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"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Secularized Universals
11/29/2006 17:59:55
I have been meaning to write more about the massive American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference two weekends past. Eleven thousand theologians, religionists, anti-religionists, and publishers exploiting them all descending on my own dear Washington, D.C. is certainly worthy of comment. For now I'll offer one little anecdote that I only partly remember.
The dazzling Jonathan Z. Smith of Chicago made his appearance in a panel about his remark that the AAR of today is actually derivative of the theology of Paul Tillich. Smith gave a presentation (which I missed) and then some younger scholars offered their comments. What I want to point out, however, is a question asked of Smith by somebody at the end. He noted Smith's use of the word "interesting," by which presumably an organization like AAR might decide what to study. All of us turn our attention to what is interesting. The questioner noted the connection between "interesting" and "interests" in the materialist Marxian sense. We are interested (intellectually) in the things that refer to our (material-personal-social-economic) interests. The questioner then went on to ask if Smith meant to imply a correlation between the casual use of the word "interesting" and Paul Tillich's famous language of Ultimate Concern. Smith answered, no, not really.
I am not totally sure what he meant by the question since I missed Smith's presentation, but it did strike up a train of thought in me about casual language. Particularly in an academic department, we talk about interests a lot. I study here what I find interesting, since something that is interesting is worth studying. It is assumed that there might be some reasons why a thing is interesting to me, for instance its connection to my life story, but just as easily the interest might have no identifiable reason really at all. I just might find it interesting. I might want to study it all day and do my investigations into the nature of existence through that interesting subject. J.Z. Smith, for instance, was interested in ancient Mediterranean religion and found in that study insights useful for lots of other scholars. Edward O. Wilson was interested in ants and through that study synthesized sociobiology. The larger thing is made by interest in the smaller thing, with the smaller thing as a window into the larger thing.
To juxtapose the "interesting" with Ultimate Concern introduces the possibility that our use of the word may not be so casual as we think it is. To say a thing is interesting is therefore to say that it is so profound as to touch on what is more important than anything else. Just as Tillich's term aims to describe God in a way that sidesteps people's weariness of traditional theological language, could the casual word "interesting" be a secularized shorthand for the things that shake us to the ground of our being?
My dear friend's posting in August on "Surrogates for the Universal" has got me thinking a lot about being alert to the appearance of avatars for the ultimate in ordinary life. It is a practice of attention and analysis, predicated on the questional assumption that people are always somehow on the lookout for universal things. Worth a try, though.
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re:Secularized Universals - 12/10/2006 18:05:35
Posted by Alexa Clay
is "rationality" not an avatar for localized empiricisms?
ALSO...
re: ants. The idea that the smaller thing acts as a window into a larger thing is a persistant narrative in science. But how exactly does this transformation happen? I think in part science owes much to poetics. What is interesting about poetics is that a known thing often intuits an unknown thing via metaphor. Essentially the movement becomes kinda dialectical. For example, in the 1860s the physicist James Clerk Maxwell braved a description of electromagnetic fields by using metaphors of wheels, pulleys, and fluids. This primitive language of mechanical physics provided a means for talking about something until a more suitable descriptive language could evolve.
Lastly, I can't help but think how this type of atomic "thinking movement"
(small thing-->bigger thing) differs from intuition. The experience of intuition gives one a sense of reversability i.e. the a priori/unconscious awareness of a bigger thing allows us to understand the small thing.
re:Secularized Universals - 12/11/2006 20:15:52
Posted by nathan
Your comment about intuition strikes me because I think intuitions of this kind are quite fluid, which is to say they fall on the "nurture" side of the irrepressible (despite how we might try) nature/nurture distinction. The deductive (as you describe it) has a Platonic appeal that might not so much pull on someone used to an empiricist way of seeing the world. What is importation ultimately, I suspect, is the conception of the scale change in the first place, the idea that one kind of thing can be understood better by reference to either another kind of thing within it or another kind of thing that it is within. This, made possible by the telescope and the microscope, is the mechanism (if not the mindset) of the scientific revolution, if we can say there is one.
The connection to poetics is an interesting one. The other day I read the chapter in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis on Montaigne and it got me thinking about the connections between the essense of representation he sees as fundamental to Western literature and the process of secularization. In some sense it seems connected to the whole act of making, that every written thing stands in competition to the Word of God and every painting or sculpture stands in danger of idolatry. So the aesthetic of representation that emerged in encounter with this tension, through distance, came to enact a separate and neutral space. I wonder if his thinking on representation can help inform the poetics of scientific thinking.
In working with computers I came in contact with these kinds of poetic needs. In a very real way, computer programming languages have been invented as living metaphors for incredibly complicated, unseeable mechanical processes. As one works with them, the language comes to feel like the reality until you hit a glitch and one is struck with the sense that it is "just a metaphor."
With EM fields, there is a similar problem of language. The metaphors, the poetics, really only go so far. There is a complexity and specificity going on that no metaphor can ever properly describe. Even mathematics, so far as anybody is able to actually wield it, reaches its limits. On the other hand, the programming language demonstrates the critical necessity of metaphor for any process to be meaningful, particularly in the sense of being meaningfully manipulated. If metaphor in poetry is the same thing as metaphor in science, this might make us attentive to the performativity of poetry: what do people accomplish by doing poetry, what processes does it approximate, in what sense is it formulated as a piece of technology.
re:Secularized Universals - 12/12/2006 15:31:51
Posted by alexa Clay
re: platonic appeal
Empiricists often have a distorted sense of self-knowledge and inheritance. {which is to say the experience of intuition is rarely reported, but often rationalized in scientific discovery. Certain scientists (Einstein, Newton, others) were very transparent about the benefits of intuition in forging and "imaging" an objectivity.
Hence, I think the idea of performativity is key. Part of sound empiricism is allowing our sense perception to perform for us; to suspend intentionality. And perhaps this allows us to escape the platonic/ intuition / new age section of the bookstore and enter into a field where the poetics of sense perception are able to encounter the real of scientific specimen.
the microscope is but an invitation.
must run to bartend.
apologies for the scraps!
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