Martha Nussbaum:

The vine-tree image, standing near the poem’s end… confronts us with a deep dilemma in the poet’s situation, which is also ours. It displays the thorough intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made, that are present in this and in any human life.… Human excellence is seen, in Pindar’s poem and pervasively in the Greek poetic tradition, as something whose very nature it is to be in need, a growing thing in the world that could not be made invulnerable and keep its own peculiar fineness.

The crucial question for us:

To what extent can we distinguish between what is up to the world and what is up to us, when assessing a human life? To what extent must we insist on finding these distinctions, if we are to go on praising as we praise?

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Currently Reading: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy by Martha C. Nussbaum 📚

We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change.

In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.

(Extended quote here.)

Finished reading: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine 📚

The resonance overflows. I will be revisiting this one, and hopefully posting more about it. One thing that kept coming to mind thoughout the book was an essay I wrote for a global health class in 2020: What kind of expertise shall we look to? For me, it’s never been Hans Rosling. It’s Paul Farmer!

Currently Reading: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine 📚

People are going to have to stop setting the bar so high with these killer introductions.

Finished reading: Love’s Braided Dance by Norman Wirzba 📚

The introductory essay was excellent.

The way of hope is inspired by an acknowledgment of what can be called the miracle or grace of life itself, the realization that your own life and the lives of others are the never-again-to-be-repeated embodied expressions of life’s primordial, gifted goodness. Affirmation of the love-worthiness of this world is the spark that ignites a hopeful way of being because it calls people to give their love to the world in return. When love is given, the prospect, but not the guarantee, of a better future emerges.

The book mostly dropped off after that, at least for me. But Wirzba does bring it back toward the end of the book. If I get a chance, I may try to say some more about the final chapter. But don’t hold your breath. I’m easily distracted, and lately have the attention span of a

Currently Reading: Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis by Norman Wirzba 📚

A logic governs the way of hope. It is difficult to articulate because the way of hope is not linear, systematic, or smooth. It does not follow twelve neatly defined steps that, when taken in succession, lead a person into a hopeful manner of being. Instead, it is often meandering and circuitous as people attempt to live faithfully and mercifully with each other. False starts, improper motivations, and harmful choices, but also felicitous decisions, serendipitous encounters, and enduring commitments, often reveal themselves only along the way. This is why this book’s chapters take the form of essays that explore paths into what I take to be hopes animating logic. My aim is to narrate the experiences and journeys of various people so that the heart of a hopeful way of being can come into view.

These chapters, then, are complementary sketches that together draw a picture of what a hopeful life looks like, or, more exactly, they offer a series of improvisational movements that make a compelling theatrical performance in which hope appears. As people go through life, what do they encounter, what should they accept, how should they respond, and to what end? Hope registers as the desire to celebrate and further the loveliness and love-worthiness of this life. When we live a hopeful life, love animates what we do and why we do it.

An excellent book haul this week 📚

Currently waiting to dive into: The Uses of Idolatry by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

I’m waiting because a) I have a few projects around the house that require the attention I’d prefer to give to reading, and b) Cavanaugh’s gracious voice in his attitude toward politics and culture is one that I have a feeling I’m going to need a lot more of after November 5th.

But I couldn’t resist reading the intro a couple weeks ago.

I want, in a way, to present idolatry in a sympathetic light. As St. Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, their proclivity to worship is evidence that they are groping for God, and may still find God. Idolatry critique helps to overcome the binary of believers/nonbelievers by showing that we all believe in something; we are spontaneously worshiping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful. Following an invisible God is hard for material creatures, so we fixate on things that are closer to hand. Idolatry critique applies equally to those who profess belief in God and those who don’t. We all worship, and we all worship badly, to greater and lesser degrees. Idolatry critique is therefore best understood first and foremost as self-critique, an exercise in cultivating the virtue of humility. I am not so much interested in “idolatry” as a stable and univocal master category by which we can critique others and get our own worship in order; the only remedy for idolatry is ultimately an unmanageable encounter with the living God, one that throws all of our lives into question.

Finished reading: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton 📚

A very enjoyable read. I don’t often delve into the world of quantum anything, but when I do it’s usually fun. (George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance and Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland are two that always come to mind.)

I love not only how diverse Egginton’s subject is, seen through the distinctive lives of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg (literature, philosophy, and science, respectively), but also how incredibly old it is: the book opens with, and never fundamentally moves on from, Plato’s Parmenides dialogues.

Robert Alter said of the 2500-year-old book of Ecclesiastes and its questionably pious epilogue, which arguably sought to “domesticate Qohelet’s doctrinal wildness,” “It is surely attributing far too much naiveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text.”

He goes on:

What continues to engage the moral and philosophical imagination … is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness.

Far from triumph, there is a leveling effect to be found in the heights of human knowledge. Here’s Egginton:

Standing on the precipice of this very instant, we stare into the abyss of the eternal. Desire for that abyss fuels powerful human impulses: romantic ecstasy; religious fervor; artistic creation; compassion for others; even the courage and conviction to transcend our inclinations and do the right thing, no matter the cost to ourselves. But to believe we can exposit that abyss, that we can package it into the language and logic of space and time—to think we can visualize the impossibly small, the infinitely whole, describe the world before its beginning or after its end, know the fate written in our stars—such pretension leads us astray.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like Qohelet.

I mentioned before that it reminded me of Jonathan Pageau’s “Most of the time the earth is flat.” Pageau ends that (first) piece with this:

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

So much wisdom in life simply has not changed in human history. And the real place for it is always right in front of us.

Here’s Egginton again:

We see evidence for the existence of this moral law everywhere, [Kant] said; in the least impressive of our fellows, in the most abominable of men, we can at times glimpse an act of righteousness, a spark of goodness. And when we do, Kant wrote, we can feel our spirit bow down in respect, even if we wish to resist that feeling and remain aloof.

There is a line from Elizabeth Bowen that Christian Wiman has quoted many times and that I think would have made for a fitting end/direction for Egginton’s epilogue:

To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

(I mentioned somewhere else that Sarah Hendren (@ablerism) has two posts on the book — here and here — that are not only excellent reflections but that probably give a better idea of the book’s contents than I have.)

Currently Reading: The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton 📚

Splendid, so far! I’m not sure how well this will follow Egginton’s narrative, but at several points I’ve been reminded of Jonathan Pageau’s 2014 post “Most of the Time the Earth Is Flat,” which was such a great source of conversation once upon a time.

It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them.