“Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”
— Mary Harrington quoting Oppenheimer.
Things Im looking forward to as spring rolls in:
In summary: good conversations; good food; sunshine and fresh air and beautiful landscapes; good music; good books. The simple things.
Finished reading: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 📚
A really engaging and enjoyable read. I agree with Bakewell in being disturbed at the flaws of many of her cast of existentialist characters, but I like how she brings out their humanity in the midst of these flaws. And this book reminded me of my own cast of thinkers who, taking their cue from Merleau-Ponty, celebrate and wonder about what it means to live as embodied beings in a material world: I think of Nic Carr; David Abram; Jenny Odell; Norm Wirzba; Albert Borgmann; Tim Ingold; Robert MacFarlane; Ian Mcgilchrist; Rowan Williams. There is something about careful consideration of what it means to be embodied that I gives me a deep sense of satisfaction in reading and re-reading.
“I do not think the existentialists offer some simple magic solution for the modern world. As individuals and philosophers, they were hopelessly flawed. Each one’s thought featured some major aspect that should make us uncomfortable. This is partly because they were complex and troubled beings, as most of us are. It is also because their ideas and lives were rooted in a dark, morally compromised century. The political turmoil and wild notions of their times marked them, just as our own twenty-first-century turmoil is now marking us.
But that is one reason why the existentialists demand rereading.They remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are.They constantly repeat the questions about freedom and being that we constantly try to forget. We can explore the directions the existentialists indicate without needing to take them as exemplary personalities, or even as exemplary thinkers. They are interesting thinkers, which I believe makes them more worth our trouble.” (319)
Currently reading: Flood and Fury by Matthew J. Lynch 📚
Started this book earlier today; reading with the hope of picking some helpful ways of addressing violence in the Bible with the youth I work for at church. They ask difficult, important questions worthy of deep engagement!
Currently reading: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 📚
Reading this one for the second time. Currently on the Merleau-Ponty chapter. Bakewell’s description of his way of doing philosophy really encapsulates the kind of thinking I most admire:
“In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two - a kind of rocking motion which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge'.
What Merleau-Ponty is describing here is another kind of ‘chiasm’ - an X-like interweaving, this time not between consciousness and world, but between knowledge and questioning. We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.” (241)
Testing from phone
Today: brunch with church folk; walk on Crescent Beach; started microblogging; pizza and baby nephew babysitting in Chilliwack.
Testing, testing.