June 20, 2005
Expansiveness
A scan thru Arts and Letters Daily leads me back to the "Edge", a site I haven't visited since I first started surfing the web. It's good to find it again.
I like to think that the shallower aspects of the intellectual scene of the last century have played themselves out. I mean in particular the assaults on objectivity and rationality, which often take the form of attacks on science. There's nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves?this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There's something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences. It's not, of course, that novels will all address scientific themes?that would be ridiculously restrictive. But I hope that the spirit of expansiveness that's associated with the pursuit of scientific truth can get infused into the arts and humanities.And later on in the piece:
...It's as if a painter produces a picture that has something to say about the nature of beauty, perhaps even something to say about why beauty moves us....Posted by Dennis at June 20, 2005 2:22 PM
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