Sunday 16 April 2023
Time Stands Still
Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science.
This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.
George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
It’s an old social division this one. There are those who understand the importance of experience and those who only partially understand it. The latter are those who stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.
By poetry, Santayana meant the seductive and beguiling art of the wordsmith misapplied to social and political life. Unsurprisingly, people with a practical outlook seem to value practical experience of the real world instead. The art of the wordsmith they leave to others, which has never been a good idea.
Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. In our day they are only partially welcome and understood too. The green revolution could almost be described as an attempt to run the world on poetry. Time stands still, especially for progressives.
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3 comments:
Science, properly done, is probably always going to deflate the yearnings of those who seek the transcendent, the numinous, the beautiful feelings of awe.
The recent times have seen a greater and greater movement away from reality into warm fuzzy feelings. I can't help feeling that the warm fuzzies are like Wily Coyote... one day they are going to look down and realise that they have run far beyond the edge of the cliff. Gravity is a bitch.
I'm not sure what he means by "experience" here. Presumably poetic and impractical types have "experience" as well, but of a different type and devoid of useful abstracted principles. Maybe he means something like "accumulated experience", and the ability to learn from it.
DJ - that does seem to be the problem - science deflates all kinds of yearnings and feelings. I sometimes wonder if the issue became more acute once attempts were made to analyse human behaviour scientifically because that would include the behaviour of elites.
Sam - I think that's what he does mean. Experience stemming more from our direct, accumulated observations of the natural world including ourselves and other people rather than abstractions which take us into worlds which are not natural and not real.
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