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The Role of the Unknowable and The Universe as a Work of Art
This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Radical Visions, in Pari on May 23-30, 2025.
Humans in the 21 century have become obsessed with the known and the knowable. Now, quantum computing and artificial Intelligence unleash a fever dream of knowledge. The explicate order of physical things and thought things seems to have virally infected our modern cultures.
Such intense fragmentation makes it difficult to orient ourselves within the whole of reality. We are in circumstances described by the ancient Daoist sage Chuang Tzu:
The ten thousand things are one with me.
We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can’t tell where we’ll end.
The whole and the unknowable are linked in mysterious ways, for example through the “generative order” described by David Bohm and David Peat in their book Science, Order and Creativity. In the creative act, artists use metaphor and metaphor-like strategies to weave together the known and the unknowable so as to put readers, viewers and listeners in touch with the whole. Artistic metaphors offer an antidote to hubristic knowledge, as Chuang Tzu (dreaming himself a butterfly) knew well.
John Briggs has authored and co-authored several books on chaos, fractals and creativity, including Metaphor, the Logic of Poetry (Pace University Press); Fire in the Crucible (St. Martin’s Press), Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos (Simon & Schuster) and three books with F. David Peat: Looking Glass Universe (Simon & Schuster), Turbulent Mirror (HarperCollins), and 7 Life Lessons of Chaos (HarperCollins). He was also the editor of a collection of essays, Creativity & Compassion, How They Come Together (Karuna Press).
Prof. Briggs holds a PhD in aesthetics and psychology from the Union Institute, and an MA in English from NYU. He taught for 14 years on the Humanities Faculty of the New School for Social Research. During the 1970s and 1980s he was Managing Editor of New York Quarterly and co-host of The Logic of Poetry Show for PBS station WNYC.
For 25 years, beginning in1987, he taught at Western Connecticut State University where he was named one of 12 Distinguished Connecticut State University Professors for the four-campus system. He served as co-chair of the English Department and was one of the founders of the Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process. He was one of the principal developers of the MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. He is the former senior editor of the journal Connecticut Review. He retired in 2012 as emeritus Professor of aesthetics and writing.
Briggs began his career as a journalist for the Gannet Newspapers and The Hartford Courant.
Prof. Briggs’ fiction and poetry has appeared in many publications as His story “The Bow Tie” won the 2004 Fiction Award for Cream City Review. His collection of stories, Trickster Tales, appeared with Fine Tooth Press in 2005.
He has been a science writer for Omni magazine and Science Digest. He is the author of many articles on creative process and creative genius. These publications include chapters in Advances in Consciousness Research; Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow; Quantum Implications (Routledge); The Variety of Dream Experience, and others. He is an emeritus Fellow at the Black Earth Institute.
Prof. Briggs is also a fine art photographer, a student of the famed landscape photographer Paul Caponigro.
From 1987-1992 he served on the three-person Board of Selectmen for his New England town of Granville, Massachusetts, and was for the 10 years following one of the town’s voluntary police officers.