Art Reboot

23 response to the German mathematician David Hilbert’s attempts to demonstrate the provably-consistent axiomatic basis of all mathematics, a goal which Gödel showed was logically impos- sible to achieve. The broader implications of his work extend far beyond mathematics, and serve our purposes well here. The intellect, too, is a closed system. It can only be fully understood by including the perspective of the trans-intellectual realm. We can look back over the human story and identify four main vehicles of human endeavour: science, religion, philosophy and art. It is tempting to think that science is the most purely intellectual of these four great pursuits, and that it is a precise discipline requiring no perspective outside itself. Yes, it is un- doubtedly the most rigidly intellectual of the four, depending entirely on evidence-based discovery and on eschewing woolly thought. Today, however, many aspects of science are coming up against hard intellectual boundaries. Physicists, in particular, are struggling to formulate intellectual explanations for the bizarre realities they observe in the quantum world. It seems that one of science’s assumptions – that all unsolved mysteries are simply waiting in line on a laboratory bench for their inevitable reso- lution – is no longer secure. Philosophy, religion and art are much more accepting of the inexplicable, despite many confusing attempts to explain it in terms that our intellects can understand. Indeed, religion abso- lutely depends on the inexplicable: faith, metaphysical belief, magic. And when it comes to art, not even the most rigidly scien- tific thinkers approach an iconic work expecting to ‘explain’ its aesthetic qualities in terms of its scientific characteristics.