"What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian - and, born from it, tragedy - what might they signify? - And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man - how now? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the 'Greek cheerfulness' of the later Greeks - merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans' resolve against pessimism - a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science - indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what - worse yet, whence - all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against - truth? And morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your - irony?"
--Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Science has not necessarily attached itself to the absolute blueprint of the nature of reality. On the contrary, it is often a very poor explanatory tool - successful at predictions, but unsuccessful at truth. As it conflicts with phenomena, science contributes very little to the meaning of life. Clock time is not lived time. The former is a fabrication - an arbitrary social contract to govern (in many cases in brutal fashion) our activities. We have blurred the line between the two.
"A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marvelled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Today of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the grey matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away."
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
My goal is perhaps much like Nietzsche's was in The Birth of Tragedy - "to look at science in the perspective of the artist" and "at art in that of life."
