Sampls Gre Essay

2 Pages 558 Words

“The function of science is to reassure; the purpose of art is to upset.
There lies the value of each.”


Though it is detrimental to attribute specific functions and purposes to knowledge, especially at higher level of understanding, since both science and art form the same sphere of knowledge, the issue at hand is certainly some worth contemplating. Indeed, the function of science is reassure and the purpose of art is, to some extent, upset. Hence each has its own worth albeit in a limited way.
Science, in one sense, has the meaning of 'knowledge' accumulated from experience. In other sense, it is the pursuit of truth behind the phenomena through experimentation and study. The very genesis of science upholds these definitions. In the primordial stages of human civilizations, eastern or western, man was intrigued by the phenomena of nature such as lightening, earthquakes etc. These phenomena, as they were mysteries to the man of those times, remained dreadful to man. Man, the rational animal, honed his intellect to get emboldened and gain vigor. The rationalization for these phenomena resulted ultimately in philosophy and understanding of these resulted in science. Thus, the very purpose of science has been and is to remove the fears of man about the 'unexplained'. The concept of electricity has removed the fear of lightning, and the concept of human morphology and medicine and that of disease are a few examples.
Quite surprisingly, the value of science gets tainted once it starts threatening. The unwanted by-products of science such as pollution, nuclear weapons, and destruction to environment countermand the very purpose for which science has been rightfully created. None can deny the fact that this perversion of science has diluted the value of it. It is quite evident that science is now a tool that creates fear instead of removing it.
On the other hand, art has altogether a different reason to be cr...