Excited by What?

Depending on your situation, or your temperament, to be “excited by nothing” might be taken to mean either that a) life has lost its sparkle, or b) you’re excited to greet the day, though you can’t put your finger on any specific reason.

These days I often find myself in the latter state. I might attribute such irrepressible glee to the clear morning light, the bright green vegetation, crabapples coming into bloom, the songs of the kinglets and white-throated sparrows that fill the air as I step out onto the deck—or all four. But the feeling runs deeper than that. Everything seems grand on such mornings, and the question becomes, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we have to do anything about it? Going for walks, getting together with friends, listening to music, staring off into the underbrush …    

Yesterday morning I trimmed a low-hanging branch from a tree near the fence. I’ve been wanting to do that since last year. While out in the yard I spotted a “pheasant-back” mushroom that had sprung up on a tree stump amid the seas of Virginia waterleaf. A few minutes later I was back inside, googling the species to make sure of the identification. I looked high and low, and found no comment on the order of “not to be confused with the similar and highly poisonous ….”

In the afternoon Hilary and I took a stroll through Eloise Butler wildflower garden. Back home, I noticed we had quite a few red bell peppers in the fridge, and I concocted a plan. I put some early Italian music on the stereo—Landini and friends. It might just as well have been modern Italian folk music, though the harmonic progressions tended toward the pleasantly odd and strange, as if an episode of Father Cadfael were running on the TV in the next room.

I sliced up the peppers, blackened them in the broiler, then proceeded to assemble the dish we call Sicilian Peppers—black olives, anchovies, capers, oregano, onion, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.

Then I harvested the mushroom, brushed it off, and sliced it up. I took a bite, which immediately confirmed the identification: it tasted like watermelon rind. I sauteed the slices in butter, and we enjoyed a light dinner sitting in front of the doors that open out to the deck.

Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

Advent Meditations

The Pope in Nicaea.

The new Pope. A wonderful man by all accounts, and better yet, he’s from Chicago!

A few weeks ago he paid a visit to Nicaea, in Turkey, in honor of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Bishops from many nations gathered there in 325—hundreds if not thousands of them—to deliberate a wide variety of issues. (Who paid for the lodging, the food, the enormous travel expenses? The Roman state.) 

At the top of the agenda was the question of whether Jesus existed before his birth in the manger in Bethlehem. The Arians said NO. At the council this position was ruled a heresy. It was deemed imperative to underscore the position (we can hardly call it a “fact”) that Jesus was of “one substance with the father” since the beginning of time, and perhaps well before.

To most people who were raised in Christian traditions the issue isn’t that important. For many, the most enduring result of the council was the introduction of a new prayer—the Nicaean Creed— alongside the somewhat shorter Apostle’s Creed. Most people find the Apostle’s Creed easy to remember. The Nicaean Creed? Not so much.  

At any rate, I never got the hang of it. Yet the rhetoric did sink in, to the extent that I began to wonder what a “substance” actually was, from the metaphysical point of view. I’m still wondering.

It’s a good question. But at Christmas time another question perhaps looms larger: Was Jesus ever really a baby? Would he be “of one substance” with the Father during that rudimentary phase in his earthly ontogeny?

It might seem like a frivolous question, if not a blasphemous one, but it cuts to the heart of the Christmas event. Aside from the lights, the music, the gatherings and the food, it seems to me that people are often moved by what I might call the rural simplicity and innocence of the event.

Let me suggest that Christmas is the most evocative time of the liturgical year, in part, because it's the least didactic. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh are dazzling and exotic; we don’t really care what they symbolize. The Star in the East could be any star, if it’s bright enough to attract our attention. (Stars are cool and mysterious, especially in the deep winter night.) We can forget, for the time being, the sometimes dour, gnomic, and prescriptive episodes in Jesus’s adulthood, and enjoy the aroma of balsam, the sweet buttery taste of a spritz, or the slightly edgy bite of a home-made pepper kaka, hot out of the oven. And also, perhaps, a vaguely delirious sense of cheer and hope.  

Family memories resurface. Some of them are “magical,” while others may remind us, painfully, of how naïve and self-centered we used to be—and probably still are. 

But there is no need to dwell on such things during these celebratory days of darkness and light. Better simply to relish the color, warmth, and togetherness that are pleasantly adrift on a mysterious something. Is it time? Or substance?

Daylilies and the Spectre of Idealism

Every plant has its problems. For example, daylily blossoms only last for a single day. We've got a couple of clumps of Mary Todds in our front yard that are well established and currently at their peak. The blooms are staggered, which is nice, but the deer love to nip off not only the blossoms but also the buds. That's a second problem.

This year I put some green plastic fencing around one clump, and Hilary suggested we put some old netting that had been idling in the garage for decades around the other. This has preserved the blossoms ... but blooming daylilies don't look all that hot when seen through such fabrics. This morning I removed the netting from the clump under the piano window. The flowers look great! Will I remember to replace the net in position tonight. Who knows?

Wandering out back, I loaded some decaying leaves from the compost pile into a galvanized bucket and spread them around on the floor of our "cherry orchard," where I recently planted a turtlehead and Hilary transplanted some groundcover. That might sound like a grandiose name— "cherry orchard"— for a strip of land where, a few years ago,  I discovered two volunteer cheery trees amid the underbrush. But what better place to be grandiose, and playful, and a little imaginative, than in one's own back yard?  

I was enjoying the morning, unalloyed by the nagging thought that I wasn't doing anything productive, because I'd already done a few things. I sent a file to a client in Massachusetts to be proofed. I'd looked up some royalty figures for Norton. I emptied the dishwasher. I uploaded some files to SpeedPro to be made into posters.

One of them was for a rock band called Seth that will be playing at the Hopkins High School 50th reunion in a few weeks. My brother-in-law, David, was in that band, back in the mid-seventies. Will we "crash" the reunion just to see David up on stage? It's hard to say.

Settling down to a recent issue of the New Yorker, I spotted an essay by Adam Gopnick about the historian Charles Taylor. I was reminded of one of Taylor's earlier books, A secular Age, that I bought decades ago. I didn't think much of it at the time—it seems to be arguing for a utopian return to medieval guilds and  faith communities. To judge from Gopnik's critique, the new volume, which carries the vaguely portentous title Cosmic Connections, is cut from the same cloth.

Yet when I fetched my copy of A Secular Age from the basement. and opened it, my eyes immediately came to rest on a passage brilliantly exposing the poverty of materialist explanations of history, while underscoring the role played not only by concepts in general, but by ideals specifically, in historical development.

"In general, a new practice will have both “material” and “ideal” conditions; which of them we try to explain may depend on which is problematic. Why did a democratic revolution occur just then, and not before? The answer may be: because people hadn’t suffered from monarchical rule as much as they came to on the eve of the turn-over; or it may be because they began to see from some striking example that democracy brings prosperity (the draw of Europe?). But it might also because at that moment they had developed the repertory which allowed for a self sustaining democracy, as against just a revolt which changed one mode of despotism for another. And it may also be because democratic forms of rule came to seem right, and in keeping with their dignity, around that time. There is no good empirically-based reason to think that the second kind of explanation must always give way to the first. The weighting between the two can’t be determined a priori, but will be different from case to case."

But there is really no need to choose between the two. Material and conceptual (or spiritual, if you will) elements are at work at every moment of our lives.

At this point Taylor feels the need to explain in some detail what the interaction between ideas and conditions looks like, by considering the question of "how the new idea of moral order came to acquire the strength which eventually allows it to shape the social imaginaries of modernity." Good question.

He begins by mentioning the "discursive practices" of thinkers reacting to the devastations of the Wars of Religion, who felt the need to identify a basis of legitimacy unsullied by religious differences. Reaching further back in time, he draws our attention to the "domestication of the feudal nobility" between the 14th and 16th cen­turies.

"I mean the transformation of the noble class from semi-independent warrior chieftains, often with extensive followings, who in theory owed allegiance to the King, but in practice were quite capable of using their coercive power for all sorts of ends unsanctioned by royal power, to a nobility of servants of the Crown/nation, who might often serve in a military capacity, but were no longer capable of acting independently in this capacity."

All of this makes perfect sense to me. In fact, it's a fine description of the dialectical process itself, though that specific word, "dialectic," doesn't appear in it. Taylor clearly wants to stick close to events, hoping to avoid even a whiff of Hegelian meta-history or teleology.

A Secular Age is 800 pages long, and I'm suddenly convinced I'll have to get back to it soon.

But maybe not right now.

 

What We Can Learn from Kant's Mistakes

Immanuel Kant was born on Earth Day, April 22, three-hundred years ago. The son of a saddle-maker, he eventually became one of Europe's most famous philosophers. A year-long string of conferences and celebrations have been scheduled in Germany to commemorate the event.
In the United States, not so much.

The director of the Einstein forum in Potsdam, German, Susan Neiman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the abiding importance of Kant's thought. It carries the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant."  Neiman is the author of a recent book called What We Can Learn from the Germans, so she ought to know what she's talking about.  But I could find very little in the article to convince me that Kant's ideas are worth examining in any great detail.

Her comments can be stated without much fuss: Kant "proved" that freedom, justice, and the world beyond our senses exist.  (Was there ever any doubt?)

"Kant [she writes] was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?"

A passage like this strikes me as borderline nonsense. Children begin to develop a notion of freedom the first time they're sent to their room for some foul deed, and they find that they've lost some of that freedom. The concept of justice follows soon after, as they begin to brood over the fact that their big sister "started it all" yet suffered no consequences. Acts of freedom and conscience are a commonplace in the lives of most adults.

In the eighteenth century the concepts of fellow-feeling and the "moral sense" developed in England, France, and elsewhere. Kant, to his discredit, rejected those concepts. He argued that a truly moral act could never be a pleasant one. If you helped an elderly man across the street and felt good about it, shame on you! In Kant's worldview, goodness was basically a synonym for duty. But who is to determine where our duty lies? And how can this devotion to duty be squared with the idea of personal freedom? And where does the genuinely moral element come in?  

But Kant is mostly known these days for his analyses of how the mind works.  Here, too, confusion reigns. Yet we can learn something from Kant's missteps. For example, the distinction he makes between analytic and synthetic judgments is worth looking into. In the former judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. In the later, the predicate adds something to the subject. The distinction here is sound, but the words Kant uses to describe it are not. An analytic judgment isn't really a judgment at all, but simply an analysis. When we analyze something, we take it apart, separating and identifying its constituent parts. When we judge something, we assert that the thing, considered as a whole, has some sort of value.

Philosophers tend to love analysis yet are wary of judgment. Why? Because judgment is always personal. There is no way to "prove" that the Mona Lisa is beautiful (I don't care for it much myself) or that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. But the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 follows  of necessity once we've agreed to work in the decimal system of numbering. It's already part of the scheme. It's an "analytic judgment." However, it's equally "true" that 2 + 2 + 11 ... if you happen to be calculating in base three.

Kant went on the posit two realms of judgment, one of them "prior to" experience, the other following upon experience. He was eager to locate a domain of truths that weren't merely reiterations of  the presuppositions involved, but had transcended, somehow, the rough and tumble of experience. He referred to such truths as acts of a priori synthetic judgments, and many Kant enthusiasts today consider this transcendental realm as Kant's great gifr to the world.  

I find it amusing that neither of the examples of such thought given in the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually possess the required attributes of the form:

Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband.

Some bodies are heavy? Well, a body would typically be described as something that has weight, so the remark is analytic. It doesn't meet the requirements.

All husbands are male? Here in the 21st century, we all know this to be factually untrue.

Kant himself considered mathematical processes as "synthetic," Heaven knows why.

 

The most glaring errors to be found in Kant's work are those that pertain to the differences between the world in which we live and our impressions of that world. It almost goes without saying that such impressions are always incomplete, provisional, and tinged with error. Kant make a great fuss about this fact, however, even going so far as to suggest that many elements of our experience derive not from the world we inhabit but from the architecture and tools supplied by our own brains.

The French intellectual and novelist Madame de Staël,  author of the first popular analysis of German culture to reach a wider Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote:

The leading imperative forms of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrated that everything we per­ceive is subject to these two forms. He concludes that they are in ourselves and not in external objects, and that in this sense it is our understanding that imposes laws upon external nature rather than receiving them from it.

From this and other silly notions arose the idea that we can never actually form clear and adequate impressions of the things around us. The only things we can know "for sure" are the impressions themselves, locked within our heads. Kant referred to these impressions as "phenomena," and in the course of time a field of study has developed—phenomenology—devoted to exploring the ins and outs of these purely mental bits of data.

The entire field is illusionary.

Just a few years ago, MIT published a monograph titled Phenomenology in which we:

Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead ... But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamen­tally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock... Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.

The author somehow fails to notice that "true" appearance differs here from "mere" appearance by further investigation, not of a phenomenological event inside our head, but of a real event out in a pond. We improve our understanding of the world by going out into it. 

The kernel of Kant's thought that needs to be explored and developed is the judgment, through which we assert the goodness, truth, or beauty of a thing. Or more strictly, of an event.

Value is of the essence of reality. We can defend our values, perhaps eloquently, but we can't "prove" them, because they apply to aspects of the world we share with others, rather than closed systems of our own devising. And others may react to the same things differently.

Kant describes his mission, near the start of his Critique of Pure Reason, as one of distinguishing a "pure" from an "empirical" cognition.  Underlying such an impulse is the desire for some sort of depth and transcendence, and these are things we can all aspire to. But such enlightenment cannot be gained through the pursuit of logical purity. Rather, the quest leads us through the muck of experience, guided by our conscience, taste, fellow feeling, curiosity, and judgment.

One of Kant's admirers wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that "it's easy to find Kant mystifying or off-putting unless you have the time, patience and sympathy to discover and properly reflect on his remarkably original work."

I have the time, patience, sympathy. I have reflected for years, on and off. Nothing good has come of it. I'm going birding.

The fabric of the universe?

Metaphysical questions typically arise at an early age, when we first ask ourselves, "Why am I me, and not you?"  Before long this question leads to a second one: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Such questions may give us a eerie pleasure, or they may induce anxiety or even panic. In either case, answers are seldom forthcoming, and we usually put those questions aside, though with time a variety of lesser issues along the same lines are likely to rear their heads, including "Why are there mosquitoes?" and "Why is Mrs. Edstrom, my kindergarten teacher, persecuting me?"

Injustice, pain, the nature of meaning itself? For the most part, philosophers have done only a middling job of answering such questions. There are insights to be found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many others, but they tend to be strewn like shining nuggets amid a vast outwash plain of well-meant but unilluminating ratiocination.

In recent times—that is to say, in the last few centuries—thinkers have devised a number of approaches to such problems, drawing on the methodologies of mathematics, physics, linguistics, and other disciplines that lay claim to a more limited scope but firmer foundations. The results have been dismal.

Just the other day, Scientific American published an article carrying the title: "Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?" (You can read it here.) It describes the results of a conference recently held to discuss the fact that no nuts-and-bolts physical or neurological description of consciousness has ever been devised.

The chosen title poses an even larger issue: In what way can it be said that the universe has a "fabric"?

Skirting this enormous question, the conference attendees analyzed the question of whether a panpsychic theory—that everything in the universe already possesses consciousness—might solve the problem. It's a wonderful theory, though it begs the question. It has been proposed by many philosophers including Giordano Bruno, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Denis Diderot, all of whose investigations the attendees seem to have been entirely unaware. In any case, such an approach doesn't address the pertinent issue, which is less about the existence of consciousness than the nature of sentience.

Consciousness is always consciousness "of" something. And that connection between inner and outer worlds is always colored by the individual who makes that connection. So what? The conferees seem to have been content to analyze the question of whether the color "red" that I see actually looks like the "red" you see. That's a trivial question. More important would be to analyze how my understanding of beauty or justice aligns with, and differs from, yours.

Going further, we might explore the wonderful fact—and it is an empirical fact—that my notions of justice and beauty are similar to the ones my family and friends hold. For example, we gnash our teeth in concert as we summon images of the dastardly and dangerous rogues in the Republican Party who are dead set on destroying our sacred institutions. This, in part, is why we've become "family and friends."

Such affinities are widespread but they're rarely perfect, which is why many of us continue to explore the nuances of the world we live in and the wide array of consciousnesses we share it with—animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Maybe the universe has a fabric after all?

History & Human Flourishing

 A recent review in the New York Review of Books drew my attention to an anthology of essays carrying the title  History & Human Flourishing. I found the presence of the word "flourishing" interesting in itself, and the review underscored the fact that the essays it contained focused their attention in various ways on how our lives can be nourished by the study of history, beyond the often useful but always limited range of prosecutorial investigations of the past. It's not the kind of book that's likely to show up any time soon in a remainder catalog or on a sidewalk bookstall, however, so I took a chance and forked over the $29 to buy a new copy—the last of the birthday money I'd received recently from Hilary's mother.

The first essay I read made it all worthwhile. The author, a Princeton professor named D. Graham Burnett, takes us through his own agonized development as a scholar in an effort to explain why so  much of what goes on in academia today, and perhaps especially in the humanistic fields, is either polemical or remote, dry, and lifeless. If I were to reiterate his position in a single sentence, I would say that in Burnett's view, the vitality and interest of the humanistic disciplines lies in their ability to evaluate events, artifacts, and cultural movements. The best work relies, in other words, on personal judgment. For the most part the university experience is driven by the need to avoid or obscure such judgments in an attempt to provide a veneer of detachment and universality to its pronouncements.

Early on in the piece Burnett describes how much he enjoyed reading the volumes in the I Believe series edited by Clifton Fadiman during his undergraduate years. Why? Because, as he described it, they brought him "relief" from the unwillingness of most scholars to actually reveal what they thought about the subjects they were investigating.

He hastens to add:

"There were, of course, in those years, bold voices exactly making brave statements of commitment—on race, gender, sexual identity, and preference; on the need for new forms of academic prac­tice. And a few years later, the tragedy of 9-11 would produce a pained spasm of “seriousness” among historians and humanist intellectuals more broadly ... But all I can say is, in the course of my own graduate formation in History, I had been led to focus on the mastery of a large, intricate, and contentious secondary literature, and I had been assiduously tutored in the tournament of anxiety that is life as a neophyte scholar. I had gotten essentially zero sense that actually deciding what one thought about things—and stating that clearly—was part of the project."

Burnett wasn't unduly perturbed by the situation because the scholars he admired were professionals who saw little purpose in blatantly advancing their personal views blatantly. Still, something was rubbing him the wrong way.

"I harbored a (sublated) sense that to be a historian was to be an 'intellectual' and that to be an 'intellectual' was to have some substan­tive conception of life that was integral to one’s account of one’s work."

The question arises as to where the foundation for such personal judgments lies. By way of answering that question, Burnett introduces us to the work of the mid-nineteenth century thinker Auguste Comte, who figures in intellectual history as the father of sociology and a lifelong proponent of positivism, a movement dedicated to bending the study of human life to fit the methods of the hard sciences. Burnett goes into some detail describing Comte's career, most of which he finds misguided and often silly, but he highlights one of Comte's ideas as worth considering: that the discoveries of modern scholars perform the same social function as that of the religions they have largely replaced. 

"If it is legitimate to speak of 'wisdom traditions,' [he writes] I would define this notion as pre­cisely that set of practices and beliefs, stories and rites, habits and concepts that equip human beings to confront pain—to take it in, to feel and experience it ... and to do something other than pass it along to others ... For me, for better or worse, the humanistic scholarly enterprises only really make sense as thinly (and, I believe, imperfectly) “secularized" efforts to do work once done in explicitly religious settings."

Burnett is arguing, quite rightly I think, that the purpose of historical thought, and of the humanities more generally, is to expand and deepen our values and our sense of the richness, sacredness, and interconnectedness of life. Historians often do this by means of the narratives they shape. Only the most eminent  among them step out from behind their material to explain in personal terms why they believe their "take" on the past is important.

One reason may be humility. Another might be simply that such a rhetorical strategy would be too crude and "unprofessional." But Burnett draws our attention to an important essay, "Science as a Vocation," that Max Weber published in 1918. He lauds it as "an exceedingly rich and historically specific text" but notes that Weber limits the scholarly vocation to one of knowledge-production, leaving no room for problems of "meaning" or "life."

"The problems may be real, but university professors have no special claim on them, and Weber is caustically dismissive of any residual conception of the university that trades on the promise that academic study will address such matters—which, in his view, it absolutely cannot (and must not). It is exactly a reconstruction of the humanistic domain on Weberian “scientistic" grounds that has, in my view, substantially deprived that domain of its pri­mary reason for being and rendered it increasingly impossible to defend in contemporary life."

I was pleased to see that Burnett sees only limited value in causation and the search for origins, preferring to place an emphasis on "recovering human experiences." He notes, astutely, that

"As a practicing historian, I tend to be basically wary of causal/explanatory history—not because I think it is impossible or invidious, exactly, but because I think there is plenty of work to be done in a different key ... I feel that there is basically an infinite amount of history to be done that works to recover human experi­ences (i.e., to resurrect and translate their immediacy), and that, on balance, this work does more good in the world (is more needed) than more history that tries to assign blame for various things—which is basically what causal/ explanatory history always finds itself doing, in the end.

 As the essay draws to a close, Burnett begins to draw in his wings, however. He shies away from the major issues his train of thought has raised and retreats into a safer realm, where the main purpose of historical inquiry is merely to "see a time from elsewhere." Gone is the religious foundation, gone is the emphasis on value and judgment.

Well, I don't blame him. Such issues are complex and difficult to untangle in the course of a few pages. This might also explain why philosophy, both analytic and continental, has descended so often to trivialities and technicalities in our times. Yet the bulk of Burnett's essay was devoted to history and the humanities as inspirational disciplines. The history of art, for example, exposes us to many varieties of beauty, and helps us to see their value. Economic history underscores the difference between enterprises that "work out" and those that "fall flat" and therefore disappear from view, though their merits may be worth re-examining. Underlying all of this is a concept that once went by the name of progress. In the introduction to this volume, the editor gives a convincing account, I think, of why the word "flourishing" better conveys what an understanding of history often contributes to.

A generation or two before Comte appeared on the scene, Hegel made use of the word "spirit." Dialectic was the concept, spirit provided the energy, the result was development.

A generation or two after Comte, the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce refined and improved Hegel's notions, retaining the dialectic while dispensing with Hegel's meta-historical scaffolding, his teleological speculations, and his interest in the Absolute. The overhaul was so thorough that it would make more sense to call Hegel a pre-Crocean than to call Croce a post-Hegeliam.

Few read Croce these days, as far as I can tell, though the University of Toronto came out with a slim volume titled A Croce Reader a few years ago. Croce wrote sixty or seventy  books, so such an anthology can take us only so far. Serious students might prefer to look back to the anthology published by Oxford in 1966 that runs to more than a thousand pages. Even in his own day, when he stood as a beacon of liberal opinion in the midst of his country's Fascist regime, Croce's philosophy was largely misunderstood even within Italy. 

At the center of Croce's world lies is the concept of spirit. In common speech that's a simple word, and we all know what it means. If I read that a football team made a spirited defense of its title, the meaning is clear.  If I describe someone as being dis-spirited, no one will mistake the meaning. If my piano teach tells me to put more spirit into my rendition I'll know what she means.

Spirit differs from Heidegger's Being, to take a more popular post-modern concept, in that it is indwelling, animate, questing, and almost invariably incomplete. A moment of expressive power or a shrewd conceptual leap toward coherence may be deeply moving, and the artistic expression or historical or logical insight it produces will endure as a cultural artifact. But new urges and issues will invariably develop in the wake of such creations. To paraphrase Hegel himself: "The act never [quite] produces the desired result." Hence the restless urge to "go beyond" that fuels the historic process we call "living."

Spirit is what the young Burnett and his fellow grad students were studying, and seeking to cultivate, and hoping to transmit to a new generation, before they were ground down by the academic system. Philosophers of an analytic bent almost invariably criticize the concept as vague, wishy-washy, or "metaphysical." But such judgments are merely the result of lazy thinking. Consider the example I mentioned a few minutes ago of Comte. Burnett spends several pages outlining the man's career and his influence on his contemporaries. It's not hard to discern what Comte was reaching for: a more precise understanding of things. His advocacy of the scientific method, which was working so well in other fields, is easy to understand, though such methods proved inappropriate to the subject. (As Paul Valery once quipped, "History is the science of what only happens once." A century earlier Novalis had further limited the reach of the sciences when he remarked: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.")

But in Burnett's judgment, Comte did have one good idea—that for many, the humanities now play a role once played by religious institutions. Burnett could easily have advanced this as his own insight and saved the reader some time, but the historical precedent is significant. It fleshes out the insight. Burnett paints the scene, establishes the context, and highlights the spirit—the living part—of Comte's work. The historical echoes and reverberation are enriching. But there is nothing vague or wishy-washy about the spirit involved. The historian must answer the question, at least implicitly, why we ought to take an interest in this, rather than that. He or she must identify where the value lies.

The concept of spirit only becomes vague when it's posited as being opposed to matter. To the historian, spirit animates events and in so doing, it transforms matter, lives, institutions. Hegel's term for these things is "objective spirit." The study of history and the humanities is, or ought to be, inspiring. Referring to the students who continue to pursue a career in these fields, many of whom he has taught, met with, and advised, Burnett writes:

"They must feel this, since it would be inconceivable that they would decide to pursue a PhD in the humanities in the hopes of getting a 'good job'—of, somehow, making their way in a promising 'profession.' Given the career-placement statistics for humanists with doc­toral degrees, that would be completely crazy."

The academic environment Burnett describes isn't much different from the one I experienced in the mid-1970s, during my years in grad school at the U of MN. My advisor expressed the hope more than once that I was having a good time, because he thought it very unlikely I'd ever land a job as a historian. During my last year of study twelve students in the history department were in line to receive PhDs. Only one of them had a job waiting in academia.

 I was having a good time. College didn't cost much in those days. I enjoyed my work as a T.A., and I also worked part-time as a parking lot attendant, which helped to finance my education and gave me lots of time to read.

I was reading the wrong things, however. I enrolled in a seminar on Victorian England but found myself reading Burckhardt's history of the Italian Renaissance. I took a class in the French Revolution but got distracted by Robert Kuttner's Economists at Bay. Too many scattered interests. Meanwhile, it was becoming evident to me that grad school was, as the saying goes, a process of learning more and more about less and less.

When I'd exhausted my tenure as a T.A., I dropped out. (I was offered a job full-time by the university parking service. I declined.)

I suppose if everyone dropped out, we wouldn't have brilliant books like History and Human Flourishing to read. That would be too bad. But a glance at any issue of the New York Review of Books—not only the reviews, but more especially the university press ads touting their latest publications—make it clear that plenty of fascinating material is still coming down the pipe from academia.

 Laymen like me would probably find much of it unreadable. It would take a lot of work to extract and ponder and share the spirit within. And all for what?

Well, how about enlightenment?

 

Barbershop Big Bang Theory

I came upon an article in Scientific American recently suggesting that the universe began with a "bang" rather than a "bounce." That was the story we were told as kids, of course, and it even appears in a flashback in Annie Hall (!977) where the young Alvy Singer tells his psychiatrist, "Why do your homework? The universe is expanding, and someday it will explode." The kid's got a point.

More recently, theories have been floated suggesting that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion in an endless series of bounces. So, which is it?

I have often pondered this question while sitting in the barber shop waiting to get a haircut, though a second question often comes to mind first: "I made a reservation online half an hour ago, when there was a half-hour wait; so why do I have to wait an additional half-hour once I get here? Did I pass through a wormhole or what?"

Though I find the question of the origin of the universe intriguing, the first thing that caught my eye in the article was the last phrase of the headline—"New Studies Find."

This is wretched journalism, and not in the least bit scientific. The proper phrase would be "New Studies Suggest." Nothing in astrophysics is definitively "found," and the origins and dim past of the universe will probably remain murky 'til the end of time, and beyond. The "findings" referred to in the article are merely speculations, and shaky ones at that.

Astrophysicists have established with some degree of confidence that in the first few milliseconds during which our current universe expanded—a blindingly hot phase known colloquially as the "inflationary period"—the universe behaved very differently than it does now. The speculations under review here deal with conflicting explanations of irregularities that have been detected recently within the cosmic microwave background, which is commonly considered the "footprint" of that nascent universe. The authors of the current article describe and also critique theories such as bispectrum and loop quantum cosmology before concluding that before the Big Bang produced our universe from a "singularity," there was ... nothing. The mass required to reverse the expansion of a previous incarnation and keep the "accordion" pumping simply does not exist.

Personally, I have my doubts. Four fifths of the mass required to explain the rotation of the galaxies we can see and measure—the infamous Dark Matter—has never been detected at any wave-length. We presume it's there because without it our gravitational formulas don't work. Well, maybe there's even more Dark Matter out there than we think, that we also can't see, that would make a different gravitational formula more accurate while also supporting the theory of an accordion universe—the "bounce" theory mentioned in the title.

Yet such arguments overlook a more basic point. Even if current evidence supported the "accordion" theory of numerous expansions and contractions, it would leave the question unanswered. How did the universe—whether singular and unique or seesaw and musical—get going in the first place? Where did it come from?

Thinking about this issue at any great length will make you seasick. I would not recommend it. But such questions do have their amusing side, because language is incapable of even phrasing the question correctly. For example, a moment ago I asked the question, Where did the universe come from?  Such a question makes sense if it refers to something discrete, like a wood tick that suddenly appears on my forearm, crawling toward my hand, as I'm driving. Where did that come from? It wasn't there a split-second ago. The window's closed, and I doubt if it fell from the inside roof of the car. Weird!

One thing I know for certain is that wherever it came from was somewhere else.

But you can't ask where the universe came from unless you believe there's somewhere else it could have come from. But that place would also be a part of the universe, which includes everything. Right? The question makes no sense.  

Yet it must be asked.   

Another question that makes no sense to me is this: I've been waiting patiently, thumbing through Golf Digest or Minnesota Monthly, until my name rises to the top of the list on the computer screen. I sit down in the barber chair, and the stylist asks me a question like "Why are we here today?" or "What are we thinking of?" Oh, my God. These are profound questions. Why are we here today? Why is anything here today?  

But I think I know what she's driving at. And I have an answer ready.

I point to my hair and say, "A little shorter, please. And could you clean up that unruly fluff on the back of my neck."

   

Sacred Nature: The Dark Enigma Gate

In her latest book, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, the religious historian Karen Armstrong has taken up the question of whether we might succeed in averting environmental catastrophe by modifying our attitude toward the environment—coming to view it as sacred, rather than merely useful. She argues that Christianity devotes less attention, and affords less respect to living things beyond the human realm than do other religions. I'm not sure this is true, but  Armstrong does a good job of highlighting attractive elements of Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Moslem, and even Jewish religious thought and practice that Westerners in general, and Christians in particular, might benefit from exploring. She writes:

In the Middle East ilam, meaning "divinity" in Akkadian, was a radiant power that transcended any singular diety. In India, the Braham, the ultimate reality, was indefinable; it was a sacred energy that was deeper, higher, and more fundamental than the "devas," the gods who were present in nature but had no control over the natural order. In China, the ultimate reality was the "Dao," the fundamental "Way" of the cosmos; nothing could be said about it, because it transcended all normal categories."

Armstrong explores these various sacred traditions, mostly dating from the Axial Age (900-200 BCE) and along the way relates a string of telling, and sometimes amusing, anecdotes. For example, the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Fang Yizhi, after engaging in theological discussion with the Jesuits, concluded that the West was "detailed in material investigation," but deficient in "comprehending seminal forces."

In another chapter she informs us that the medieval Jewish mystics who developed the tradition of the Kabbalah were, in part, "responding to a popular demand for a more immanent notion of the sacred." These thinkers argued, contra the Biblical view, that God hadn't created the world “out of nothing.” Rather, "creation had proceeded stage by stage 'out of God.' " It followed, by their way of thinking, that what we take to be the original, primal "nothing," is always present, and more "real" than the things right  in front of our eyes. We can't perceive it only because  "the core of divinity is forever unknowable."

This kind of lore really tickles my fancy, notwithstanding the fact  that the subject is beyond words and basically unknowable. It seems to me that we may catch glimpses of the sacred out of the corner of our eye, but if we turn our head for a better look it's gone. We always want more, though we probably wouldn't know what to do with it if we met it face to face.  

On the other hand, though I haven't read the book cover to cover, it strikes me that Armstrong tends to give Christianity short shrift in her effort to make her point. She mentions St. Thomas Aquinas's argument that God wrote two books—the Bible and the Book of Creation—but goes on to suggest that such notions were crushed underfoot by the critical and investigative spirit that culminated in Newton's mathematically based conception of the universe. This is true enough. Yet Aquinas was never a source of popular understanding of natural processes, which was far more often derived from the alchemical and magical practices espoused by healers and proto-scientists of whom Paracelsus was perhaps the most famous.Newton himself spent a great deal of time investigating such things, when he wasn't tracking the planets.  

Armstrong is on firmer ground with St. Francis of Assisi, and she reproduces a lengthy passage from one of his poems. But in order to bend it to her thesis, she counsels us to consider that the "Lord" to whom the poem is addressed, and who appears in almost every line, is the "transcendent force that imbues the whole natural order," rather than the more conventional celestial father of Biblical tradition.

Really? I doubt it. To my ears, it sounds as if St. Francis were address a specific person or presence. And isn't that simply another way of drawing our attention to the third "person" of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit? But such a reference actually proves her point. Whereas several Eastern traditions enshrine a natural energy or flow, nameless and elusive, the Judeo-Christian tradition has developed largely as a dialog between "the people" and their God, who is basically a transcendental vision of themselves. In the process, the wonder and mystery of the natural world is devalued. And that's a bad thing. 

Armstrong spends little time describing her own connection with nature. It isn't that kind of a book. Her purpose is to bring us to a wider and deeper awareness of the sacred element in nature as it manifests itself in a variety of "classical" traditions. And along these lines her thoughts and erudition are welcome.

But the fundamental question remains to be answered: Is nature really sacred? For that matter, does the word "nature" refer to anything real?

A Zoroastrian temple

It strikes me that sacred things—or places—tend to be unusual or remote, set off in one way or another from day-to-day experience. For example, few are allowed to visit the inner sanctum of a temple. Not only would they be likely to despoil it due to inexperience or "uncleanliness," but it would begin to lose its hallowed character were we to become too familiar with it. By the same token, a sacred bundle in the care of a Native American elder is not a thing for young children to play with. Rather, tribal members approach it with ceremony and call upon its energy only on rare occasions. In the presence of such objects or locales, we are often gripped by a feeling, difficult to describe but compounded of beauty, pleasure, preciousness, and latent energy or power.

But everyone doesn't feel the same way about such things. I'm thinking here of all the churches and monasteries that were used as stables and munitions dumps during the French Revolution, or the scene in the film Ladybird during which Saoirse Ronan and her friend lie on the floor in a hallway of a church munching down a few communion wafers as an afternoon snack. Shame on them! 

Many of us were brought up under the injunction to "fear the Lord," which was an old-fashioned way of advising us to revere him, I think. But I find it hard to see how nature broadly considered can be placed in the rarefied category of the sacred. Most of us can recall specific times when, in the presence of awesome or pristine natural phenomena, we were gripped with that feeling of reverence, or ecstasy even. Depending on how much time you spend outdoors, this can become almost a common experience.

If I read her right, Emily Dickinson had such feelings, though they didn't last long.

Did Our Best Moment last —

'Twould supersede the Heaven —

A few — and they by Risk — procure —

So this Sort — are not given —

 

Except as stimulants — in

Cases of Despair —

Or Stupor — The Reserve —

These Heavenly moments are —

 

A Grant of the Divine —

That Certain as it Comes —

Withdraws — and leaves the dazzled Soul

In her unfurnished Rooms –

 

I suppose it's a matter of temperament and circumstances, but I receive such grants of the divine fairly often, and there are times when I see evidence of beauty and order almost everywhere I look. 

I often get that feeling when I turn on my computer.

No, I don't worship technology. But my computer has a very large screen, and over the years I've accumulated quite a few exquisite screen-savers—photographs I've taken myself. Some of them are classically picturesque images of mountain peaks and crashing surf, almost worthy of a Sierra Club calendar, but the ones that fill me with the greatest awe are photographs of random vegetation. There is no point of focus. The eye wanders from one flower, leaf, or twig to the next, admiring the harmony and intricacy of an exquisite but obviously unplanned arrangement.

Unplanned, yes. Random? No. These plants have followed divergent evolutionary paths to their present shape and dimensions, each one different, but guided by the same need for sunlight and nutrients. They share a chunk of soil, a plot of ground, perhaps uneasily, but often beautifully, as they scramble for a place in the sun. As my eye roams here and there amid the vegetation vividly illuminated on my screen, I pause to take the measure of, and appreciate, a particular leaf or plant that I would certainly never have noticed on a tramp through the fields, and it fills my heart with awe and affection.

But we ought to acknowledge that the "nature" I'm describing here is a thing I chose and framed myself. Not every rotten log and weedy roadside produces the same effect. So perhaps their sacred character is the result of both natural processes and my own aesthetic sense. But isn't this the connection—this communion—we're looking for?

It all ties in, I think, with a fundamental but, as Armstrong admits, all but inexpressible logic that poets and thinkers have been attempting to describe for millennia. 

Another route to sacred nature, I think, lies in cooking. It's easy to enjoy the flavors we concoct in the kitchen, many of them natural enough. But how often do we take to time to pay homage to the living things we're making use of to sustain us. Here again, it might be simply that I have the good fortune to see the vegetables I'm chopping up for a carrot-based pot of chili in a spectacular slant of light coming into the kitchen through the dining room windows.

It's a temple--and a sacrifice--right in front of my eyes.

Taoists use the phrase "the ten-thousand things" to denote the diversity of stuff in the universe. In the introduction to his translations of the Tang poet Po Chu-i, David Hinton writes that Po "came to realize that the self was also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient." This was an important step, because it bridged the chasm between individual and environment, allowing them to settle into one another.

On the next page, Hinton introduces us to a few Chinese concepts: hsien—profound serenity and quietness; lan—the heart-mind of trust; wu-wei—the practice of tzu-jan, which he describes as "occurrence happening of itself." 

For Po, Hinton writes, idleness was "a kind of meditative revel in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice."

  

Our garden path to the compost pile.

 In such an environment the tea bowl and the flagstone path through the moss become sacred entities—though perhaps little that's worthwhile ever gets done. 

Here's a piece by Chui-I, chosen almost at random.

OVERNIGHT AT BAMBOO PAVILION

Sit through dusk beneath eaves of pine
at Bamboo Pavilion, sleep night away:

it’s such empty clarity, like some drug,
isolate mystery deep as a mountain home.

No cleverness can rival a simple mind,
and industry never outshines idleness.

Done struggling, done cultivating Tao:
here it is, this remote DarkEnigma gate.

You won't find much of this quietistic appreciation in the lyric poetry of the Greeks, but the broader notion of a cosmic order appears in the concept of logos. Armstrong misses a trick here, I think, her vast erudition notwithstanding, when she writes, "The logos deals with facts." Not so.

Nowadays we translate logos as “word,” but consulting an on-line dictionary at random, I am confirmed in my understanding that “logos” carried a wealth of meanings in ancient times. To the pre-Socratics, it was the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, and the human reasoning that struggled to come to grips with it more fully on a personal level. The Stoics held a similar view, though they more explicitly associated it with God as the source of all activity and generation, and with “mind” (nous), which, through the power of reason, develops the wherewithal to illuminate the order in experience and even, on occasion, make a leap to the divine.

In short, “logos” is not merely “the word” or language, and it has nothing to do with facts. It's a logic that unites the cosmos and the individual in some sort of quivering harmony. I am reminded here of the quivering mosquito twins in the Book of the Hopi that sustain the universe, and the musical meters which, in the Satapatha Brahmana, are the cattle of the gods.

I think Armstrong would approve of such associations. Her intention is to familiarize us with them through her acute descriptions of the rituals, myths, and metaphors of ancient times and foreign traditions. The hope is that they will allow us to embrace nature's sacred dimension more fully.

I have neglected to mention one important and illuminating aspect of the sacred: it's political dimension. In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington refers to it when he writes:

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

Yes, the agreements that preserve and protect our individual and social freedoms are sacrosanct. But what about the birds, the eels, and the mountain springs?