The interdisciplinary nexus between art and science and the play of the aesthetic

Abstract

It is usually assumed that each discipline ranging from the humanities to the sciences forms a neat, separate and irreducible mode of analysis and area of expertise. The great body of knowledge accumulated over time, is a testimony to the many advances in each field. Often new fields and sub fields are established, but in the main there appears to be a separation between the humanities and the sciences; two cultures as it has often been described. While this is a useful partition, it may be but a fiction. For whether one is talking about either such disciplines, it remains human knowledge all the same and therefore subject to the same perceptual apparatus and history, albeit science claims neutrality and objectivity, while the humanities and the arts, the subjective and more imaginative domain. Nevertheless, such distinctions may be spurious and shortsighted. My endeavor is to suggest some rudimentary language, albeit far from a written system of codification or discipline, but described as a more holistic conception of the “state of knowledge” as it were. It is here that one may speak of the inter-disciplinary and I do this by some philosophical speculations wherein art and science can share a common language of sorts.