But is this distinction real? There is an art to rationality, just as there is a science to artistry. But more importantly, art and science are both slaves to the same fundamental question: ''Why?''. Oh, it's not that we don't care about who and what, when and where. But science and art need to know why.
And so, predictably, art has come to be the answer to that most dangerous of questions that plagued me for most of the summer: Why psychology?
Finally, I have an answer: Marc Chagall. Bear with me if my explanation seems cryptic, I'm doing my best here. Psychology's raison d'être - when there are other fields like neuroscience and philosophy, sociology and economics - is that one day a man decided to be an artist. He asked why love and family, why health and illness, why religion and country... Chagall is my favorite artist. And if I had to make up a reason why, I'd say it is because he asked all the right questions without ever being afraid of the answer. These are themes that we all have to grapple with at some point in this life, and a science of psychology gives us a language, a framework, for talking about and questioning these themes - and for keeping our answers at least a little bit honest.
There's more to being a science than the answers. If anything, it's more about asking questions. And Chagall's work has something to say about that too. Perhaps in our determination to make sure it is a respectable-looking Science, psychology loses more than it gains because it cannot ask all its questions. Part of what contributed to my existential crisis over the summer was my devastation at the futility of the questions being posed in social science. But maybe we are asking uninspired questions because we are afraid of the answers we might get to any better questions. (After all, few of us actually really want to be saddled with anything like the political nightmare that are Milgram's results).
Maybe this is where art has something to teach us. Asking 'why' even when it doesn't look like the answers will be all that much fun. Far from running from it, psychology can be inspired by art to ask all of its questions.
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Thanks to ArtisticThings.com and GrandeYeoem.com for images.
