‘Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can’t live long on the heights.’
‘No,’ said Merry. ‘I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.’
— Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1139
We should also remember that the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalizations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 168
“The Elves may fear the Dark Lord, and they may fly before him, but never again will they listen to him or serve him. And here in Rivendell there live still some of his chief foes: the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas. They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.'
‘I thought that I saw a white figure that shone and did not grow dim like the others. Was that Glorfindel then?'
‘Yes, you saw him for a moment as he is upon the other side: one of the mighty of the Firstborn.’
— Gandalf and Frodo in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 290
“[Dynamic] relationships are not only more important than the entities related, but… ontologically prior to them — so that what we call ‘things’ arise out of the web of interconnectedness, not the web out of the things.”
— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1224
It is the normal practice of scientists to ignore evidence which appears incompatible with the accepted system of scientific knowledge, in the hope that it will eventually prove false or irrelevant. The wise neglect of such evidence prevents scientific laboratories fron being plunged forever into a turmoil of incoherent and futile efforts to verify false allegations. But there is, unfortunately, no rule by which to avoid the risk of occasionally disregarding thereby true evidence which conflicts (or seems to conflict) with the current teachings of science. During the eighteenth century the French Academy of Science stubbornly denied the evidence for the fall of meteorites, which seemed massively obvious to everybody else. Their opposition to the superstitious beliefs which popular tradition attached to such heavenly intervention blinded them to the facts in question.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 138
Before making a purchase, my wife and I make a habit of asking these five questions. Is it…
needful?
beautiful?
convivial?
wasteful?
simple?
Obviously, most of these terms are positive, one way or another, though #4 is an obvious exception — the answer you hope for there is “no” whereas the others ideally would return “yes.” Nevertheless, there are no hard and fast rules here. Some things truly are needful, and for the exact same reason they are needful, they are inevitably wasteful. Some things are convivial, and that redeems their wastefulness. Some things are beautiful because they are not simple; some things are beautiful because they are simple. (Few wasteful things are truly beautiful, though I imagine there are exceptions.) Many needful things are not beautiful, convivial, or simple, and that is okay.
I own plenty of things that satisfy just one or two of these criteria; several that qualify for three; a few that manage to swing four out of the five. Do I own anything that is needful, beautiful, convivial, and simple all at once — and not wasteful, to boot? If a musical instrument can qualify as “simple,” and if music-making is “needful” (as I take it to be!), then my viola does. Maybe nothing else.
This column / book review by N. S. Lyons is worthwhile — as much for its ultimate affirmation that this may be “neither the best nor the worst of times, but simply the time we have been given” as anything else. There is one feature I find odd. Toward the end of the piece, Lyons cites Jordan Peterson’s recent proclamation that we are living on the cusp of (or indeed in the early moments of) the Counter-Enlightenment. He then goes on to cite Oswald Spengler’s suggestion in The Decline of the West that the collapse of the “age of theory” might give way to a “sweeping re-Christianization” (Lyons’s term, not Spengler’s). The effect is to suggest that “the Counter-Enlightenment” and the “sweeping re-Christianization” will be, if not perfectly co-constitutive, at least a 90% overlapping Venn diagram.
But, as Lyons (and Peterson) surely know, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments before, and likely will be again before Enlightened modernity has run its course. Probably a majority of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers active since 1800 have been, in some sense, Counter-Enlightenment figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler (!), Scheler, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault are the first ten names that come to my mind, and obviously there are others — Wittgenstein, anyone? (Crack open the bibliography of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things for many more!) The interwar German philosophical coterie of which Heidegger was the most prominent figure even seems to have self-consciously identified as a new Counter-Enlightenment school. None of these figures, whatever their individual religious beliefs, can really be said to have contributed to any sort of sweeping re-Christianization, though in my estimation some are more readily appropriated for the tasks of Christian philosophy and theology (Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and — in a roundabout way — Nietzsche) than others (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Foucault, and probably Derrida too, whatever Jamie Smith says).
And — to turn the screw further — what could be more quintessentially Enlightenment in its underlying attitude than, say, a project to refound all of metaphysics from first principles? Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it. That is because the Enlightenment is not a philosophical school — Wolffian deductive rationalism, Kantian transcendental idealism, Benthamite utilitarianism, or whatever it is that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have in common — so much as a set of postures, habits, and — for lack of a better word — vibes. An extremely persistent and evolutionarily successful set of postures, habits, and vibes, no less, which has spent the better part of three hundred years displaying an extraordinary capacity to adapt and co-opt opposition. The Enlightenment mold, it seems, cannot be shattered from within: now that Kant’s “sapere aude!” has become conventional wisdom, anyone who self-consciously tries to break with it is still, by definition, daring (in some measure) to use their own understanding. Once one has grown up and been educated under the plausibility structures of post-Enlightenment modernity, it is extremely difficult to shake them off and abandon them entirely. (See also: theologically educated Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism.) Neither can the dialectic of Enlightenment be simply ignored; its embodiment in modern technologies and technological society shows it is almost no use deciding you are simply uninterested in the dialectic, since the dialectic remains just as rapaciously interested in you. The rise of a purportedly Counter-Enlightenment movement in Western public life neither guarantees a sweeping re-Christianization of society nor promises a breaking out of the Enlightenment mold.
An oddity of philosophical / theological history: the great minds, whom we now remember, often developed their ideas in contradistinction from, not principally a preceding great mind who founded a school, but that school’s later and lesser lights who took their founder’s insight too far — whom we do not now remember.
[Despite] our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true — that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there — something to be true to. Assuming there is something there to know implies that some understandings will inevitably be better than others. And since each hemisphere provides a different understanding of it, it is perfectly coherent — and indeed necessary — to ask which is superior. (The validity of the question is not affected by the observation that we can, and may be best to, use both.) If a pilot is flying blind and has two navigation systems to rely on, each of which, though they differ, provides significant information, the criterion for having to prefer one over the other is clear: following which one is less likely to lead to a crash. Or again, as a piece of music cannot be experienced without a player, who inflects what it is that we hear, there is nonetheless such a thing as a better or worse performance, one that is more or less faithful to the potential enshrined in the piece — a potential that is, essentially, the piece of music, and becomes realised in every true performance, The arbiter, then, in either case, is the experience of the whole embodied person as he or she responds to a more, or less, accurate — a richer, or poorer — account of the world.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1:379–80.