We don’t hear sounds, Heidegger said. That’s an abstraction. What we hear are things making sounds – “the creaking wagon, or the motor cycle . . . the column on the mark, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling” (quoted in Jonathan Ree, I See A Voice, 42). Jonathan Ree demurs, and points to the grammar of sight and sound to make his point. On the one hand, “light and its sources are not, as a rule, the objects... Read more
Jonathan Ree’s delightful I See A Voiceglances at Enlightenment-era efforts to work out analogies between color and musical harmonies. Newton’s Optics was key. He argued that “just as all different tones can be located on a single scale running from the highest to the lowest pitch of audible sound, so all the different colours must have their place on a single skill of visible light.” Newton first discovered five colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet) but later added orange and indigo,... Read more
Belief in God is natural, argues Justin Barrett in Born Believers. His is not a theological or philosophical argument about natural knowledge, but a conclusion from interviews, surveys, and other psycho-sociological evidence. Which makes atheism rather an anomaly, Barrett things, and a comparatively rare one. After surveying the factors that, statistically speaking, correlate with atheism, he offers seven steps toward confident atheism (219-20): First, “Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds or a tendency to not use psychological or social reasoning.”... Read more
Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (The Savage in Judaism) traces most every form of impurity in ancient Israel back to issues of fertility. I don’t buy that overall, and he recognizes that it can’t cover everything (see his discussion of menstruation. 177-94, where he uncovers several overlapping schemas). The argument works well, however, for circumcision. He points out that the covenant of circumcision comes in the midst of a promise of an abundant seed (Genesis 17:17; by his count, fertility comes up seven... Read more
Amos Wilder’s Theopoetic, recently reprinted in Wipf & Stock’s Amos Wilder LIbrary, is a plea for a renewal of imagination, written with the taut elegance of a poet. Writing in 1976, Wilder saw himself fighting on two fronts – against the utilitarian spirit of American Protestantism on the one hand, and against an anarchist aesthetic on the other. A self-described “traditionalist” who aimed above all to revive biblical tradition, he urged Christians to be open to currents in contemporary arts that... Read more
Amos Wilder’s Theopoetic, recently reprinted in Wipf & Stock’s Amos Wilder LIbrary, is a plea for a renewal of imagination, written with the taut elegance of a poet. Writing in 1976, Wilder saw himself fighting on two fronts – against the utilitarian spirit of American Protestantism on the one hand, and against an anarchist aesthetic on the other. A self-described “traditionalist” who aimed above all to revive biblical tradition, he urged Christians to be open to currents in contemporary arts that... Read more
At the 1993 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Marshall Sahlins was invited to provide “after-dinner entertainment.” His anthropological stand-up routine has been published as Waiting for Foucault, Still, most recently in 2002 by Sahlins’s own Prickly Paradigm Press. Sahlins thinks that atheism is the solution to all the world’s problems. He is an enemy on many fronts, but he is a highly amusing enemy. “Surely,” Sahlins says, “it is a cruel post-modernist fate that requires the... Read more
Nabokov didn’t much like Dostoevsky. What interests him in literature is “enduring art and individual genius,” and from this viewpoint Dostoevsky is mediocre: “with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between” (Lectures on Russian Literature, 68). His characters are mentally unbalanced, his writing repetitious, his psychology incredible. He is a sentimentalist who puts good people in impossible situations and wrings all the pathos he can out of it. Nabokov doesn’t like the way Dostoevsky’s... Read more
Consciousness enters the world and the stones remain stones and the sun the sun. Still existence becomes completely different when consciousness arises, Bakhtin argues in Speech Genres. This happens become the coming of consciousness is the coming of “the witness and the judge” (137). “A stone is still stony and the sun still sunny, but the even of existence as a whole (unfinalized) becomes completely different because a new and major character in this even appears for the first time on... Read more
Diane Thompson concludes her essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition with this superb description of the place of God’s Word in the words of Dostoevsky’s novels, and his characters: “Dostoevsky’s feeling for the dynamic aspect of the Logos was exceptionally strong, as was his gift for making it a living rejoinder in the great dialogue of his works. He never seals off the biblical word from other words, from the life depicted in his works, but makes everyone, from deniers... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In