GREEK DICHOTOMY

Our culture puts logical discourse ahead of visual discourse.  This predilection started with the Greeks:  the early Greek thinkers essentially disparaged sensory experience. Instead they encouraged the rigorous application of words and numbers.

In fact, the Liberal Arts sprang from the early Greek’s emphasis of language and mathematics. Thus the endeavors of grammar and arithmetic have been identified as the only avenues of study which were worthy of being practiced by a free man in a democratic society.  The free democratic man really cannot be bothered with all of that touchy feely visual stuff.

In contrast, the anti Liberal Arts, if you will, have been dubbed the Mechanical Arts. Thus, the endeavors of painting and sculpture were segregated and downgraded due to their reliance on sensory perception, labor and craftsmanship.

And of course this educational dichotomy is still with us. Any Liberal Arts curriculum will focus on language, composition, comprehension, deduction, and objective problem solving. There certainly is not any sort of visual component to the SAT.

Joseph Parriot, who was a client of ours and is now likely doing his wonderful drawings in another world somewhere, commented that it was always so sad when elementary students lost their artistic innocence. He was saying that early on, we learn with our senses.

In the beginning, we don’t know the meaning of words or numbers. Yet early in our development, our visual input is very real to us. And in that early learning stage, when we are asked to respond artistically, we do so with gusto. We fearlessly shape the clay, or draw the drawing. And we do so with complete visual innocence.

We know how this story ends. As we learn definitions and quantities, our heartfelt and gutfelt perceptions are minimized. In the typical college environment, there is a near blackout of the creative student, who is tacitly placed in an inferior mode.

Yet the Greeks remained cognizant of the primacy of the mental image. They realized that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening perception.

The Greeks could not solve it the dichotomy between the visual and the logical, and apparently we have not either. And that really is too bad given that this dichotomy continues to pervade and dilute our educational dynamics.

Does a more holistic way of perceiving and deducing move us even in small steps toward the elimination of this dichotomy? Can facts be a combination of visual and logical?