LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND THE IMAGINATION

Message to the Graduates of the UP College of Science

By Dr. Gemino H. Abad, University Professor,
April 22, 2007, Cine Adarna

Literature and science, when either one is undertaken and achieved, have

in common one great human faculty or power of the mind – the imagination. All

great scholars, scientists, and artists are men and women of vibrant imagination.

For me, the imagination is simply the finest form of intelligence: it comprises

reason and intuition, our physical senses, feeling, and memory, all alive at all

points of contact with reality.

Another bond that holds science and literature together, where both serve

humanity in equal measure, lies in their quest of reality. But what we call reality is

nothing less than the continuing mystery of life and creation, and we alone of all

living creatures are the servants of its one living Word – one, because all life and

creation is one web. We are its indefatigable initiates because it is a mystery in

which we have all our faith and in which our mind finds its profoundest delight

and fulfillment unraveling it.

We are all on this quest of reality – to understand, and so, master reality

only in order to serve it well. This is what it means to be real to ourselves: we

assume the responsibility for life and nature – both human nature and the natural

world.

There is no quest where there are no questions. Both science and

literature are committed only to such a quest. Neither one respects any politics or

ideology except where they, too, join the same quest. Both science and literature
 2

move and have their being on the universal plane. The universal plane is not the

site of eternal verities but a clearing of everlasting questioning.

Here then are two big words – imagination and reality; these words hold

an infinity of human endeavor where language is the crucible of understanding.

For the works of literature and the works of science are essentially works

of language. Such works always show a brilliant interplay of reality and

imagination – on the one hand, the workaday dragons of fact that we would

tame, and on the other, the treasure that every dragon guards.

Language is the supreme human achievement. Both literature and science

weave a language by which a perception or insight into reality is endowed with a

meaningful form. Such weaving of a language, such expression through letters

and figures, only realizes, or makes real to our mind, the phenomena – the

appearances or manifestations – of nature: again, both human nature and the

natural world; yet, and still, their reality lies deeper beneath our language, is

beyond mere nomenclature. What we can know of reality is only a possible text

of what we call “our reality” – how we perceive it, from our own standpoint; we

are then always at risk.

The works of literature and the works of science, are, as I said, works of

language. Yet language itself is already work of imagination. “When the

imagination sleeps,” says the philosopher Albert Camus, “words are emptied of

their meaning.” Every name or word, every theorem or way of looking, is only a

dwelling-place for that item or aspect of reality that we seek to understand. But to
 3

understand is only to stand under: “a green thought in a green shade,” says the

poet Andrew Marvell.

In science and in literature, language is essentially translation, a word

from Latin transferre, translatus, meaning “to ferry across.” By whatever

language, mathematics or a given natural language like English, we only

translate the immutable silences of nature, we only ferry across our words, our

vocabula and mathema, or learning, our own soul’s cargo: our insights and

conceivings. What is requisite in science is to have a sharp sense of what may

be lacking in our knowledge or conception of anything in reality; likewise, what is

requisite in literature is a lively imagination of what may be ideal or possible for

humanity.

We are nature’s ferryman; we give her our speech.

There is only one difference, as I see it, between literature and science,

but it is a difference that enriches us all. Science abstracts from human

experience or the observation of phenomena, but literature renders the

experience itself as imagined as lived. Science establishes the facts of the reality

it observes in order to see it again whole – the idea of it: a theory, a way of

looking, by which a specific understanding of it is reached. In this way is a

meaning fixed for the reality in the observer’s ken. In literature, on the other

hand, the imagination’s field is the individual human experience where it affirms a

person’s essential freedom and dignity. As Jung puts it, “the only reality is the

individual,” to which Aristotle would say, “There is no science of the individual.”

Literature then has no theory and establishes nothing. It only mimics or simulates
 4

a human experience, in one’s own historical and cultural scene, in order to see it

again whole, as imagined as lived; the form of it in story, poem, or play is the

matter of art, and its content is the matter of interpretation. In this way what is

achieved is not meaning but meaningfulness: the meaningfulness of the living of

a human experience as imagined; what is offered is not a theory of the living of it,

but only the sensation of being wholly alive to oneself and a sense of what it is to

be human.

In all this, language is the crucible of understanding – and the work that is

accomplished is veritable work of imagination.