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The Power of Re-Reading
As the end of the school year approaches, I typically look forward to having more free time, and, after two busy semesters, look forward to reading things of my own choosing. While I enjoy reading student papers and perusing research materials, there is something refreshing about reading things I choose to read. I may pick up a new book, but I often find myself turning to something I have read before, an old favorite text I want to read yet again. I do this, I think, because of the comfort of reading something I have read and enjoyed before, such as classic mysteries by Arthur Conan Doyle, John Mortimer, or Agatha Christie, or popular works like the Harry Potter books. I know how they turn out, and somehow knowing they will resolve most of their plot threads and not leave me hanging (and thinking) satisfies me, perhaps because so much of life doesn’t lend itself to such immediate or neat resolution. The experience of re-reading these texts brings me a sense of pleasure and fulfillment so central to pleasure reading. But there are many other texts I find myself rereading on a regular basis because I teach them each year. The texts are familiar, but the experience of working my way through them changes as new groups of students read them and discover and then share in class the insights they have uncovered. While some observations come up time and again, each year new ideas enter into the conversations of learning we have, and each class responds with fresh energy and newfound enthusiasm for texts that are new to them, though familiar to me. I find myself energized by...
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Pleasure, Transcendence, and the Problem of Beauty
“Beauty” is an unusual term. According to Webster dictionary, beauty is defined as “the qualities of a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or to the mind.”1 However, pleasure is also a problematic term. Eating a tub of ice cream might bring someone pleasure, but is it beautiful? Perhaps so. Serial killers might also find pleasure from murder, but most reasonable people certainly wouldn’t define that as a form of “beauty.” If it’s simply a matter of positive sensory experiences, the term beauty becomes void and meaningless due to the endless variability of taste, opinion, experience and perspective. If it’s only about pleasure, “beauty” becomes an ideal that is neither distinguishable nor reasonably sought after. There’s a popular idea that art, therefore, is an avenue towards the ideal or transcendent, intended to be beautiful or masterfully executed. The English philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, created a documentary in 2009 called Why Beauty Matters, which proclaims his own stance on the topic. According to Scruton, since the twentieth century, art has become degenerate, degraded from the likes of Michelangelo or Rembrandt into art that is meaningless, unnecessarily crude or outrageous. He cites modern art examples such as Marcel Duchamp, who presented a urinal in an art exhibition in 1917, or Piero Manzoni, who submitted a can of his own feces to a similar venue. Scruton demands a call back towards art that exemplifies the human form in its full, representational glory. He insists that art’s truest form is art that is pure, Christian, inspiring and wholesome.2 The problem with this frame of thought centers around the same issue that made modernism flop and postmodernism take root. Call it Satan’s...
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“Beauty is Almost Too Common”: Professor David Laraway and Outsider Art
During the summer of 2012, shortly after Professor David Laraway had begun his doctoral coursework in Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, he came across popular press reports featuring a botched attempt to restore a religious fresco in Spain. A well-meaning parishioner, Cecilia Giménez, had attempted to restore the painting in a village church. It had not gone well. The new painting—according to Dr. Laraway’s newest book, American Idiots: Outsider Music, Outsider Art, and the Philosophy of Incompetence—“was noteworthy precisely because of its stunning incompetence” (1). Rather than dwelling in ironic relish over the fresco’s failure, however, Dr. Laraway began to consider the philosophical implications of the fresco’s fame. What does our reaction to incompetence—especially “stunning incompetence”—suggest about our collective relation to defective or “failed” creative works? Why are we drawn to art that falls so completely short of its aspirations? In short, what happens when art goes wrong? In my interview with Dr. Laraway this past week, he was quick to clarify that the art he addresses in American Idiots “is not just poorly executed [art], but in some works, there is something going on that is of philosophical importance.” The difference between incompetent art and interestingly incompetent art, then, is that in the latter, “artists and musicians are totally faithful to their own muse even if they’re the only one that can hear the voice of that muse.” A focus on these artists and musicians can therefore help to answer a deeply philosophical problem: what can bad art teach us, in terms of ethics as well as aesthetics, about the gap we experience between a call that appears to us as infinite in its demands as the paucity...
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The Ice is Melting
For some, the college admissions scandal that proliferated headlines last week was revelatory; in an unprecedented move, Federal prosecutors charged 50 people with the “largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.”1 Included among the accused are actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, with the details of the scandal encompassing direct cheating, bribery, and fraud. Many of the people that I encountered following the scandal seemed caught off guard by the exposure of corruption, of a broken system laid bare. Yet for others (apparently many others2), the scandal was anything but surprising. So the rich and powerful act in ways to guarantee those same privileges for their children, and they get away with it? Isn’t this an accepted fact of American life? It seems like this has been the sad reality, the fabric underlying conversations, jokes, and real-life decisions regarding school choice for years. What’s new here? I remember a similar sentiment expressed at the height of the #MeToo movement. A popular SNL sketch around that time depicted women welcoming men to the world in which they have lived their entire lives—a world full of violent men and constant vigilance.3 “This is the water we swim in,” they seem to say, “Where have you been?” Indeed, an article in USA Today ties these two phenomena together—the college admissions scandal and the Me Too movement (along with recent revelations concerning the Catholic Church, which has been in the spotlight since at least 2002)—by positing, “In some ways, the only thing shocking about these events is that they’re shocking at all.”4 Yet I consider many of these measures of pushback a bit of a strawman, at least in some ways. “Surprise” when scandals like...
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Events
Faith & Imagination Guest Lecture: Peter Howarth
When: Friday, Apr 12, 2019
Where: B192 JFSB
more event details ->
Colloquium: Mark Eaton, Matt Smith, & Kim Johnson
When: Thursday, May 16, 2019
Where: 4010 JFSB
more event details ->
On Being Vulnerable, Part II: Faith after the Anthropocene
When: Friday, Sep 13, 2019
Where: JFSB B192
more event details ->
Humanities Center Blog
The Power of Re-Reading
As the end of the school year approaches, I typically look forward to having more free time, and, after two busy semesters, look forward to reading things of my own choosing. While I enjoy reading ...
continue reading ->
Pleasure, Transcendence, and the Problem of Beauty
“Beauty” is an unusual term. According to Webster dictionary, beauty is defined as “the qualities of a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or to the mind.”1 However, pleasure is also a ...
continue reading ->
“Beauty is Almost Too Common”: Professor David Laraway and Outsider Art
During the summer of 2012, shortly after Professor David Laraway had begun his doctoral coursework in Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, he came across popular press reports featuring a botched attempt ...
continue reading ->
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