The Alchemy of Perception: Deconstructing the Divide Between Science and Poetry

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Introduction: The Illusion of the Divide

We are often told that the universe speaks in mathematics, yet we experience it in poetry¹. At first glance, this assertion suggests a profound paradox: that cold, impersonal quantities somehow give rise to warm, qualitative sensations. But is this really a contradiction, or does it merely expose the assumptions embedded in how we separate knowledge from experience? The distinction between the so-called hard sciences and the arts is not a natural boundary but a metaphysical division shaped by centuries of philosophical tradition. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Derrida, and Barthes claim that these oppositions — truth and illusion, objectivity and subjectivity, science and art — are not fixed, but constructed.

Nietzsche once asked: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms...”² With this provocative declaration, he pointed to the poetic core even at the heart of science — the notion that truth is not a mirror of nature but a system of symbols stabilized by social consensus. If we take this seriously, then perhaps the distinction between a “photon” and the experience of “green”, between data and perception, collapses.

The “Photon” as a Poetic Construct

Physics (or more precisely, physicists) defines a photon as a quantum of electromagnetic radiation, measurable in units such as wavelength, frequency, and amplitude. But photons are not directly encountered; they are inferred from patterns in data collected by instruments. The photon, then, is not a raw observation—it is the product of a symbolic and interpretive act.

Although it carries the authority of scientific objectivity, the concept of the photon is not immune to the conditions of language, metaphor, and culture. It is a construct rendered intelligible through a chain of signs linking theory, measurement, and representation. Like any concept, it becomes meaningful only within a network of symbolic mediation.

Scientific concepts do not precede the poetic—they are poetic in their own domain. They operate within a distinct register of meaning-making, no less metaphorical than the language of sensation. The photon, far from being the unmediated thing-in-itself, emerges through the same process that gives rise to green: a translation of phenomena into symbolic systems. Just as green is not simply seen but interpreted, photon is not simply detected but conceived. Both are constituted within frameworks of sense-making.

From Wavelength to Green: The Ontology of Experience

When electromagnetic radiation at approximately 550 nanometers interacts with rhodopsin molecules in the retina, it initiates a cascade of electrochemical events. Physicists can track this sequence with extraordinary precision. Yet at no point does it account for the emergence of the felt quality we call green.

This shift from quantity to quality—from numerical abstraction to lived experience—is often described as mysterious. But perhaps it appears mysterious only if we cling to the binary that separates objective description from subjective feeling. In truth, both domains rely on symbolic systems and interpretive acts.

As Derrida reminds us, “The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa.” The sensory experience of green is not layered atop a neutral substrate called photon; it arises through the same network of interpretive conditions. Just as green is a product of translation—from radiation to sensation—so too is the photon a translation, from invisible flux to conceptual form.

The boundary between what lies “outside” as physical cause and what appears “inside” as felt experience is not ontologically clean. It is always already contaminated by the other. In this light, green and photon are not opposites but analogues—both symbolic constructs, both mediated realities. Neither simply exists; both are made intelligible through the languages that produce them.

Deconstructing the “Hard” and “Soft” Sciences

Why then do we privilege one register of experience over another? Why is physics treated as more truthful than poetry, chemistry more serious than literature? The supposed superiority of the hard sciences rests not on an inherent difference but on rhetorical framing and institutional authority.

Roland Barthes observed that science, like any other form of discourse, operates within a “general system of signs.”⁴ Its clarity, neutrality, and detachment are rhetorical effects, not guarantees of privileged access to reality. The scientific text, no less than the novel or the lyric, demands interpretation, presupposes metaphor, and constructs meaning through language.

The division between “serious” knowledge and “mere” expression is thus a cultural artifact, not an ontological given. Derrida and Barthes both expose how these binaries reinforce hierarchies: science becomes rational, objective; poetry becomes emotional, subjective. Such metaphysical oppositions are precisely what deconstruction seeks to dismantle.

In doing so, we do not deny the value of scientific knowledge — rather, we illuminate its conditions, its limits, and its kinship with other forms of sense-making. The goal is not to flatten all differences but to reject the metaphysical scaffolding that privileges one discourse as “truth” and relegates the other to ornament.

Conclusion: Toward a Poetics of Knowledge

What emerges from this deconstructive inquiry is not a rejection of science, but a call to rethink its place in the ecology of knowledge. If both photons and poems are products of translation — if all understanding is mediated through signs — then the boundary separating the quantitative from the qualitative begins to dissolve.

We do not pass from objectivity to illusion when we move from equations to sensations. We move from one symbolic system to another. The real alchemy of perception, then, lies not in converting number into feeling, but in recognizing that both are expressions of the same symbolic capacity — the human power to render the world intelligible through language.

Perhaps, in the end, the most rigorous science is also the most poetic: not because it abandons measurement, but because it acknowledges that all knowing begins with metaphor, and all truth with translation.

Notes

1. Filimowicz, Michael. “Threshold of Being: Perception as the Quantum-Qualia Conversion Point.” Medium. https://medium.com/higher-neurons/the-threshold-of-being-perception-as-the-quantum-qualia-conversion-point-3778238e8ec2
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873). Translated by Daniel Breazeale.
3. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 152.
4. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, p. 112.