About Here and Me

 

"The refined human intellect deplores the compartmentalization of its world."

I wish I could attribute the above statement to somebody auspicious, but in truth it rolled off my fingers spontaneously once in an internet conversation.  It is perhaps a bit presumptuous to put myself in that category, but nonetheless it is the instinct that guides these pages.

This blog has no focus.  Or it tries to focus on everything at once.  Take your pick.  It is a sort of intellectual journal of whatever I happen to be reading and pondering at the time.  Over the years I have discovered that no matter how sincere a thought or feeling is, I can never express it as well privately as when I am forced to prepare it for public display.  Perhaps it is ego, perhaps it is the act of putting intuitions into comprehensible structure, perhaps it is some inexplicable quirk of my personality, but there you have it.  

Running underneath the purely cerebral exploration, there is also a motivation: I want to fix our civilization.  We live in a time of unparalleled change; the old world has dissolved and the problem before us is nothing short of the creation of an acceptable new global worldview.  As of now we have no unified outlook that brings together a science that pierces the world, an art to interpret the experience, a morality to guide behavior, and a spirituality to grant the entire endeavor purpose.  They are all scattered in pieces, each unto its own house, and so limited in their life-giving capacity.

In order to accomplish such a feat it requires a digesting synthesis of every realm of human knowledge and experience.  This is the ultimate origin of the eclecticism here and why I do not even attempt to confine my posts to a single field but rather let them expand as they may.  Everything overlaps and I want to try and weave it all together.  Yes, this is audacious, but I think anybody who really feels the pull cannot help but attempt it.  We should never be made embarrassed to be part of the great search.  For myself, then, there are a few guiding traits on this journey:

1. I am a biologist.  It is my field of training, but also much more than that.  It represents a certain style of organic thinking, of change happening, of history mattering, of chance and inexorable force at work at the same time.  Where categories are recognized to be arbitrary-but-meaningful, and where variation is as much signal as noise.  And finally, I believe it is reaching a mature enough point to begin to shed light on portions of our own nature as well and help us answer what we truly are.
2. I am a moralist.  To my mind there is such a thing as living better and living worse, and am of the attitude that to discover the good life is a prime function of philosophy.  In this way my metaphysics and epistemology are really in the service of my ethics and aesthetics, rather than the other way around.  I want to understand so that I may be good.
3. I am a "spiritualist."  There needs to be a better word for this, for I do not believe in seances or a particular view of the soul.  Rather, I affirm with everything in me that there is a spiritual, you might say holy, dimension to our existence, and that to touch it is to find Truth.  What this entails will be the subject of many essays.
4. I am an optimist.  One of the great enemies of any progress is a loss of faith that anything has or ever will be accomplished.  It is particularly vogue at this time to indulge in cynicism about our chances.  However, this is just a defensive psychological barrier, one that is no more rooted in reality than utter naivete, and there is too much to be done to so burden one's self.

Finally, as a last portion of my introduction, I want to orient this blog within a bit of my own personal history.  I am new to much of this.  For most of my life I was a rationalist, not in the philosophical sense but in a more pragmatic, scientific one.  I figured that experiments would figure it all out, and that it would ultimately conform to a singular vision of reason.  I had certain naturalistic spiritual leanings, but they were vague, and my attitude toward art was wholly dismissive as entertainment or irrational emotion.

Then from 2017 into 2018 I had an experience not unlike John Stewart Mill's when he encountered Romantic art; that what he had thought he had in his neat little system was, in fact, not wholly sufficient, and it left him with less certainty in his utilitarianism than most believe.  My trigger was something different, but the result was the same, and it has only been since then that I have been in earnest engaging with many of the topics that now fill this blog. 

It has now been a few years since I began to root around.  I am aware that I am an eager novice in nearly every field, but that is okay.  If one doesn't have confidence (or enthusiasm) to try then nothing will happen.  I am hoping to leverage my own ignorance for insight as well: I am coming upon this later in life than most people who take it seriously, and as a result with a different training and emphasis.  Perhaps this will help me see some things others have not, and if I make simple mistakes in the process then they will be mine as well.  It cannot be so very discouraging when the whole endeavor is so enlivening, enlightening, and elevating.  

I wish to close here, then, with a pair of quotes.  The first is from Sir Kenneth Clark, a man from whom I have learned a great deal and will forever be indebted to for his efforts to educate the rest of us.  He is standing in front of Raphael's School of Athens:

"I suppose that Rafael's frescoes, as works of art, aren't all that easy to enjoy.  Even in the 18th century, when Rafael stood at the summit of the established Olympus, Sir Joshua Reynolds warned young artists not to be disappointed by their first visit.  But to go on looking and looking until they finally understood the restrained but perfectly balanced language in which he expresses his ideas.  I've tried to follow his advice over the last forty years.  And, I promise you, it's been worth the effort."

The second requires a brief explanation.  It is drawn from my own writings on the relatively obscure, but thoroughly profound anime series, Gunslinger Girl.  There is no way to sufficiently summarize it, except to say that it is a genuine piece of art, a meditation on unmitigated suffering and the affirmation of something beyond it.  It is worth every thoughtful person's time to view it and think on the final image of its opening sequence and what it says of the Grand Search:

It was not impossible, for she was the sky.