Wednesday 20 January 2010
Essential to the Present: Keeping One Eye on the Past
As a society, our past is not paid the attention it should be, and this means we struggle to understand our present, or predict our future. On a certain level, the reason for this obvious: We tend to have enough trouble just dealing with the present. But it is still deeply unsatisfactory and, I would say, dangerous. This is connected to understanding both our present and our future. How can we predict the future from the present, if we don't understand how the present has developed from the past?
I hope that saying, as a society, 'we do not have a great understanding of our past', is not a very controversial claim. Perhaps never before have even relatively educated sections of our society had so little idea of the full sweep of our History, whether of Britain, or the whole World. Pick almost anyone at random, and they are probably largely unable to describe either the broad sweep of history over the millennia, or its details, outside perhaps a few very specific periods. I believe this sad fact is a simple consequence of a few factors. Firstly, the decline of the ideal of what can be called the 'Renaissance Man': that an educated person should be generally well informed and skilled to call themselves educated. Education has become increasingly specialised, to the great benefit of economic and technical pursuits, but to the cost of an understanding of the background of our society and the wider world. This can be seen at school where beyond GCSE most subjects are just abandoned and specialisation really sets in. Secondly, and connected, is the commercialisation of education, meaning education seen as something undertaken for purely for economic benefits, rather for any ennobling, character enhancing reasons. The Humanities in general suffer particularly from a combination of both effects.
This process is intensified by the manner in which history is taught in the modern day, for the little time it is obligatory. That is, by intense concentration on a few isolated segments or periods of history, without any overview of how the whole, rolling, continuous human story fits together. For all its possible benefits this method has a crippling deficiency. I do not know how to quite explain it except by analogy. Our method of teaching history is like teaching pupils about America by intensely drilling them on the social, economic and political facts of North Dakota, South Carolina and Utah, but nothing about the country as a whole, whether its government, its shape, where it came from, or what stands for or anything else. Even among A-Level or University students of history, the general ignorance is often maintained, outside the particular few areas they have studied in such detail, unless they have a strong natural interest that they pursue more broadly in their own time.
I think few would disagree that most people know only a small amount of history, whether ancient or comparatively recent. Far more people, however, may question why this ignorance of the Past really matters at all. To answer this, I first appeal to another analogy. We consider a person who has entirely lost their memory, or even for whom their memory is particularly weak or failing, as a person who is profoundly disabled. This is for the obvious reason that they can neither truly know or appreciate who they are, or have the resources of knowledge and experience to apply to the situations they meet now or in the future. These are resources that we all rely on on a constant basis. They are doubly crippled by being robbed of the riches of memory of all they have done and achieved in the past, and in facing their present or their future. Exactly the same applies to whole societies or peoples or, indeed, humanity as a whole.
Obviously a group of human individuals totally ignorant of their social past can continue, in a manner unlike a single individual, because they do in fact retain their individual memories, but still in as far as they constitute a single social body and seek to act socially they will be crippled like any individual amnesiac, both by a failure to appreciate the richness of their past and the individuals who came before them, and by the lack of knowledge with which to understand the situations of their present or future, especially when faced with other peoples for whom the past is a more immediate current motivation. I would go even further. In any individual personal relationship what is important to that relationship is not mostly what we are doing with that person right now, but rather the depth and warmth of the history that we share. It is likewise so in the social bond that binds us together, whether country or people or community. If we as a social group do not know our shared history then we lose a major part of what makes us one people, one community, rather than just individuals thrown together. Indeed, as a man who has no idea of his past loses his very identity, so a people without idea of their past will struggle to have an identity as one people at all, but merely as a group of individuals thrown together by accidents of birth, or geography, or politics.
I speak in terms of our social identity here because I believe that is where the problem of our collective social amnesia is most dangerous. Not just in the loss of social identity, and the failure to appreciate those who have gone before us, but equally in failing to equip ourselves with the lessons of the past to guide us in the present and future. This is not dangerous, perhaps, in the theoretical sciences, areas where progress would not be possible without a constant awareness of the discoveries that have gone before and where, hence, such a consciousness is maintained. It is an immense risk, however, in the more practical and general areas of the social, political and economic choices we make to direct our country, state, community and people.
Without an awareness of the history and background of these decisions, of what has been tried and tested before, of what situations have already emerged, and what has succeeded and failed, we cannot be sufficiently informed to take the decisions we must in a complex world and decide wisely. We don't just need to know ourselves either, we need to understand the nations around us. Just as ignorance of where we have come from cripples our ability to know ourselves, and act, so ignorance of the deep background and heritage of the communities around us cripples our ability to understand them, where they come from, and what they seek to do now. Just as knowledge of an individual person's past allows us to understand what has shaped and motivated them, so we need knowledge of the past of the peoples and communities around us to better judge their actions and motivations now.
It is trivial to list political issues of our time that rest on deep historical causes and influences. From the politics of racial injustice and Confederate memorials in America, to the historical motivations behind the European Union; from the complex divisions over Israel-Palestine, the tensions in Northern Ireland, the continuing violence in the Middle East, the policies of Russian Expansionism, and even the background to the Corbynite and Conservative political movements within Britain; none of these can be really understood except through the deep historical wells and sources that have fed and driven them.
Even apart from these arguments, for me there is another important reason we should care about the poverty of historical awareness in our society. History is an immensely rich topic of study because of the sheer diversity, wealth and wonder of the things we can discover there. L.P.Hartley once wrote, "The Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". This is very true. I can think of no better metaphor for the wonders we can discover in History than the joys of travelling to a foreign country for the first time and experiencing new culture, food, climate, sights, people and stories; a richness and diversity we would never have imagined without venturing beyond our own land and people.
This is as true of the past as any possible place we can travel in mere space, though obviously and sadly we can never experience them as directly as in actual travel. Still, there is a richness there, of people and stories to tell, greater than any writer of fiction could conceive in one small imagination; being the true lives of billions of people just as inventive and creative as any of us. More than this though, the people of the past were people just like us: with hopes, fears, dreams and the vision of a purpose and meaning to their life. Surely then, if we are a people of love, who honour the value of human beings, we must honour them by remembering their lives and those things they gave and spent their lives for. We must remember the things, causes, and people that were so important to them, and which are also, of course, now the essential building blocks and causes of the lives we have today. For the basis of the near-infinite complexity of the lives we lead is that near-infinite beauty and complexity that came before us, with its loves and hopes, goods and evils, which now exist only as far as we take them up into our minds and make them part of our thoughts, hearts and lives.
Saturday 28 November 2009
40:30:20:10
Lib Dems 20%
Others 10%
Sunday 22 November 2009
40:30:20:10
(This was originally meant to be a relatively brief piece on my ideas of what, considering the political events and climate of the last years, should be the benchmarks for our political parties in the coming 2010 election, my ideas about the bencharks against which their current and eventual standing could be compared. It has been a personal labour of love about a subject I find fascinating. However, in the writing it has become exceedinly long, of full essay length, and hence I am posting the first half here before the rest is complete, so I don't fall further behind my personal target of posting once per week, and also to avoid ending up with an incredibly long post. I hope you find it interesting. The sections on the Lib Dems and Others is to follow soon. )
Tuesday 27 October 2009
What God Does.
When I was sitting there watching the world, it was a very special moment, for I was still and complete, for I am whole in the world when nothing is wrong that I can or must affect. It is a way in which I feel the goodness which underlies reality and that I could abide forever in that moment in perfect contentment, if that moment would just remain. So God was watching the world as well.
Like when I sat and looked down the valley behind my house. I sat on the grass in a warm summer, looking down the valley, past the golden and brown fields and trees and watching the sun go down behind the treetops. I watched this happen and drank in the beauty of it and I has the most incredible sense of watching it with God and of him watching it to, and appreciating it to, for he need do nothing but watch, and sharing this beautiful vision of what he had created.
I realised that I saw a piece of beauty, unique in the history of the world and the Universe, and I realised that no-one but me saw it, no-one but me and God. I realised that he must see this beautiful sunset every day, every day a little different, and that most days he saw it alone, unseen and unappreciated by anyone else. But this day he shared it with me, and I felt that God smiled, and that I was supremely honoured to share this moment where I was experiencing the pleasure of a maker at the success and unveiling of the beauty of the thing he had made. Like the pride of a parent at their daughter’s wedding, or their graduation from University. Love mingled with pride and the one reinforcing the other.
Thinking about this time I think that this is what God always does. He watches and waits for the time to come and sometimes he watches beauty and sometime he does not, but always he watches, and when the times is right he acts and he is working his purposes out from year to year. I had never thought about what God does with the world when he is not dealing with people, with thinking beings. What did he do in the aeons before the founding of the world. The answer, I think, is very simple, he watched.
God in the Bible and in the experience of my heart is not a God of many words. In the Bible God never uses ten words where one would do. I admit that this is not always true. God’s silence is broken by action, and powerful action to, and speech. In Jesus, God spoke at length but still the Gospels leave the feeling of so many words unspoken, so many parables we wish could be more completely explained, so many pages that could be in there.
Furthermore, my own explorations have led me into the search for stillness, in being able to move with rather than against the universe and God’s truth and the nature of what is valuable. It is a feeling of seeking a Taoist-like harmony with the universe, in Christian terms being in perfect obedience with the will and intentions of God. This is in terms of harmony and an important part of that harmony is both inner and bodily stillness and watching and waiting and acting when it is needed. In Taoist terms, doing by not doing. Actions, and powerful actions, puncture silence and watching. It is impossible, however, to underestimate the importance of watching and listening, and experiencing, for to do such a thing is to drink in the world as it moves around you.
Neither does it have to be contrary to God’s ever-activity and care. It is the nature of things that God pervades all. God acts constantly, both in his intercession in the world and through the constant over-flow of his Love into the world, that we call Grace. However, in any particular strand of existence, viewing any particular slice of time, looking at all the places in the cosmos, overwhelmingly in terms of their number God watches and does not directly act, although still his love and compassion overflow, as we know that we can merely watch someone and yet still our love and care can flow onto them.
Friday 23 October 2009
A Defense of Truth in Art - Some Preliminary Ideas.
These are some of my first brief thoughts on looking at how we consider and access Truth in, and through, Art and Literature and how this is fundamentally different to how we generally model and determine truth through maths and science. This is something that I believe has interesting possibilities for helping to explicate an explanation of the ways we access and react to the truth and knowledge we experience and rely on in ordinary life (and also in religion), in a fuller and more useful manner than the simplistic model we often rely on from the hard sciences and mathematics.
These ideas are inspired as a response to an article by J.Stolnitz 'The Cognitive Triviality of Art', which can be found here and argues for precisely the title, that Art is cognitively trivial, containing no unique useful knowledge or truth. The idea of this article is that supporters of Art often make claims to such a thing as Artistic 'Truth' or even knowledge. It takes a very narrow sense of truth and knowledge and then proceeds to use this to ridicule claims of Artistic truth or knowledge. To the extent it does not particularly engage with the wider questions it is merely a polemic, but it is a interesting starting point to bounce off of and give us somewhere to start in forming and defending the opposite view.
The article accuses Art of lacking the definitions of knowledge and truth that would provide us with a range of propositions whose truth is uniquely or best discoverable through that area of knowledge and a method by which such propositions could be compared and verified. He then claims that this demonstrates that the idea of Artistic truth or knowledge is essentially vacuous since there is no knowledge that is not more easily comprehendible and verifiable in some other area of understanding or by some other method. He contrasts this with examples of proper areas of knowledge such as science, history, religion, and even 'garden-variety' knowledge and examples of their respective unique propositions such as, ‘nothing can travel faster than the speed of light’, ‘the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066’, ‘the Trinity consists of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and ‘summer is warmer than winter’.
I am sympathetic to the article to the degree that I feel that talk of Artistic beauty is more immediately useful and relevant as a starting point of discussion of Arts than that of "Artistic Truth", which is to introduce a model of evaluation that is immediately likely to confuse when related to Art, especially when imported with all its retinue of ideas of contradiction, proposition, law of excluded middle etc,which is the baggage of formal logic. Any idea of Truth in Art or truths imparted by Art, let alone 'Artistic knowledge' is going to be considerably more difficult. The evaluation of beauty is perhaps hence a more useful starting point, possibly even because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that it itself is not a precisely defined concept and hence does not bring such immediate baggage with its use, it is however one that strikes most people at some point with immediate force, whereas Artistic Truth is ironically the more amorphous idea in most people’s minds.
The Article plays on this ambiguity to ridicule the prospect of Artistic truth and knowledge by taking a strictly propositional definition of truth or knowledge. He demands to know precisely what substantive and interesting propositions can be discussed and verified solely, or even best, through the medium of fine art. In this regard he appears to be correct. Any particular proposition about the world expressed in a piece of Art would seem better justified and grounded through some other means and area of knowledge particularly designed to develop and assess claims of that type of knowledge, whether history or science or philosophy.
In my view though, this merely shows the weakness of his model of artistic truth, or indeed of truth in general if he believes that the propositional model is the only one that there can be, or which can be useful (or indeed if he limits the range of his proposition to factually statement about the composition of the world as he seems to do).
My personal distaste for his talk of artistic knowledge or artistic truth leads me to constantly seek to phrase these ideas rather as the truth of Art or the Truth through Art. But that is merely personal preference.
I believe that the model in which we must discuss truth in Art is precisely not a propositional model but rather one of the immediate synthetic realisation of a whole manifold of truths, their inter-relation and their importance in terms of their aesthetic, moral, religious and existential value. Within a piece of Fine Art we can see captured and revealed an instantiaton of a scene or idea or or maybe just one element of a scene, whether in terms of a snapshot of a something, or a revelation or all eternity, enhanced and shown to us for our appreciation and understanding, with all the infinite, interwoven detail, connotations and connextions such a thing can produce. Such a picture, once (partially, for that is all it could ever reall be,) atomised into its constituent propositions, will inevitably lose its richness, not only in the sheer range of propositions, but also in the inter-related nature they share and the emotional impact which can actually bring them home. It is near (though I do not say entirely) impossible to achieve the same effect, of the over-arching view and connexion of something, with what must become in the end a mere list of individual propositions.
I believe that it is this precise feature of the encounter with truth that we reach in Art that gives a study of this truth the greatest relevance because it is this structure that it shares with so much of the truth or "truth" that we meet and deal with in our ordinary lives, where decisions from the trivial to the overwhelmingly important are so often based on an image or a glimpse or a moment and the immediate intuitve apprehension of what they mean, from our ordinary human perspective and which can so rarely be boiled down into one of logical atomism.
These ideas are not withstanding the eminent human tradition, whose most well known advocate that comes into my mind is Plato, which all but equates beauty and truth and hence the regards the insight of beauty, which many sense in even the most unadventurous or un-humanist Art as an authentic meeting with some truth in the universe that exists in the sense of deeper value and constitutes a meaning and being that gives surface reality and propositional truth its purpose and use and hence constitures a deeper and better truth than that expressed through any proposition. I recently read a man saying that we do science and technology so we may have the means and leisure to do Art, to create. And this is by no means an unheard of view.
Through Art, even apart from the conviction of beauty we can realise many truth and realise them deeper and better than we can through them merely being told to us. I do agree with the article further to the extent that not many of these ideas or propositions would necessarily be justified or grounded in their explanation through Art. Art may show me that a sunset is a supremely beautiful thing, but this would not be because of any particular painting that this was true. Aesthetic, Moral, religious, Existential propositions will often have their basis in some other area of knowledge, and merely receive expression through Art. Again though this is not necessarily true though, as with any of these categories, Fine Art, especially perhaps literature, may lay out the case for them in such an intricate detail unobtainable elsewhere that Art itself is uniquely situated to provide the evidence and backing for them, even if the particular events depicted are fictional. This could be thought of as in a way similar to an extended thought experiment.
This will not be true in all places, however, some Art will merely convict you at that point of ideas and propositions best grounded elsewhere and sometimes Art will reveal knowledge primarily or only in the form of the revelation of Beauty itself (not that this is to be disparaged) and sometimes it will reveal truth in the sense I have just described above. What this all goes to show though is that there is in fact an entire range of meaningful that Truth in and through Art can be studies and considered and through which we may then gain a great deal.
Trying again.
Tuesday 20 October 2009
First Post Made. Plenty to think about.
A Defense of Truth in Art - Some Preliminary Ideas.
These are some of my first brief thoughts on looking at how we consider and access Truth in, and through, Art and Literature and how this is fundamentally different to how we generally model and determine truth through maths and science. This is something that I believe has interesting possibilities for helping to explicate an explanation of the ways we access and react to the truth and knowledge we experience and rely on in ordinary life (and also in religion), in a fuller and more useful manner than the simplistic model we often rely on from the hard sciences and mathematics.
These ideas are inspired as a response to an article by J.Stolnitz 'The Cognitive Triviality of Art', which can be found here and argues for precisely the title, that Art is cognitively trivial, containing no unique useful knowledge or truth. The idea of this article is that supporters of Art often make claims to there being such a thing as Artistic 'Truth' or even knowledge. It takes this possible claim in a very narrow sense of truth and knowledge and then proceeds to use this to ridicule the idea of Artistic truth or knowledge. To the extent it does not particularly engage with the wider questions it is merely a polemic, but it is a interesting starting point to bounce off of and give us somewhere to start in forming and defending the opposite view.
The article ('The Cognitive Triviality of Art') accuses Art of lacking the definitions of knowledge and truth that are useful and applicable in such fields as science, history, religion, and even 'garden-variety' knowledge, which would include such propositions as "summer is warmer than winter".
I am sympathetic to the article to the degree that I feel that talk of Artistic beauty is more immediately useful and relevant as a starting point of discussion of Arts than that of "Artistic Truth", which is to introduce a model of evaluation that is immediately likely to confuse when related to Art, especially when imported with all its retinue of ideas of contradiction, proposition, law of excluded middle etc,which is the baggage of formal logic.
Any idea of Truth in Art or truths imparted by Art, let alone 'Artistic knowledge' is going to be considerably more difficult. The evaluation of beauty is perhaps hence a more useful starting point, possibly even because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that it itself is not a precisely defined concept and hence does not bring such immediate baggage with its use.
The Article ridicules the prospect of Artistic truth and knowledge by taking a strictly propositional definition of truth or knowledge. He demands to know precisely what substantive and interesting propositions can be discussed and verified solely, or even best, through the medium of fine art. In this regard he appears to be correct. In my view though, this merely shows the weakness of his model of artistic truth, or indeed of truth in general if he believes that the propositional model is the only one that there can be.
My personal distaste for his talk of artistic knowledge or artistic truth leads me to constantly seek to phrase these ideas rather as the truth of Art or the Truth through Art. But that is merely personal preference.
I believe that the model in which we must discuss truth in Art is precisely not a propositional model but rather one of the immediate synthetic realisation of a whole manifold of truths, their inter-relation and their precise importance in terms of their aesthetic, moral, religious or existential value. Such a picture, once atomised, will inevitably lose its richness, not only in the sheer range of propositions but also in the inter-related nature they share and the emotional impact which can actually bring them home.
I believe that it is this precise feature of the encounter with truth that we reach in Art that gives a study of this truth the greatest relevance because it is this structure that it shares with so much of the truth or "truth" that we meet and deal with in our ordinary lives, from our ordinary human perspective, which can so rarely be boiled down into one of logical atomism.
These ideas are not withstanding the eminent human tradition, whose most well known advocate that comes into my mind is Plato, which all but equates beauty and truth and hence the regards the insight of beauty, which many sense in even the most unadventurous or un-humanist Art as an authentic meeting with some truth in the universe that exists in the sense of deeper value and constitutes a meaning and being that gives surface reality and propositional truth its purpose and use. A recently read a man saying that we do science and technology so we may have the means and leisure to do Art, to create. And this is by no means an unheard of view.