Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The world stage ...

Why do we assume that reality is best explained in terms of its ingredients? Bread is made from flour, water and yeast, but that is far from being the whole story of the warm, fragrant loaf one slices and slathers with butter. An analysis of ink and paper will tell you nothing about Bleak House or any other book. Nor will the carpentry of the Globe reveal anything about Richard II. Knowledge of the phone tells you nothing of the message your girlfriend left on your answering machine.

Ancient peoples did not personify the wind and the rain, the sea and the sky. Rather they experienced — as so-called primitive peoples still do — the world as a place inhabited by beings with personalities. We like to regard pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales and Heraclitus as proto-scientists, but anyone who has read the latter’s Fragments knows that he has more in common with Lao-tse than with Galileo. Earth, air, fire and water, I suspect, were not thought of as one or another primary substance of being but rather as apt ultimate metaphors of being.

C.S. Lewis, before he became a Christian, thought that myths were “lies breathed through silver.” His friend J.R.R. Tolkien disagreed completely. To him, myths were true: “Just as language is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.”

The pre-Socratics were engaged not in science, or even philosophy, but in a mythopoesis grounded in an essentially personalist view of reality. Science is less at odds with religion than it is with this pre-scientific personalism (though religion itself, in its tendency to legalism and doctrinal rigidity, can also be at odds with it).

Mythopoesis approaches reality from the other end, as it were, not in terms of ingredients or instruments, but in terms of product and message. In other words, it sees reality as a cosmic drama. In this excellent post, Mark Vernon says that “the problem for Christianity is that it is so tied to the person of Jesus.” This is so if you regard the “history” in the Gospels from a strictly positivist angle, but not if it is “true myth.”

As the poet Muriel Rukeyser (who knew a bit about science - she wrote a biography of J. Willard Gibbs) put it: "The world is made of stories, not of atoms."


Here is something else that touches on metaphor:



3 comments:

  1. Maybe it's the discoveries that excite us, the shock of the new. As one gets older, if one remains aware, we reach certain conclusions about how and why we behave, the vagrities of the weather, the passage of time and the invisible threads that bind our society.

    But in science, there's so much more to learn and discover, so much weirdness out there, especially when you enter the quantum. Not only is it as weird as we can think, it's weirder than we can think. Can you look at a picture of the cradle of galaxies, taken by the Hubble, and not wonder what the heck you're seeing?

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  2. Heaven forfend that I should give the impression that I do not appreciate science! I like knowing what ingredients to gather to make bread. My point is simply that a pure analysis of things - breaking them down into their constituent parts, while it may teach all sorts of things that are not merely interesting but also quite useful, may still not tell us anything about the meaning of those things. That can only be arrived at, I would suggest, at the level of the things themselves.

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  3. Heaven forfend that I would suggest such a thing. After skimming Roger's essay, my thoughts may be unrefined, and there's a lot of good in all this to consider.

    I'll have to check "The Ascent of Man" book when I get home. Bronowski, if I remember right, had something cogent to say about the proper relationship between humanity and science, that science unchecked by consideration for humanity leads to catastrophes such as the Final Solution.

    The conclusion (for me anyway) is that we must remind ourselves, no matter where our search for truth takes us, that we must not forget our humanity. It leads us to the same place as that insane professor who blithely calls for the destruction of billions of people through the Ebola virus.

    Hmm, maybe my critical thinking skills need a tuneup. :)

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