge consists of personal feelings and beliefs that are valid for only one or a few people and can’t be verified empirically (e.g., “this painting is beautiful”). Perhaps we should simply distinguish objective from subjective knowledge. And subjective knowledge is not truth.

Scientists aspire to make their search for truth as objective as possible. We produce evidence for and against our ideas. Evolution might be controversial in the public eye (71 percent of Americans reject it as a purely naturalistic process, believing instead that human evolution involved the hand of God), but it’s not controversial among scientists because a mountain of evidence shows that it “conforms with fact” and thus has been “verified by a consensus among qualified people.”

Such objective knowledge is distinct from debates involving morality, ethics, religion, or politics. These cannot be resolved by conflicting ideas because they depend on personal preferences. Should abortion be banned under all circumstances? Should we have the death penalty? Should we prohibit the sale and eating of meat? There are no “true” answers to these questions because the answers depend on what kind of societies people want—a subjective matter.

This puts the lie to two claims. First, the view that free speech and the resulting debates are necessary and sufficient for finding truth (famously promoted by John Stuart Mill and later by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) is wrong. The “clash of ideas” alone cannot produce truth—a claim that undergirds America’s First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech—unless you add evidence into the mix.

Likewise, the common claim that the most important purpose of colleges and universities is to expand, preserve, and promulgate new knowledge—to find consensus truths—is also wrong. Finding truth is not the purpose of the literary arts like literature and poetry, the visual and graphic arts like film, painting, animation, photography, and the performing arts like theatre, dance, and music. These fields cannot find truth because that is not why they exist nor why they are taught. (Other areas like economics and sociology, often considered part of “the humanities,” can find truth insofar as they engage in empirical study of reality.)

Let’s dive into what art can and cannot tell us.

On a trivial factual level, art can indeed tell us things we didn’t know. For example, paintings up to the eighteenth century show that members of the Habsburg dynasty had protruding lower jaws and lips, a genetic condition called “mandibular prognathism.” Without the paintings we wouldn’t know that, nor what anybody looked like before photography. (Some of these things could, of course, be checked by finding written documentation.) And of course there’s information about the artworks themselves: The Sixth Brandenburg Concerto is written in B flat major and has no violins. Moby-Dick describes in detail how whales were caught in Melville’s time, and, assuming his information can be verified independently, it contributes to knowledge. But what’s the truth beyond that? Yes, the characters, like Ishmael and Queequeg—friends of different races—as well as the vengeful Captain Ahab, are believable. But that is not truth: it is fiction that rings true. In those days, Ishmael may well have been a racist who spurned Queequeg, and that would also ring true. Or is there a greater truth, with the search for the whale being a metaphor for something else? If you can find a propositional truth in this great novel beyond its depiction of whaling, you’re better than I am.

But propositional truths aren’t what’s peddled by scholars as the knowledge that comes from art. *Moby-Dick *is not read to teach students about the whaling industry of the nineteenth century. There are other sources that can tell us that—and more thoroughly. In general, the “knowledge” conveyed by a work of art is often said to lie in the work’s themes. And that leads to our problem, for themes are subjective, reflecting beliefs of both the author of a work and person who views or reads it.

Roald Dahl and the Ethics of ArtThe urge to censor is based on a misunderstanding of what makes literature valuable.Iona Italia

What, for example, is the knowledge conveyed by Jackson Pollock’s “Number 5”—to me the most appealing of his abstract “action art”? I like it because it evokes emotions in me that other Pollock paintings don’t. And what is the “truth” in Macbeth? Is it that overweening ambition leads to tragedy? Well, yes it can, but there are many counterexamples: for every truth conveyed by a work, there’s another work with an equal and opposite truth. Is the “knowledge” in Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” that one can find solace from the city by moving to a bucolic island? That may be Yeats’s feeling, but it doesn’t resonate with a city boy like me. What resonates is the poem’s beauty, not its apparent message. And what knowledge do we gain from the modern dances of Twyla Tharp?

Knowledge derived from art is either trivial (war is hell; the Habsburgs had big chins), needs empirical verification before it can either be considered knowledge (is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle an accurate view of the early twentieth-century meatpacking industry in Chicago?), or is instead contradicted by knowledge from other sources.

Contradictory “knowledge” is ubiquitous in literature. Does one find a better life by following self-interest, as in Atlas Shrugged, or by showing empathy and communal solidarity, as in The Grapes of Wrath? Is the American dream empty and shallow, as in The Great Gatsby, or is it worth pursuing, as in Horatio Alger’s Struggle Upward? Is war a backdrop for heroism and valour, as in the movie Saving Private Ryan, or is it a venue of unmitigated horror without glory, as in the movie and novel, All Quiet on the Western Front? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments”) celebrates the constancy of true love, while Lord Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving” mourns love’s inevitable waning. The human experience is varied, as are the responses of different readers and viewers. This guarantees that any knowledge gleaned from the arts is subjective.

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Jerome Bruner emphasises this difference in his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds:

There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to each other … The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.

Bruner’s emphasis on verisimilitude—the feeling of “truthiness” that promotes the suspension of disbelief—is one key to the value of art, for it can produce emotional and cognitive resonance in the consumer. One could restate Bruner by saying that while science and other empirically-based disciplines constitute ways of knowing, much of the humanities involves ways of feeling. The appreciation of beauty is perhaps the greatest benefit conferred by art. While science can also yield awe and wonder, especially when contemplating cosmology or the biological world, the real goal of science is to produce knowledge, not emotion.

What about objective standards in art? Are there perhaps objective considerations governing why some works are better than others? Well, yes, there are criteria for judging the quality of art, but these again are subjective, and there are no unanimous answers. Nearly everyone agrees that Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is better art than “Dogs Playing Poker,” but there is no objective way to verify that conclusion unless you specify beforehand your criteria for greatness. Most music lovers would consider Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony far better than his “Wellington’s Victory.” You can argue that the Ninth is more complex, more diverse, and less bombastic, but what do you do with someone who likes a good military march and doesn’t feel that “All men become brothers”?

Finally, if you prize knowledge in a poem, then surely you’d place high value on “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” an account of the 1879 collapse of a Scottish railroad bridge written by William McGonagall, perhaps the worst poet in history. The last stanza gives the reason for the collapse:

I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.

It’s hilariously awful, but it’s objectively true! And surely objectively truer than the immortal but ambiguous and controversial lines of Keats:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Still, Keats endures while McGonagall is mocked. Why? Because Keats’s poem is musical and beautiful, even though its own “truth” is unclear. Yes, the poet thinks the vase is beautiful, perhaps because it depicts human pursuits that provoke his imagination, but are all such depictions “true,” much less “beautiful”? Is Keats making a general claim here, or simply describing his subjective reaction to a single vase? At least one can test McGonagall’s claim that stronger houses better protect their inhabitants.

Curiously, I think that perhaps my art-isn’t-truth stance is not as extreme and unreasonable as my eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging friends in the humanities imply. As I mentioned, at the Heterodox Academy panel Menand and McWhorter were the eye-rollers and shoulder-shruggers, but I see that they too have run up against the objective/subjective issue in their own thinking. For example, in an exchange about whether Leonard Bernstein’s symphonies are greater than his musicals, McWhorter wound up admitting, “There is no truth: it’s a matter of informed opinion and opinion on what you have decided you value in art.” Agreed!

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