ALONGSIDE "THYMOLOGY – INTELLIGENCE - CONSCIENCE "

 

Silvio Locatelli

 

Modern specialization considers science and poetry to be independent or even incompatible. Nevertheless, not few people think that an intimate relationship between science and poetry exists. 

Edgard Allan Poe, Mallarme, Paul Valery, Jules Romains believed in a meaningful relationship between science and poetry. In particular, Valery, as well as Jules Romains, was sure that modern men could not do less but be interested in science and know its language, and went further on: he wanted to know how the intellect works.  

In order to reach this aim he abandoned the poetic creation for more than ten years and devoted himself exclusively to mathematics. He was convinced that, in order to acquire certainties, certainties from whom it is possible to draw correct deductions from the reasoning applied to the solution of mathematical problems, he needed to be sure of the achieved result, something that only mathematics could offer. Once you got the problem’s solution, you deduce the correctness of the applied reasoning. Valery wanted to get to know the method and the intuitive ability of Leonardo, those virtues that brought him to the definition of the actions built by the mind.  

Only the inadequate technology of the time obstructed the realization of many of the projects of the great artist and scientist. Nevertheless, poetry, creativeness and science are in symbiosis.  

Romeo Lucioni opens his essay "Thymology Intelligence Conscience" with meaningful calls to Cartesio and to his belief in feelings as moral source, to Pascal who believes the heart to be endowed with cognitive ability (“Heart has its own reasons, that reason does not know”), to Rousseau for his belief in the ability of feelings to perceive ethical values, to Kant, for his axiom that reason, sensibility and will raise man above every other living being, and for the reference to conscience, seen as a possibility of self-judgement.  

To Cartesio’s "cogito" must obviously be added Saint Anselmo’s "dubito", more stimulating towards the mental adventure and towards the science’s need to decompose the mind’s mechanisms, in order to know its single faculties and their contribution to the complex operations.

Science and poetry, science and literary creation, a world open to the most adventurous interpretations. Psychiatrists and psychologists have a very fertile field of investigation, if they venture in the analysis of the most extraordinary characters that the great writers, these fertile creators of souls, offered to the readers of every Country in every age. 

Literature is a mirror of life. Literature as analysis of being, of acting, of the identification in other people's passions, of the effort to understand and accept the endless diversities of being. The exemplification and the art’s generous offer to science open themselves to stellar-distanced borders. Few examples just to suggest a research-path that could deliver analysis of renewed interest to the history of literature. 

Madame de La Fayette, with the first modern novel of French literature, offered us an extraordinary female figure in the princess of Clèves, a beautiful lady, married to a man she was devotedly fond of, but to which she had been tied up not by means of a love-choice, but of an acceptance of convenience. Since nobody escapes the heart’s calls, the princess meets the man of her life some years after her marriage, and, being candidly honest, she communicates the feelings that upset her to her husband. Her husband, believing himself betrayed, suffers so much that die and the princess of Clèves could make at last her choice of love. The respect for her dead husband upsets her and prevents her from obeying to her heart, and at last she is also held back by the fact that she feels that the prince of Nemours has not her same moral height. Which best possible illustration of Pascal’s thought, that the heart owns a cognitive ability?

What a splendid possibility for the science to analyse the mind of Pisana, the protagonist of the Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo! A complex and thrilling female character, Pisana is open to love, to devotion, to altruism, to selfishness, to self-donation, to the tallest sacrifice, to passion, feelings that live and dominate conflicting in her heart, without the ethical values being ever smothered entirely. It is a proof of Rousseau’s creed.  

How not to remember Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevskij?  

Which hurricane does the crime cause, once committed, in the mind of a man who cannot escape his own human condition? How not to remember Kant and his consideration of conscience as possibility of self-judgement? 

Ivan Ilic by Tolstoi introduces himself as a tallest possibility of research about the self-changing in the sick. The incredulity, the fear, the impotence, the terror of the monster that grows in the body as an unstoppable, merciless and cruel enemy, that day by day devours an incredulous and sentenced victim, if also eager to believe weakly in those people who want to delude her. An extraordinary short-story, in which the great writer poured his own experience’s considerations extensively.

And the researcher will have open field in the analysis of the feelings in Goethe, in the characters of Werther and of Elective Affinities. Goethe gave life to symbolic  creatures. The great writer Goethe is a superb analyst of characters who, nevertheless, are not alive creatures but a mind’s projection, a testimony of the heart.

With Flaubert we have the tallest meeting among intuition, artistic creation and scientific affinity. Flaubert is the writer who creates coherent characters, characters aware of their own limits, characters who often introduce themselves with the “dress” they would like to be seen in, deceiving themselves sooner than the others. Very famous is his vision of the world, testified by a good consideration of the critic Jules Gaultier: "The lack of personality leads everybody to believe themselves different from what they are, and everybody represent themselves by the image they prefer, and they behave according to what they believe to be, not according to what they are". As far as this theory is concerned, Emma Bovary appears entirely legible, as well as the chemist Homais and Fred in Sentimental Education, the hero of the inaction. Flaubert, "the idiot of the family", as Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his famous and incomplete study; Sartre, the future great realist writer, who did not know the alphabet when he was already 7 years old, gave us some perfectly readable characters. A misunderstanding is not possible in the process activated for their knowledge. Their life develops itself as if it were on the pierced drum of a musical composition.

If it is true, as the playwright Arthur Adamov sustained, that "nobody knows anybody", it is also true that science proceeds unstoppable and tireless in the analysis of our mind’s functioning. Technically we will have the opportunity to know how each of our cells interacts with others in the functioning of the “car-man”, but every man will be always also different, unique, unrepeatable, and Adamov will always be right, since nobody will ever be able to understand anybody. Psychiatrists and psychologists, nevertheless, will keep on tirelessly observing in their microscope’s slide the promising and fleeing “cell-man”. 

An endless adventure, rewarded by discoveries, that are continuous and full of suggestion.