William Deresiewicz on art and science

I loooove this:

Austen knew, in other words, that human motivation is enormously complex. Reducing it to any single factor—well, for that you need a social scientist. Great literature has the power, through painstaking art, to fashion a convincing representation of human behavior in all its inextricable, mysterious, and endlessly ramifying mixture of sources. That is why it never becomes obsolete. What does become obsolete are the monocausal theories of people such as Chwe. Literature puts back everything the social sciences—by way of methodological simplification, or disciplinary ideology, or just plain foolishness—take out.

and this:

...what really bothers me is that his titular idea is the kind of effluent that contaminates the cultural water supply.

and this:

There’s a reason that art and science are distinct. They don’t just work in different ways; they work on different things. Science addresses external reality, which lies outside our minds and makes itself available for objective observation. The arts address our experience of the world; they tell us what reality feels like. That is why the chain of consilience ruptures as we make the leap from material phenomena to the phenomena of art. Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean.

 Okay, one more:

Art is experiential. It doesn’t just speak of experience; it needs to be experienced itself, inhabited in ways that proofs and formulae do not. And experience cannot be weighed or measured; it can only be evoked.