I enjoyed reading Gregory Wolfe\u2019s\u00a0Beauty Will Save the World<\/a><\/em>, but I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s a book best read straight through, as I did. \u00a0The second best way to read it probably reading the first section, in which Wolfe lays out his thesis, and then dipping in and out of his profiles of writers and artists over a few months, with frequent breaks to read some of the works he\u2019s discussing. \u00a0The\u00a0best<\/em> way to enjoy the book is probably not to read it at all, but to have Wolfe over for a dinner party and then stay up until dawn talking.<\/p>\n There\u2019s enough material for several dinner parties, in fact, so let me just jump into a passage about the intellectual history of knowledge:<\/p>\n To the ancients, reason found its highest expression in the contemplation of being \u2014 the order of the cosmos. \u00a0One of Kirk\u2019s intellectual heroes, Josef Pieper, described the medieval understanding of human thought. \u00a0According to the\u00a0scholastics\u00a0 Pieper writes, the\u00a0ratio<\/em>, or discursive, logical faculty is paralleled by the intellectus<\/em>, the\u00a0intuitive\u00a0perception of reality. \u00a0\u201cThe mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the\u00a0contemplative\u00a0vision of the intellectus<\/em>, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it\u00a0conceives\u00a0that which it sees\u201d (Leisure: The Basis of Culture<\/em>).<\/p>\n But the advent of modernity caused a shift in the understanding of human thought. \u00a0The nominalists, and later, Descartes, denied the reality of the\u00a0intellectus<\/em> and elevated the\u00a0ratio<\/em> to preeminent status. \u00a0The moderns began in doubt, or skepticism, to use Lilla\u2019s word, about reality, and proceed to treat reason (ratio<\/em>) itself as the ground of being. \u00a0Instead of Man the Knower, we have Man the Thinker.<\/p>\n The modern concept of reason is, at root, ideological. \u00a0Reason, instead of the faculty by which we achieve connatural knowledge of reality, becomes the means by which we construct systems that are imposed on reality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was pretty interested in this active\/constructive vs passive\/receptive dichotomy, since I\u2019ve come to think of science as much more in the\u00a0intellectus<\/em> mode since I\u2019ve gotten into reading Less Wrong (what\u2019s true is what\u2019s there to be interacted with<\/a>, etc). \u00a0I think of exercising my reason as the discipline of paring away biases and sharpening my senses so I can be more receptive to the reality of the world that surrounds me. \u00a0(I could add that developing my character is paring away sinful indifference so I can be more receptive to the beatific vision). \u00a0Attaching a sense of\u00a0ownership<\/em> to your ideas and insights is common, but likely to lead you astray.<\/p>\n Wolfe\u2019s book put me in mind of another modes-of-thinking dichotomy. \u00a0Science is sometimes defined in opposition to art as the field where no one is indispensible. \u00a0Shoot Einstein, and sooner or later, someone will come up with relativity, because it\u2019s embedded in the world, waiting to be interacted with. \u00a0Shoot Hawthorne, and no one will write\u00a0The Scarlet Letter<\/em> (or, much later, film\u00a0Easy A<\/em>). \u00a0Reading Wolfe\u2019s book throws some of those assumptions into doubt.<\/p>\n Art has the power to move us because it touches on some external truth. \u00a0To put it in math analogy terms, if Truth is an n-dimensional object, art shows us projections of Truth into lower-than-n dimensional spaces, and give us flashes of the larger structure. \u00a0To stick with the more traditional parable, artists are like the blind men examining the elephant<\/a>. \u00a0Lose Hawthorne, and you\u2019ve lost the particular quirk or genius that informed his snapshot of the whole, so your model may become less rich or detailed, but other artists may end up filling the gaps in some unexpected way.<\/p>\n At first, this may sound like it lowers the status of artists. \u00a0None of them are necessary<\/em>, and they can only show us one thing, albeit from different angles. \u00a0But I find this reframing invigorating. \u00a0Artists aren\u2019t simple creators who might go anywhere<\/em> (to Baker Street or to Baghdad<\/a>); they are explorers and pioneers. \u00a0They are called to\u00a0give us more to see<\/a>. \u00a0Great artists\u00a0are operating under constraint, but that shouldn\u2019t be seen as a privation; that\u2019s the price of having a telos<\/em>.<\/p>\n Wolfe\u2019s book is meditative and inviting, but it\u2019s also a call to arms. \u00a0He is writing against the conservative pessimism that writes the culture off as lost so that it has an excuse to cut itself off from the world. \u00a0But if artists are drawing out attention to what is real (or creeping up on it sideways), speaking to a weird culture is only like learning an unfamiliar language. \u00a0The truth is still there, and it has some way of being expressed, it only remains to discover how.<\/p>\n Our vision can even be expanded by artists moving along the\u00a0via negativa<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0In the\u00a0Sondheim discussion<\/a>, I found that\u00a0the grotesque love story in\u00a0Passion<\/em>\u00a0drew our attention to its insufficiency<\/a>\u00a0and ultimately deepened our understanding of the ideal. \u00a0If you want to go a little more Canon,\u00a0Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/a>\u00a0is your gal. \u00a0And quite recently, I found Joss Whedon\u2019s\u00a0The Cabin in the Woods<\/em><\/a>\u00a0to be powerfully affecting because the nihilism of the film made \u00a0me intermittently\u00a0queasy for several days after seeing the show.<\/p>\n I once took a very satisfying computer science class from a professor who opened class by saying \u201cThere\u2019s no point in learning a new programming language if it doesn\u2019t change the way you think.\u201d \u00a0A great artist uses and subverts our native tongue and culture to teach us a new way to think, so we can express a thought our old system was not large enough to contain. \u00a0Further up and further in!<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.isi.org\/(S(xsw3gl452behdhykaaa5tb45))\/images\/books\/covers\/large\/471.jpg\" "\\"beauty")
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