[1]Perspective in the Age of Opinion: Timely Wisdom from a Century Ago:
"A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing
except everything."
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I have worried, and continue to worry, that we have relinquished the
reflective [2]telescopic perspective for the reactionary microscopic
perspective. When we surrender the grandest, often unanswerable
questions to the false certitudes of the smallest, we lose something
essential of our humanity. When we aim the spears of those
certitudes at one another, more interested in being right than in
understanding, we lose something essential. How did we get to a
place where to have an opinion is more culturally rewarded than to
have a question? Hannah Arendt admonished against this dehumanizing
loss decades ago in her trailblazing [3]Gifford lecture on the life
of the mind: "To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and
cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the
ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art
but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which
every civilization is founded."
How to guard against the decivilizing tyranny of unthinking opinion
over perspectival thought is what the English poet, essayist,
philosopher, dramatist, journalist, and art critic G. K. Chesterton
(May 29, 1874-June 14, 1936) - an imperfect man, to be sure, but
also a brilliant one belonging to that rare species of truth-seers -
addressed in the opening chapter of his 1905 essay collection
[4]Heretics ([5]free ebook | [6]public library).
Writing decades before philosopher Simone Weil [7]contemplated the
dangers of our self-righteous for and against, Chesterton - who
feasted on paradox and employed a style of rhetoric he called
"uncommon sense," subverting popular arguments to reveal their
deficiencies - writes:
In former days… the man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of
being right… The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being
right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one
thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for
whether they are philosophically right.
[…]
It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to
another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree
in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in
the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in
its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd
and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the
habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter.
Chesterton laments that in the exponential narrowing of focus toward
more and more hard-held opinions about smaller and smaller
dimensions of life, we have increasingly lost perspective - that
telescopic perspective - of the largest, most enduring, most
important questions of existence. He writes:
Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself
is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint.
We will have no generalizations… A man's opinion on tramcars
matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all
things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million
objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for
if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters
- except everything.
Chesterton - who vehemently and publicly opposed eugenics when
Britain was passing the Mental Deficiency Act and considering
sterilizing the mentally ill - admonishes against the perils of
surrendering the grand perspective. Noting that "the human brain is
a machine for coming to conclusions," he considers the two great and
opposite evils of bigotry and fanaticism - "bigotry which is a too
great vagueness and fanaticism which is a too great concentration" -
and asserts that the only thing worse than both, "more firm than a
bigot and more terrible than a fanatic," is "a man with a definite
opinion." What we lose by electing opinion over perspective, he
argues, is cosmic truth:
When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their
idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be
made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every
one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that
cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one
says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the
latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for
eating.
[…]
But there are some people, nevertheless - and I am one of them - who
think that the most practical and important thing about a man is
still his view of the universe.
In a sentiment of chilling relevance more than a century later, he
adds:
This repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a
race of small men in politics… Our modern politicians claim the
colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too
practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral.
This tyranny of definite opinions about the smallest questions, at
the expense of broad perspective on the largest, effects a kind of
worship of blind practicality over philosophy - the field most
directly tasked with the seeing of truth. Chesterton writes:
It may be that there have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals
that have from time to time perplexed mankind. But assuredly there
has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleading as the
ideal of practicality… Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that
kind of worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking
of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause
or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in
anything long enough to make it succeed. The opportunist politician
is like a man who should abandon billiards because he was beaten at
billiards, and abandon golf because he was beaten at golf. There is
nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous
importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that
fails like success.
Six decades later, John F. Kennedy would hold up [8]art as the
social corrective for politics. But art can only be a corrective,
Chesterton argues, if it manages not to succumb to the same
opinion-constricted narrowing of view that paralyzes and corrupts
politics:
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise
enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to
produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond
it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content
with nothing except everything.
In a sobering allegory, he illustrates this deeply damaging loss of
perspective at the altar of opinion and petty practicality:
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,
let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to
pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages,
is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner
of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the
value of Light. If Light be in itself good - " At this point he is
somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the
lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about
congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as
things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled
the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some
because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness,
because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a
lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash
municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something.
And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So,
gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there
comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and
that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we
might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the
dark.
Complement this particular portion of [9]Heretics, much of which has
stood the test of time and opinion in the century-some since, with
René Descartes on [10]opinion vs. reason and the key to a wakeful
mind, John Dewey on [11]the art of critical reflection in the age of
instant opinions, and Susan Sontag on [12]the danger of opinions and
the conscience of words.
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My original entry is here: [18]Perspective in the Age of Opinion:
Timely Wisdom from a Century Ago. It posted Wed, 21 Nov 2018 14:35:14
+0000.
Filed under: philosophy,
References
1.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/brainpickings/rss/~3/JDumPo8iSZ0/
2.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/21/reflection/
3.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/16/hannah-arendt-the-life-of-the-mind/
4.
https://www.amazon.com/Heretics-Centennial-G-K-Chesterton/dp/1449599435/?tag=braipick-20
5.
https://www.amazon.com/Heretics-G-Gilbert-Keith-Chesterton-ebook/dp/B004UJM7QW/?tag=braipick-20
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http://www.worldcat.org/title/heretics/oclc/987356986&referer=brief_results
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https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/31/simone-weil-abolition-of-all-political-parties/
8.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/01/jfk-amherst-speech/
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https://www.amazon.com/Heretics-Centennial-G-K-Chesterton/dp/1449599435/?tag=braipick-20
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https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/31/descartes-reason-opinion/
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https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/18/how-we-think-john-dewey/
12.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/19/susan-sontag-the-conscience-of-words/
13.
https://www.brainpickings.org/donate/
14.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=de29ba37e7&e=b2dbad0745
15.
https://www.brainpickings.org/newsletter/
16.
https://www.brainpickings.org/
17.
https://twitter.com/prjorgensen/status/1065253399921418241
18.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2329
