APOLLO’S RECKONING Angus Barrett asks whether there is an ultimate destination for science.
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ietzsche thought that existence was found in the tension between two forces: the ordered, rational and conscious Apollonian, and the chaotic, emotional and unconscious Dionysian, both of which he named after the Greek gods who represented these differing concepts. He believed that life was maximised when the two are balanced; when the Dionysian is applied constructively within an Apollonian framework. He was reiterating the ancient idea of the primacy of the universal dipole and the being that was
generated at its interface – which was in turn to be rediscovered by modern neuroscientists in the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain. It turns out that our minds are precisely equipped to address these two opposing parts of experience: the known and the unknown, the self and the other, the predictable and the potential, and so on. While processing of unfamiliar information seems to be dedicated to the right hemisphere, familiarity is more the remit of the left. And if something’s existence is dependent on our knowledge of that thing, this could be described as the
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fundamental process of creation. Science – our rational inquiry into the workings of the natural world – is a forum for this process. There is what we know and what we don’t, our great consensus and our unsolved mysteries, and then there is the astronomer at his telescope, or the biologist at her microscope, shining a light onto the dark and uncharted territory between the two. But to view science in this way is to ask a question far deeper than any about the inner workings of stars or cells. That is: ‘Is there an ultimate destination for our work?’ Will our rational
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