The Importance Of Literature Vs Science Essay — страница 2

literature wanted to describe one it would say ?Yesterday morning a man was struck by a red Peugeot 504, killing him on impact. The driver of the car, as of yet unidentified, did not bother to stop the car. This is a sad reflection of some peoples’ inability to face their own mistakes.? Literature could make that last sentence because it does not need to back up every little thing with two thousand pieces of measurable accurate evidence. It can think in leaps and bounds with very little touch with hard facts. Science can describe an incident, but it can’t make you feel anything about it. Literature on the other hand, gives you insight and feelings into other peoples minds. For example, it is much more beneficial to read a book about Egypt, than to read a scientific report on

it. Through the characters in the book you can get a feel for the culture that the scientific report would not have. A world without literature would also leave science wanting. Many scientists would agree that without literature, science would not be the same. It would be colder, and less human. Human’s are not creatures of precision and logic, or we would have rulers for hands, and calculators for hearts. Most people would prefer to sit down and pick up a science fiction novel than a book on astrophysics. Also, writers do not have to be very skilled to be able to teach. Scientists who teach have had to train and learn for many years before they can do so. However, Joe Blow could sit down and write a book on life in the streets of Amsterdam, and we would learn something.

Literature can almost always teach you something, proficiency in it merely accelerates and improves the teaching process. This is not to say that science is useless however. Social sciences and literature complement each other well in understanding humans and their behavior. Science teaches us the ?how?, while literature teaches us the ?why?. Literature takes us into peoples’ minds, science takes their minds and categorizes them. This is why literature will always be perceived as being more human, because it relates to emotions rather than to logic, and humans are creatures of emotion. Science cannot describe certain things. How does science describe love? It can give all the physical ramifications of it, psychology can give us the probable actions done by a person in love, but

it can’t make us understand what it is to be in love. Literature can give you some experience, although it be a limited, third person sort of experience. And of course, the only way to know an emotion is to experience it. In conclusion I say that we should not pick one or the other, but continue to let them complement each other. There is a time for hard facts and evidence, and there is a time for poems and soliloquies. There is a time for Einstein and Pasteur as there is a time for Shakespeare and Tolkien. Human beings are a composite of their primal emotions, and their need for structure and organization. Thus, without one or the other, we would not be humans anymore.