ABSTRACT
Improvisation – art created in the act of performance without practice or plan – seems to offer a window into the act of creation. We have considered improvisation as an artistic discourse. But modern science, since its foundation, has shared with improvisation a longing for an unmediated experience of nature. Understanding the role of the rhetoric of spontaneity in modern science will clarify that rhetoric’s epistemological challenge. Improvisation is not only an aesthetic challenge to virtuosity but an ethical and epistemological challenge to the entire edifice of authority that underpins the dominant, conventional mainstream: how we judge value and how we know the world. Seeking to challenge and expand the way that we know the world, improvisation – with great consistency since Antiquity – has been the discourse of paradigm shifts. In the end, improvisation substitutes for the melancholy carpe diem a different imperative: carpe vitam, seize life.
