The Basic Dilemma of the Artist

"I know of no 'new programme'. Only that art is forever manifesting itself in new forms, since there are forever new personalities-its essence can never alter, I believe. Perhaps I am wrong. But speaking for myself, I know that I have no programme, only the unaccountable longing to grasp what I see and feel, and to find the purest means of expression for it."

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

The psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable.

We have a corporeal body. It is an entity subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, and external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical complement. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: the soul is nothing but our self awareness (introspection) or the way we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that the pain that we experience is the same for all of us. This limitation on our knowledge prevails even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that we can map and pinpoint the exact part of the brain which is responsible for pain. Moreover, science is even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so without fail) does not make them one and the same. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known ("correlation is not causation").