Stuff from 5 May, 2009
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on 5 May, 2009.
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on 5 May, 2009.
God Talk - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com:
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world … is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.
Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.
See where the problems begin for me? Beauty is not a finite system with rules, it is not completely knowable. The idea is so broad. What other adjective conjures very specific imagery on such a wide variety of topics? Math, painting, music, sculpture, landscapes, animals, humans.
To some, a perfectly bored engine block is beautiful. To others, it is a lawn of fresh cut grass on a late summer evening. Still others find their true beauty aurally. And of course, for large swaths of males succumbing to their limbic systems, nothing is more beautiful than the graceful contours of a woman’s torso.
Because beauty is how we describe something else, not something intrinsic in that other thing, maybe it is based on emotion. I would propose that, just as loss, joy, and betrayal produce emotions, there is an emotion for beauty: peaceful satisfaction.
A step on the path toward my understanding, I hope.