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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“Is the crowd merely a vulgus, the unlettered raving, or is it the populus—the community speaking?”
So much in Elizabeth Oldfield’s latest post that I want to sit with, add to, qualify, and think a lot more about.
Ivan Illich, via L. M. Sacasas’s amulets:
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.
Learned and leisurely hospitality v. The stance of deadly cleverness…
The most high-end account, the most highly mathematical and theoretical account of the cosmos, still reaches, at least in metaphor, for music and harmony.
Malcolm Guite is possibly the most enchanted creature on the planet. You can have your enlightenment by reason if you like. I’ll take “enchantment by baptized imagination,” thank you very much.
Kathryn Gin Lum, on whether she sees her book Heathen as being consistent with or in tension with her Christian faith:
It’s both… Some think that the book is very anti-Christian because of the sharpness of the critique. So they think that I must have abandoned the faith. Others see it as very Christian – maybe too Christian – and they see it as coming from a place of Christian lament. And I’m glad people can’t tell, because I would say that’s an accurate description of where I’m at. It’s messy.
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.)