Long Way Home
Tom Waits
Got Question
The Attributes of Science
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin
https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-baptiste-simeon-chardin/the-attributes-of-the-sciences-1731
Questions are at the heart of many things, of our doubts, often at the foundation of our beliefs, they can reflect our interactions with the universe and our place in it? They are probably at the heart of all those things and many other things as well. Asking questions is part of taking the “long way home.” Francis Bacon said, “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” This suggests the value of questioning what we take for granted, that all our certainties will eventually be called into question. Better to question them from the start and odds are once those questions produce new certainties those certainties will also provoke new questions. Curiosity is never idle, but the evidence of an active mind.
Agnes Callard in an article for the New York Times “I Teach the Humanities and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is” asks herself what is the value of the subject I teach, why is it taught? The politics of the day requires her to ask this question. She wrote:
A defensive mind-set also encourages politicization. If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.
The humanities, in other words, teach us what questions to ask and and how to think about them. If we look at our world politically, we see many who think these questions “too woke.” If they can shut down the Humanities, they do not need to consider them because they will have removed from our culture that part of our culture that challenges us to confront these issues. Marilynne Robinson in an interview, “Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God” writes, “(M)y answer is that questions are beautiful. You just think more about life, the brevity of it, the complexity of it, the incredible richness that enters into it accidentally or intentionally.” The questions need to be asked, but as a people we do not want to ask them. Or at least there are many, perhaps too many, that don’t want them asked. There are people who do not want these questions asked or answered that profess Christianity but claim Jesus is “too woke.” They believe in Christ, but do not want to confront the questions he raised.
These are questions that seem to frighten us, or some of us anyway. Callard went on to point out:
Humanists are not alone in their ignorance about the purpose of their disciplines. Mathematicians or economists or biologists might mutter something about practical applications of their work, but very few serious scholars confine their research to some narrow pragmatic agenda. The difference between the humanists and the scientists is simply that scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist, because the society at large believes itself to already have the answer to that question. If physics were constantly out to justify itself, it would become politicized, too, and physicists would also start spouting pious platitudes about how physics enriches your life.
Astronomer by Candlelight
Gerard Dou
Scientists, Mathematicians, and Engineers are not asked to show why they think their disciplines should be taught, in large part because they produce things, like computers, refrigerators, and automobiles and such that are useful. Those that master those disciplines produce things, or enough of them do, to take the heat off everyone else in their disciplines. But many, maybe most of those that earn their living exploring these subjects are not interested in producing anything. The mathematician G. H. Hardy wanted to explore abstract, theoretical math. He was not interested in math that was useful he wanted to study math that was useless. And it was useless in his time, but it has become very useful today. Princeton University set up the Institute for Advanced Study. It was dedicated to the study of useless knowledge. Abraham Flexner, the man who established this institute, pointed out that many of the world’s greatest discoveries, computer chips for example, were the result of a pursuit of useless knowledge (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174761/the-usefulness-of-useless-knowledge). Imaginary numbers, like the square root of negative one, do not exist. They were regarded by many mathematicians as useless, as pure fiction and of no real value. The name they were given was given dismissively, to mock their uselessness. But there are things mathematical that cannot be done without them. Much that is useless eventually becomes very useful, even essential.
The point is that we cannot know today what will be useful tomorrow. Often the only way we can find out what will be useful in the future is by studying what is useless today. The painting above also suggests a whimsical alliance between the arts and sciences. The astronomer is pursuing his science, while a painter paints him as he engages in that pursuit.
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
Casper David Friedrich
What does this have to do with the Humanities. Only that the study of the Humanities does not produce much that is useful, at least not useful in the way most think of usefulness. What it does produce is an inquisitive mind with (hopefully) a well developed imagination. An article, “Faking Galileo,” by Massimo Mazzotti explains how Galileo saw the moon as he did:
The first thing Galileo discovered was that the moon was not smooth and homogeneous, as everyone believed. Instead, it was covered with craters and mountains whose peaks became awash with light when the “terminator” — the line that separates the illuminated and dark parts of the moon — inched forward through the night. Art historians Samuel Edgerton and Horst Bredekamp have written insightfully about how his skills as a draftsman were key to this discovery. Young artists in training during this period were drilled on treatises designed to, in effect, reshape their perception, so that they unthinkingly interpreted certain configurations of two-dimensional light and dark shapes as the surfaces of three-dimensional figures hit by a light source. Galileo’s draftsman eye thus gave him a crucial advantage over other observers, such as Englishman Thomas Harriot, who, a couple of months earlier, had carried out the first recorded telescopic observation of the moon. To Harriot the moon remained smooth and the terminator a fairly clean line. He only saw mountains and craters after he learned of Galileo’s novel description.
It was Galileo’s training in the Humanities, as an artist, that taught him how to look differently at what he saw. Thomas Harriet’s training as a scientist taught him, when he looked at the moon through a telescope, to see a smooth surface and that is what he saw. Often world changing discoveries are not just the result of the pursuit of useless knowledge but also the result of training in more than one way to look at what we see. In one sense this is the value of a traditional Liberal Arts education. We are given a variety of lenses through which to view the world.
Venice – The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore
J. M. W. Turner
David Brooks wrote in a New York Times article “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society”:
I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, under cultured.
The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, argued that we consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds. We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways of seeing the world. Peer pressure and convention may try to hem us in, but the humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness.
Of course, we can point to places where the arts were highly valued and vigorously pursued, as they were in 1930’s Germany for example, but where also the pursuit of the arts did not make those that pursued them better human beings. We bring our prejudices and blind spots with us.
Elaine Scarry in her book On Beauty and Being Just wrote:
“But the claim throughout these pages that beauty and truth are allied is not the claim that the two are identical. It is not that a poem or a painting or a palm tree or a person is “true” but rather that it ignites the desire for truth by giving us, with an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event, the experience of conviction and the experience as well of error. This liability to error, contestation, and plurality – for which “beauty” over the centuries has so often been belittled – has sometimes been cited as evidence of its falsehood and distance from “truth,” when it is instead the case that our very aspiration for truth is its legacy. It creates, without itself fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude. It comes to us, with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor. (pp 52-53)
Scarry suggests that beauty, art, by itself does not change us, but gives us the opportunity to change, suggests to us the need to change. But we still have a part to play. Ben Jonson imagined two audiences for his plays. One that laughed at the jokes, had a good time, and then went home. And another, he called “understanders” that enjoyed the plays as much as the first audience did but went on to think about what was happening on stage and came to realize the joke was often on them. Many of the behaviors and practices that were being mocked in the plays were behaviors and practices they engaged in themselves. Jonson’s art changed this second audience, but only because that audience was open to being changed and engaged in the “giant labor” Scarry spoke of. The first epigram in Jonson’s book of epigrams suggests how important understanding was to him:
Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand,
To read it well: that is, to understand.
We shouldn’t expect that art will be like a “diet pill” that makes its changes without our having to do anything, when in fact it is more like a gymnasium where we have to do the exercises that produce that change. There is a pleasure that comes with experiencing great art. Evil people can experience art and beauty and take enjoyment from it without doing the work it provokes. The ring that Oden and other characters pursue throughout Wagner’s Ring Cycle can only be used by those that kill in themselves the ability to love. It is a power, as power often is, that can only be practiced by those that give themselves over to hate. As Makoto Fujimura points out in his book Art and Faith “Love demands creativity; love draws out our call to make. Love is the language of the Holy Spirit; and through love, the Spirit guides us. (p 63) Fujimura also points out, “(T)here is a huge gap between informational knowing and the actual knowing of making.” (p 61) Knowing beauty is not enough, there is a “making,” or perhaps a “remaking” involved.
Art and literature can change the way we perceive the world around us and the way we perceive ourselves and our work in the world. It doesn’t have to, it cannot make us change or act or perceive, but it offers us the opportunity. Brooks wrote:
Your way of perceiving the world becomes your way of being in the world. If your eyes have been trained to see, even just a bit, by the way Leo Tolstoy saw, if your heart can feel as deeply as a K.D. Lang song, if you understand people with as much complexity as Shakespeare did, then you will have enhanced the way you live your life.
Attention is a moral act. The key to becoming a better person, Iris Murdoch wrote, is to be able to cast a “just and loving attention” on others. It’s to shed the self-serving way of looking at the world and to see things as they really are. We can, Murdoch argued, grow by looking. Culture gives us an education in how to attend.
It is perhaps the difference between beauty and prettiness. If the beautiful never becomes more than prettiness, pretty music, pretty people, pretty pictures, it will never change us. We get the joke, we laugh, and then we go about our business as if nothing had happened. In the painting above of Venice, we can see the beauty that impressed David Brooks, we can see the beauty that impressed J. M. W. Turner hundreds of years ago and it can still impress us today. It can be just a pretty place to visit or live, or it could touch something deeper, whether it is the actual place that is seen or a paintings of it. Or we can, as Brooks points out, ask ourselves “What does this have to teach me? What was this other human being truly seeking?”
The Peasant Dance
Pieter Bruegel
John Baneville wrote a review (“Live All You Can”) of Robert Richardson’s book Three Roads Back. The book is about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James and how each confronted the death of someone important in their lives, Emerson’s wife, Thoreau’s brother, and a very close friend, Minny Temple, of James. Thoreau was the only one to recover quickly from his loss, he is quoted in the book as saying, “What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?” He is quoted again as saying, “When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither—for their death is the law of new life.” There is too much in life to be wondered at to let mourning keep us from that wonder. On one side that almost seems callus, but on the other life was given to us to live. There is wisdom in “Sitting Shiva.” It is the week, in Jewish culture, of mourning that follows the death of a family member. Mourning is important, but it must also end. To say that life must continue almost suggests that life is a job and we have to get back to work, when life is an opportunity, and we need to take advantage of it. Mourning is a part of life and as such needs to be experienced, but it shouldn’t be allowed to crowd out the fullness that comes from moving beyond grief. In Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the central character, Janie, is criticized because she didn’t mourn long enough the death of her husband. She says, “To my thinkin’ mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer’n grief.” Though if you read the novel you will find Janie did not have great cause to grieve.
The people in the painting above are celebrating and we all love celebration, but that too must not extend beyond its time. It becomes like a melody we cannot get out of our head, after a time it becomes a bit cloying. We tell jokes about the deceased at funerals, we remember those that were lost and are absent from the wedding. Perhaps neither grief nor joy are pure emotions, each touches the other.
William James’ brother Henry James was also saddened by Minnie’s death, but not so much. He did use his memory of her in creating the central characters in his novels Portrait of a Lady, Wings of the Dove, and Daisy Miller. It is a different kind of mourning, if it is that, but it is in stories that we preserve much that is important to us.
It is also an important avenue for learning about life and how to approach it. Stories have always been important to me. In some ways they are escapes from a world that can become oppressive. But they also open us up to possibilities. My desire to travel was motivated by curiosity that was in turn aroused by reading books by Robert Lewis Stevenson and Jan Morris. I wanted to see how people in other parts of the world lived. In traveling I learned how much alike we are as people, we do not want the same things, but we all struggle with aspirations and achieving them. Stevenson traveled with a mule; I traveled on a bicycle. I traveled through Europe and the Appalachian Mountains of New York and Vermont. A bicycle is very close up, you can see things around you, you are also a part of the environment and experience sunshine, wind, and rain. I was caught in a mistral that blew off the hills while I was bicycling through Southern France, and it was very difficult while riding into this wind to make any real progress, it took me a few hours to cover a distance I usually covered in about thirty minutes. On my trip to Vermont it rained and I was often soaked, but then the heat and humidity were terrible and the drenching was in many ways refreshing.
The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.
Richard Dadd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_painting#/media/File:Image-Dadd_-_Fairy_Feller’s.jpg
The New York Times published an article on Beatrix Potter, “Overlooked No More: Beatrix Potter, Author of ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’” Potter wrote stories that are often dismissed, as children’s stories as fairy tales often are. Somehow or other they are not serious enough. This is not true of course, but it is a belief that permeates the society. The Times article tells us “The world that Potter conjured in her books — whimsical but dark, full of bloodless observations about the food chain — appealed as much to adults as to children.” No publisher would publish Potter’s first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she published it herself. A publisher finally accepted the book for publication, and they sold, and continue to sell, very well.
The Magic Flute
Kenneth Branagh
Ideal Audience & Peter Moores Foundation
In his book After Virtue Alastair MacIntyre says, “Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources.” Aristotle in his Poetics writes about the importance of stories. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, thought the poets should be banished from his notion of the perfect Republic. Aristotle believed they were import. Because Plato’s philosophy was written as dialogues, little plays, Aristotle listed Plato among the poets. But Aristotle believed in their importance to a society. He points out that the study of history tells us only what has happened. Philosophy can only suggest how we ought to live. Stories can use imagined events to suggest how our philosophy looks in practice. Stories can, on the one hand, prepare us for the world we are about to enter and on the other suggest how that world can be made better.
The Magic Flute is a fairy tale opera by Mozart. Kenneth Branagh set his production of the opera on a battlefield during, if not World War I a war very like it. Some criticized Branagh for doing this because a battlefield is not appropriate to a fairy tale, that it goes against the fairy tale grain. But is this in fact the case. Fairy tales give us the opportunity to confront the monsters in our lives, which traditionally are represented metaphorically as giants and ogres, not warfare. But if you were a person (and it is important to remember fairy tales are not just for children) living in the Middle East or in the Ukraine, or in the Sudan, the battlefield setting might seem very appropriate. And why is that not another kind of metaphor for the struggles we encounter. In the midst of the struggle, they often feel much like a battle. Surviving anything, no matter how horrific, requires tenacity, imagination, and hope. Stories, especially fairy tales, often help us to develop that tenacity, imagination, and hope. Tolkien’s dragon, Smaug, began as the image created in battle by the smoke of artillery fire.
The Bard, 1774
Thomas Jones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism#/media/File:Thomas_Jones_The_Bard_1774.jpg
