A Paradox

So, in my Philosophy of Religion class Friday, we were talking about the importance of philosophy, and I got started thinking about how some things can be significant and insignificant at the same time. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) talks about Christian paradoxes, and this is similar to some things he mentions.

Some examples of the paradox: It's important to think about things in religion and have coherent systems of thought. If we're going to believe something, we need to think about it somehow so that we can keep it real on all levels (love God with our minds, as Karyn was saying). And the positions we take on intellectual issues make a difference; some fights about theory are really worth fighting. Philosophy matters. But then, what's a lifetime's abstract study of God worth in comparison with one act of sacrificial love to another done for God's sake? What does philosophy matter in comparison with practical obedience to God?

Or another one, close to home for me: What's the good of spending so much time and energy making a line of poetry work? Why agonize over whether this alliteration is too much or how to make this image consistent, when you could be doing something of more impact? Maybe five or ten people are ever going to read the poem, and maybe a couple of those will get something out of it. It's a lot of work for something insignificant. But then it is significant too. It's hard to find something more significant than communicating a complex truth beautifully with another person.

Or struggling to be better: Our practical moral victories are lame and insufficient, but we break our hearts over them anyway, and it's right that we do.

Or even ourselves: We're ridiculous little people, but we're also the brilliantly significant objects of God's love.

This last one leads to something that might help to understand the paradox: We're valueless compared to God, but we're deeply valuable in relation to God. So maybe the issue is to relate things instead of just comparing them. By comparison, any human act can be insignificant, but by relation, any human act can be significant.

But anyway, seeing the paradox of doing things that are both significant and insignificant gives an interesting (and, I think, healthy) attitude. Because of the significance of minute things, we can do what we do passionately. Because of the insignificance, we can laugh at ourselves and eschew pride. I think we can work with awareness that what we're doing can be a life-and-death matter and a joke at the same time, and quite genuinely and undilutedly each.

Existentialist Blind Dates

I think someone should've arranged a meeting between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Emily Dickinson. It would've been chronologically possible.

Since they're both dead now, though, I'd settle for a Tom Stoppard play based on the scenario.

Additional Bloggage

Nathan and I are trying a new blogger blog for our discussions, which used to be buried in Xanga comments. Here it is, with its very own Prufrockian title:

question on your plate

You should subscribe to it and come poke at philosophy with us there.

Poem Intersections

I like it when poems come together (accidentally or on purpose). So I think I shall post poetry quotes that seem to intersect; perhaps it'll become a frequent feature on this blog.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
- Eliot

A Wounded Deer -- leaps highest --
I've heard the Hunter tell --
Tis but the Ecstasy of death --
And then the Brake is still!

. . .

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish --
In which it Cautious Arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And "you're hurt" exclaim!
- Dickinson

Dazzling and Tremendous

"Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me."
- Whitman

I love those lines very much indeed. But I think I may disagree with what Whitman is saying (if I've understood it). I don't think the sunrise would be a mortal danger if he couldn't send sunrise out of himself. Rocks or animals aren't in danger of being killed by dazzling tremendousness, but people are -- because they have the capacity to respond to dazzling tremendousness in its own terms.

Our weakness, our capacity to be injured by our surroundings, comes from a strength, our capacity to respond deeply to our surroundings.

(To go back to Whitman, though, perhaps he's saying he'd be overcome if he only responded internally and lacked the power to express his encounters -- and the context (section 25 of "Song of Myself") suggests that that might be on track.)