Category: Lit & Crit
“Every artificer, indeed, aims to produce a work that is beautiful, useful, and enduring, and only when it possesses these three qualities is the work highly valued and acceptable. Corresponding to the above-mentioned qualities, in the pattern of life there must be found three elements: ‘knowledge, will, and unaltering and persevering toil’. Knowledge renders the work beautiful; the will renders it useful; perseverance renders it lasting.” – John of Fidanza, Bonaventure, Retracing the Arts to Theology (trans. Healy; emphases in original)
“Know that in every man there is necessarily the faculty of courage. Were this not so, he would not be moved in his thoughts to ward off that which harms him…. This faculty of courage varies in strength and weakness, as do other faculties, so that you may find among people some who will advance upon a lion, while others flee from a mouse. You will find someone who will advance against an army and fight it, and will find another who will tremble and fear if a woman shouts at him. There also must necessarily exist a temperamental preparation in the original natural disposition, which may increase through the passage of that which is potential into actuality—a passage effected in consequence of an effort made with a view to it and in accordance with a certain opinion. It may also diminish through a deficiency of exercise and in accordance with a certain opinion. The abundance or the weakness of this faculty in the young is made clear to you from their infancy.” – Moses ben Maimon, The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. Pines)
“Artists make the satisfying feeling of being an artist as much as they make discrete artworks. Typical art-world consumers, however, are not interested in the freedom art might signify. They want something to invest in and something that sets them apart. The trade in art objects is mainly about updating the prestige scoreboard (and property values) in the rarefied ‘art world’ of multimillionaire collectors, gallery owners, museum trustees, and artists becoming brands. The structure of the entire art milieu is meant to forestall the broader appreciation of art and protect its capability to signify status. It is meant to allow rich people to recognize the fruits of their wealth in their exclusive access to the world’s finest things. The glory of the view lies primarily in its being private-access. Ordinary people’s appreciation of art attaches to works like so many barnacles, ruining their meaning for collectors. As with any luxury brand, the wrong sort of audience for an artist can sully their market value completely. This is why so much of the discourse that surrounds contemporary art is so nauseating. It deliberately aims to destroy the confidence of nonelite audiences in their own judgment; it wants to make their potential pleasure in art depend on a recognition of their exclusion from the realm of art-making. We get the joy of knowing there’s some consumption experience beyond us that can remain forever aspirational, which gives us cause to cherish whatever brief peeks we get over the wall.” – Rob Horning, “Creative Tyranny”
“Because artists are celebrated by capital for their seeming independence from it, they are liable to become confused about the social role they play. They think being above wage labor gives them automatic solidarity with those who want to abolish it. They think they are fellow travelers when really they are running dogs.” – Rob Horning, “Creative Tyranny”
“Artists must produce their reputation as a singular commodity on the market, which makes their chief obstacle other would-be artists rather than capitalism as a system, regardless of whatever critical content might inhere in their work. When artists patronize the working class with declarations of solidarity, their vows are motivated less by a desire for social change than by the imperative that they enhance the distinctive value of their personal brand.” – Rob Horning, “Creative Tyranny”
“Artists work for themselves, own what they make, and must concern themselves with how to sell it. Though art has often made a mission of shocking middlebrow taste and artists have often congregated in urban Bohemian enclaves in working-class neighborhoods, they are less vanguard proletarians than petit bourgeois.” – Rob Horning, “Creative Tyranny”
“It is above all the mystics who walk on the road of God; their life is the best life, their method the soundest method, their character the purest character; indeed, were the intellect of the intellectuals and the learning of the learned and the scholarship of the scholars, who are versed in the profundities of revealed truth, brought together in the attempt to improve the life and character of the mystics, they would find no way of doing so; for to the mystics all movement and all rest, whether external or internal, brings illumination from the light of the lamp of prophetic revelation; and behind the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received.” – Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Deliverance from Error (trans. Watt)
“Those who devote themselves eagerly to the mathematical sciences ought to be restrained. Even if their subject-matter is not relevant to religion, yet, since they belong to the foundations of the philosophical sciences, the student is infected with the evil and corruption of the philosophers. Few there are who devote themselves to this study without being stripped of religion and having the bridle of godly fear removed from their heads.” – Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Deliverance from Error (trans. Watt)
“Every instruction is composed of two things: (a) making what is being studied comprehensible and causing its idea to be established in the soul and (b) causing others to assent to what is comprehended and established in this soul. There are two ways of making a thing comprehensible: first, by causing its essence to be perceived by the intellect, and second, by causing it to be imagined through the similitude that imitates it. Assent, too, is brought about by one of two methods, either the method of certain demonstration or the method of persuasion. Now when one acquires knowledge of the beings or receives instruction in them, if he perceives their ideas themselves with his intellect, and his assent to them is by means of certain demonstration, then the science that comprises these cognitions is philosophy. But if they are known by imagining them through similitudes that imitate them, and assent to what is imagined of them is caused by persuasive methods, then the ancients call what comprises these cognitions religion. And if those intelligibles themselves are adopted, and persuasive methods are used, then the religion comprising them is called popular, generally accepted, and external philosophy. Therefore, according to the ancients, religion is an imitation of philosophy. Both comprise the same subjects and both give an account of the ultimate principles of the beings. For both supply knowledge about the first principle and cause of the beings, and both give an account of the ultimate end for the sake of which man is made—that is, supreme happiness—and the ultimate end of every one of the other beings. In everything of which philosophy gives an account based on intellectual perception or conception, religion gives an account based on imagination. In everything demonstrated by philosophy, religion employs persuasion.” – Abu Nasr al-Farabi, The Attainment of Happiness (trans. Hyman; emphases in original)
“There’s something to be said for the repetitious, paying-the-bill qualities of getting the thing right.” – Nick Faust, “Get Off”
“Life is plotproof, muddled, desultory, irreducible to chains of cause-and-effect. It’s sweaty and rampantly sad. It’s a motion of moments. There’s no line of any kind other than the one that runs from birth to thwarting to death.” – Gary Lutz, “Windows that Lead to More Windows”
“There’s more than one way to tame an artist, and liberal democracies have developed their own strategies of containment for the unruly. The deal liberalism has made with art is that artists can say whatever they want as long as they don’t touch anything that doesn’t belong to them. And artists have to compete for attention with multibillion-dollar corporations bent on entertaining their way into viewers’ pockets. That way, the risk to current structures of power is minimized without disturbing the state’s ostensible commitment to freedom of expression. And when art struggles in its fuzzy handcuffs, it generates new images for sale.” – Malcolm Harris, “U.S.Ai.”
“Humanists who do not believe in God or a future life have been in a stronger position to insist on the urgency of making things better at once, in this one. If this is the only life that anybody has, then the fact that many people must spend it in such misery becomes more obviously and inexcusably scandalous. Salvation is needed now; it can’t be put off to some vaguely planned future state.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Any conclusions that specialists may draw about the relation of physical discoveries to life come from the whole of life, not just from physics, and are no stronger than their weakest link. Physics itself, moreover, is no self-contained enclave. Its arguments, like all other arguments, involve philosophical presuppositions, ideas that come from outside it. The questions involved in causal problems about the Big Bang are not internal to physics. They are shaped by crucial metaphysical notions about how causality, necessity, space, time, etc. should in general be conceived. Scientists who deal with these questions are doing metaphysics. They are perfectly entitled to do it and indeed must do it for these large, structural purposes. But whether their metaphysics leads them into religious thinking depends on all sorts of considerations internal to it and quite outside physical science itself. There is no short cut.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope, and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality, and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
“Among intellectuals, Marxism attracted people who like the heroic because of its emphasis on conflict, and it reassured those among them who might have distrusted its purely emotional appeal by the cragginess of its texts. (At this level, it pays to be unintelligible. Ex-party members who have had to study the works, not just of Marx, Engels and Lenin but also of Stalin, can still testify to the stiffness of the ordeal.) For a time, this body of theory seemed to many thinkers to open an intellectual new Jerusalem, not just because it promised a millennium gained by conflict, but because it seemed to back this promise with a scientific status. It seemed like a means of extending the reliability of science over the whole area of practical thinking—a way of spreading it that would be free from doubtful value-judgments, since the theory was impartial, non-sectarian, essentially scientific. The modesty of science was to be combined with the constructive achievement of a new and central moral insight. This hope appealed to the architectonic intelligence in many bright scientists. It satisfied that urge towards a general, comprehensive understanding which had brought them into science in the first place. It balanced the fragmentation of their specialized studies, allowing them to relate scientific aims to a wider humanitarian idealism. This was not a trifling gain; it was not a luxury. If we find no new way of making that relation—if nothing better now replaces Marxism—the loss will be serious. We are not in a position just to dance on the grave of Marx. We need to learn from his failures.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Though it is possible to be too trusting, someone who systematically distrusts people rather than trusting them does not strike us as an admirable or sensible character. Some degree of social courage—the willingness to risk being hurt in order to get near to people, to risk being misled in order to communicate—is an essential cognitive tool. It is also a necessary virtue, since the things that need doing for people cannot be done if you are too scared to go near them.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, persistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed, and ‘put to the question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess ‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses’, her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated’, ‘pierced’ and ‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur). Now this odd talk does not come just from a few exceptionally uninhibited writers. It has not been invented by modern feminists. It is the common, constant idiom of the age.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“If our curiosity is in no way respectful—if we don’t see the objects we speculate about as joined with us and related to us, however distantly, within some vast enclosing common enterprise which gives them their independent importance—then (it appears) our curiosity, though it may remain intense, shrinks, corrupts and becomes just a form of predation. We then respond to these beings we enquire about with some more or less hostile, alienated attitude, something ranging between fear, aggression, callous contempt and violent suppression. We see them either as enemies to be conquered or as brute objects ranged over against us—as aliens, as monsters, as victims, as trivia or as meat to be eaten.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Psychological symbols cannot be altered in the brisk way in which one might change a road-sign. They are not, like words, conventional signs, loose pieces arbitrarily nailed to their meanings. Nor are they even fixed items, standing in regularly for a single meaning, as Freud seems to have thought. For him, pen simply meant penis and bag meant womb. Questions scarcely ever arose about what the penis or womb themselves meant. In our imaginations, however, these questions are extremely important. Such symbols are not simple counters, they are gateways to whole uncharted territories.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Order in the world does not consist in a single, simple, basic arrangement of indestructible balls or bricks which give the real explanation of everything. Instead, it is a wide range of much less simple, interconnected patterns. Order as we perceive it at the level of everyday experience is not an illusion. It is not a mask for a quite different order at the microscopic level, and below that for real contingency, for radical disorder among distinct bricks. It is one set among others of these real patterns—subtle, complex, interconnected arrangements. Elementary particles, as much as ponds or people, are inherently unstable, transient, incomplete entities, deeply dependent for their existence on the contexts around them. But that in no way interferes with either their reality or their meaning.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Views about facts never stand alone. They are always shaped by background world-pictures which are often scarcely noticed, but which link them in a pattern and so to some extent explain them. And these world-pictures are themselves not value-free; they are always more or less dramatized.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Science is important for exactly the same reason that the study of history or of language is important—because we are beings that need in general to understand the world in which we live, and our culture has chosen a way of life to which that understanding is central. All human beings need some kind of mental map to show them the structure of the world. And we in the West have placed particular confidence in mapping it through methodical, detailed study.” – Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation
“Even if you only write one book, that’s one of your great achievements in life.” – Pamela Paul, Editor, New York Times Book Review
“Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.” – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
“Even when God is most terrible, he is never cruel, the way men are.” – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
“The difference between something and nothing is nothing.” – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
“You can’t just wish away an unattractive part of a writer’s biography and think the work would still exist.” — Jessa Crispin, Bookslut
“The soul is the weariest part of the body.” – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
“It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.” – Woody Allen, “What I’ve Learned”