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Translated from the French by A. James Arnold
POETIC KNOWLEDGE is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
Mankind, once bewildered by sheer data, finally dominated them through reflection, observation, and experiment. Henceforth mankind knows how to make its way through the forest of phenomena. It knows how to utilize the world .
But it is not the lord of the world on that account.
A view of the world, yes; science affords a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view.
Physics classifies and explains, but the essence of things eludes it. The natural sciences classify, but the quid proprium of things eludes them.
As for mathematics, what eludes its abstract and logical activity is reality itself.
In short, scientific knowledge enumerates, measures, classifies and kills.
But it is not sufficient to state that scientific knowledge is succinct. It is necessary to add that it is poor and half starved.
To acquire it mankind has sacrificed everything: desires, fears, feelings, psychological complexes.
To acquire the impersonality of scientific knowledge mankind depersonalized itself, deindividualized itself.
An impoverished knowledge, I submit, for at its inception- whatever other wealth it may have - there stands an impoverished humanity.
In Aldous Huxley's Do What You Will there is a very amusing page. "We all think we know what a lion is. A lion is a desert-colored animal with a mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi's. But it is also, in Africa, all the neighboring antelopes and zebras, and therefore, indirectly, all the neighboring grass... If there were no antelopes and zebras there would be no lion. When the supply of game runs low, the king of beasts grows thin and mangy; it ceases altogether, and he dies."
It is just the same with knowledge. Scientific knowledge is a lion without antelopes and without zebras. It is gnawed from within. Gnawed by hunger, the hunger of feeling, the hunger of life.
Then dissatisfied mankind sought salvation elsewhere, in the fullness of here and now.
And mankind has gradually become aware that side by side with this half-starved scientific knowledge there is another kind of knowledge. A fulfilling knowledge.
The Ariadne's thread of this discovery: some very simple observations on the faculty that permitted the...