In the 19th century, scientists performed dissections on live animals to study their living anatomy. Known as “vivisection”, the operations were highly controversial. While some argued that vivisection imparted valuable knowledge that could not otherwise be obtained, others felt that the additional knowledge the practice produced was insignificant, especially when compared to the cruelty involved in harvesting.
While medical vivisection is almost completely banned today, it continues to exist in another, equally questionable form.
Modern scientists spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars searching for the beating heart of once ethereal concepts like love and happiness.
However, when we eagerly devour the results of these sophisticated studies, we find that their insights are somehow less illuminating than those produced by poets and philosophers millennia ago. They simply reaffirm what we already know intuitively. Or I would know intuitively, if our aesthetic and reflective qualities had not been allowed to atrophy.
When we don’t apply our hearts to understanding and rely exclusively on academic explanations to plumb the depths of life, something fundamental about the Good and the Beautiful is lost to us.
We know the most effective way to communicate in a marriage, but we cannot explain why we wanted to get married first. We know how many hours it takes to make a friend, but we can’t express what it’s like to intertwine our soul with another’s. We know which part of the brain turns on when we have a religious experience, but we don’t understand how to satisfy our longing for transcendence. We have studied the happiness formula on paper, but we struggle to make it add up to our lives.
The more we measure and quantify the mysteries of meaning, the more they seem to elude us.
Because in the midst of our probing dissections, we forgot one crucial thing:
The subject of vivisection always dies on the table.
Source: news.google.com