An essay at Daily Nous ponders how philosophy might have been different if R. G. Collingwood hadn't died as young as he did and his prominent position taken over by Gilbert Ryle. In particular, would the Continental/Analytic Divide have developed?
A good essay in the Nation on Wendell Berry as his new volume of collected essays is published.
Even as Berry made himself a student of the flaws of local life, he sought to refashion its patterns of community and culture into something that might repair them. For him, narrowing the horizons of one’s life is the only responsible way of living, since it is how we might actually heal old wounds, clean up our own mess, and give an honest account of ourselves. Throughout his essays, he makes this case for ecological reasons but also for moral ones. Farming on a local scale, he argues, can respond to the nuances of soil and landscape and can rebuild the fertility cycle of dirt to plant to manure to dirt. Ethics also has its limits of scale. “We are trustworthy only so far as we can see,” he insists. The patterns of care that give ethics life also require a specific space. To hold ourselves accountable, we need a palpable sense of what is sustaining us and what good or harm we are doing in return. Community depends on the sympathy and moral imagination that “thrives on contact, on tangible connection.”
In The Guardian, Simon Tisdall writes about how Europe and the US ignored warning signs in the Gulf and even made decisions that have exacerbated the situation, bringing us to the brink of war.
Intelligent Virtue by Julia Annas
Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin
In the Distance by Hernán Díaz
The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Yesterday, I posted the following to Facebook: "Just finished The Overstory by Richard Powers. On first impression I'm thinking it is the greatest and most important American novel since Beloved."
Already, over the weekend as my husband and I were away celebrating our anniversary and I be up early reading the novel on the porch of the B&B, I had said to him, "This may be one of the great American novels."
After posting that, I read some reviews to see what others had to say. Most reviews, of course, were glowing, with a few negative. Nathaniel Rich wrote "He has the courage and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked."
Writing for the Kenyon Review, Aatif Rashid said, "But what if character wasn’t the only thing fiction could be about? What if a novel could be about other things instead—the world, science, ideas, the environment? In his 2018 novel The Overstory, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, Richard Powers demonstrates that a novel doesn’t have to come down to human emotion—and even argues that from a moral point that, given our world’s impending environmental doom, perhaps it shouldn’t."
Here is a big novel of ideas making a moral point. Normally that would sound awful, like reading Bunyan, but in this case it works, in a way that Steinbeck could make it work. And, as the comments above point out, while de-centering the human character. Besides the rare wonderful novel about an animal, like Watership Down, the novel is almost exclusively about human character development, but not here. This novel is about trees and forests. The idea, the moral point, is compelling and persuasive.
All contained within captivating story and told with exquisite prose. Consider this excerpt:
The photos hide everything: the twenties that do not roar for the Hoels. The Depression that cost them 200 acres and sends half the family to Chicago. The radio shows that ruin two of Frank Jr.’s sons for farming. The Hoel death in the South Pacific and the two Hoel guilty survivals. The Deeres and Caterpillars parading through the tractor shed. The barn that burns to the ground one night to the screams of helpless animals. The dozens of joyous weddings, christenings, and graduations. The half-dozen adulteries. The two divorces sad enough to silence songbirds. One son’s unsuccessful campaign for the state legislature. The lawsuit between cousins. The three surprise pregnancies. The protracted Hoel guerrilla war against the local pastor and half the Lutheran parish. The handiwork of heroin and Agent Orange that comes home with nephews from ‘Nam. The hushed up incest, the lingering alcoholism, a daughter’s elopement with the high school English teacher. The cancers (breast, colon, lung), the heart disease, the degloving of a worker’s fist in a grain augur, the car death of a cousin’s child on prom night. The countless tons of chemicals with names like Rage, Roundup, and Firestorm, the patented seeds engineered to produce sterile plants. The fiftieth wedding anniversary in Hawaii and its disastrous aftermath. The dispersal of retirees to Arizona and Texas. The generation of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photo’s frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early-middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
This is the sort of novel that might just change a reader. On Sunday as my husband and I hiked through a forest in Missouri, I kept telling him tidbits of the novel, for I was seeing the forest in a new way.
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The Sovereignty of Good by Iris MurdochThis summer I preached a sermon series inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver. One of the key features of the spiritual life Oliver recommends is paying attention.
So I enjoyed reading Iris Murdoch advocating attention as key to the moral life in her essay "The Idea of Perfection." Here are some excerpts of her essay:
I have used the word 'attention,' which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
***
But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.
***
But I would suggest that at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one's eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.
This article explores how Brexit and now Boris Johnson's actions, have raised serious questions about the British constitution, questions most people had thought settled. In essence they are fundamental questions about the difference between representative and direct democracy.
This author discusses the paradox of Peanuts, child characters who aren't like most real kids and who are also subjected to cruelty, and yet children enjoyed the comic. An excerpt:
What I took away from Schulz is that life is hard. People are difficult at best, unfathomable at worst. Justice is a foreign tongue. Happiness can vaporize in the thin gap between a third and fourth panel, and the best response to all that is to laugh and keep moving, always ready to duck.
A lovely poem about small kindnesses.
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George HaskellVictor Parrington gives this description of Roger Williams's idea of the social compact, a description I think is helpful in understanding the democratic idea of government:
But unlike the fiction assumed by Hobbes and Locke, this was no suppositious contract between ruler and ruled in prehistoric times, but present and actual, entered into between the several members of a free community for their common governance; nor on the other hand, like Burke's irrevocable compact, was it an unyielding constitution or fundamental law; but flexible, responsive to changing conditions, continually modified to meet present needs. It is no other than a mutual agreement, arrived at frankly by discussion and compromise, to live together in a political union, organizing the life of the commonwealth in accordance with nature, reason, justice, and expediency.
Actually, reading that description, I think of Rorty.
I've been reading Vernon Parrington's 1927 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Colonial Mind and today read his treatment of Roger Williams, which was a delight to read, as Parrington clearly is enamored of Williams. Here are some descriptions he gives:
"Democrat and Christian, the generation to which he belongs is not yet born, and all his life he remained a stranger amongst men."
"An intellectual barometer, fluctuating with every change in the rising storm of revolution, he came transporting hither the new and disturbant doctrines of the Leveler, loosing wild foxes with fire-brands to ravage the snug fields of the Presbyterian Utopia."
"He was a rebel against all the stupidities that interposed a barrier betwixt men and the fellowship of their dreams."
"He was an adventurous pioneer, surveying the new fields of thought laid open by the Reformation."
"He was the incarnation of Protestant individualism."
"One of the most notable democratic thinkers that the English race has produced."
"The truest Christian amongst many who sincerely desired to be Christian."