How Did You Say?
Recently reading sunsmogseahorse's entries on religion -- as well as reading clarkelane's entries about the importance of artists' engaging with critical discourse -- have lead me to think a lot about the roles of religion/spirituality, science, art, and politics/ethics. More than that, they've reminded me to search a seam that unites these discourse/disciplines.
In fact, I was prompted by instinct -- before any sleep, at 5 a.m. this morning -- to begin re-reading Richard Rorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity. I picked it up again today to continue reading through the end of the first chapter.
I was reminded of how much -- despite small quibbles with Rorty -- ideas such as his have shaped me in subtle but lasting ways. He is a pragmatist and, therefore, advises that we discard searches for "truth" in favor of finding methods that "work" for the time being.
I can't just now lay out the many ramifications such a way of thinking has for me, but I would like to just quote a couple of passages that seem pertinent -- to me -- to discussions I see recurring here in thoughtful folks' journals:
"I can crudely sum up the story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeeth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.
The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat everything -- our language, our conscience, our community -- as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be, in Freud's words, to 'treat chance as worthy of determining our fate'." (22)
And particularly on the reverence afforded science,
"... we must follow Mary Hesse in thinking of scientific revolutions as 'metaphoric redescriptions' of nature rather than insights into the intrinsic nature of nature. Further, we must resist the temptation to think that the redescriptions of reality offered by contemporary physical or biological science are somehow closer to 'the things themselves,' less 'mind-dependent,' than the redescriptions of history offered by contemporary culture criticism. We need to see the constellations of causal forces which produced talk of DNA or of the Big Bang as of a piece with the causal forces which produced talk of 'secularization' or of 'late capitalism'. These various constellations are the random factors which have made some things subjects of conversation for us and others not, have made some projects and not others possible and important." (16-7)
In fact, I was prompted by instinct -- before any sleep, at 5 a.m. this morning -- to begin re-reading Richard Rorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity. I picked it up again today to continue reading through the end of the first chapter.
I was reminded of how much -- despite small quibbles with Rorty -- ideas such as his have shaped me in subtle but lasting ways. He is a pragmatist and, therefore, advises that we discard searches for "truth" in favor of finding methods that "work" for the time being.
I can't just now lay out the many ramifications such a way of thinking has for me, but I would like to just quote a couple of passages that seem pertinent -- to me -- to discussions I see recurring here in thoughtful folks' journals:
"I can crudely sum up the story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeeth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.
The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat everything -- our language, our conscience, our community -- as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be, in Freud's words, to 'treat chance as worthy of determining our fate'." (22)
And particularly on the reverence afforded science,
"... we must follow Mary Hesse in thinking of scientific revolutions as 'metaphoric redescriptions' of nature rather than insights into the intrinsic nature of nature. Further, we must resist the temptation to think that the redescriptions of reality offered by contemporary physical or biological science are somehow closer to 'the things themselves,' less 'mind-dependent,' than the redescriptions of history offered by contemporary culture criticism. We need to see the constellations of causal forces which produced talk of DNA or of the Big Bang as of a piece with the causal forces which produced talk of 'secularization' or of 'late capitalism'. These various constellations are the random factors which have made some things subjects of conversation for us and others not, have made some projects and not others possible and important." (16-7)