Donal,
Interesting post; however to give credit where credit is due (I didn't
in my post think it was necessary in that I intended Hardy as an example
of a prevalent view and not a "focus") the entire quote should read:
"In 1883 he [Hardy] wrote in his diary: 'We [human beings] have reached
a degree of intelligence which Nature never contemplated in framing her
laws, and for which she consequently has provided no adequate
satisfactions.' This belief is of recognizable similarity to that of
Schopenhauer, but it is clear that Hardy arrived at it independently.
It is to him the fundamental principle of tragedy."
So if there was a half-baked understanding of science involved here,
Schopenhauer is probably more entitled to that criticism than Hardy. We
might want to say that it wasn't science at issue here so much as
philosophy and that Hardy had a "half-baked" understanding of
Schopenhauer, but if we consider who it is that is more entitled to
"advancing" an idea (if that's what you mean) I suspect Hardy deserves
more credit than Schopenhauer, at least in England where his /Tess of
the D'Urbervilles /and /Jude the Obscure /were credited with getting
some outdated laws changed.
But in regard to the idea being advanced, as Mike the initial poster
indicated it was Arnold's rather than Hardy's; although who is to say
which of them was the most pessimistic. But returning to Mike, we can
see that the Schopenhauer-Arnold-Hardy pessimism idea is still alive and
well. Maybe it is my current focus, but I suspect that if the death
stake is ever to be applied to it, the wielders will come out of
literature rather than philosophy.
But if you are saying that what is needed is a better understanding of
Darwinian evolution, I don't think that addresses Mike's concern.
Looking at Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" again (see below), we see
that the concern is loss of faith. If one was raised as a Christian,
and something undermines ones belief then a pessimistic reaction is
understandable. Arnold's poem is about that in my opinion. One is
entitled to be pessimistic if one's "sea of faith," once full is now a
"melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."
As to an anodyne to this pessimism, I don't think a better understanding
of science will do the job. William James thought that religious people
were inherently either sick or healthy souls. If he is right then the
root cause of Mike's pessimism and John's and my optimism is something
psychological that we may not have ready access to.
Meredith does offer an optimistic view of evolution, at least that is
what I infer, but did Meredith have a better understanding of science
than Hardy did? I haven't read biographies of either of them. Perhaps
he did or perhaps he was merely one of James' "healthy souls."
Lawrence
/The sea is calm tonight. /
/The tide is full, the moon lies fair /
/Upon the straits; on the French coast the light /
/Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, /
/Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. /
/Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! /
/Only, from the long line of spray /
/Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, /
/Listen! you hear the grating roar /
/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, /
/At their return, up the high strand, /
/Begin, and cease, and then again begin, /
/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring /
/The eternal note of sadness in. /
/
/
/Sophocles long ago /
/Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought /
/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow /
/Of human misery; we /
/Find also in the sound a thought, /
/Hearing it by this distant northern sea. /
/
/
/The Sea of Faith /
/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore /
/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. /
/But now I only hear /
/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, /
/Retreating, to the breath /
/Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear /
/And naked shingles of the world. /
/
/
/Ah, love, let us be true /
/To one another! for the world, which seems /
/To lie before us like a land of dreams, /
/So various, so beautiful, so new, /
/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, /
/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; /
/And we are here as on a darkling plain /
/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /
/Where ignorant armies clash by night./
On 8/5/2015 12:07 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
Lawrence's post can be put in the framework of a longstanding issue: how can we place ourselves as moral or aesthetic beings (capable of moral and aesthetic choices) within a 'scientific conception of the world'. Hardy is only one of many within the field of literature who have struggled with this question. What I agree with in John's post is that the 'scientific conception of the world' has changed, and that Hardy's pessimism is based on an out-dated model of science.
But I disagree with the focus on figures like Hardy. The best way into this issue is not literary types, who often have half-baked understandings of science. A debate focused on the thoughts of literateurs would be lacking. Put bluntly, there is no literary figure [a la Hardy, Joyce, Eliot] who has made a frontrank contribution to advancing on these issues - literary figures offer a pale echo of what they have understood of science and of philosophy. What literary figures did offer, and it was important, was a bulwark of resistance to the steam-roller of science as a full conception of life. But, at an intellectual level, their resistance was often not the highest, and less intellectually worked-out than the resistance found in many eminent scientists like Einstein.
The problem arose in a sharp form before Darwin with Newton's mechanical universe - a universe echoed in the mechanical clockwork universe of Descartes. Descartes gave humans the only let-out from this unremitting machinery, which regarded all animals as machines. But his let-out - Cartesian dualism - was unconvincing.
Darwinism added to the problem.
It changed the picture from
God
Man
_____
Animal
to
God?
_____
Man
Animal
The problem of separating humans from animals and from (physical-chemical) 'machines' became more acute.
It became more acute for a second reason. As Hardy seems to accept, the prevalent interpretation of Darwinism was pessimistic: life was unremitting competition, nature was red in tooth and claw - a dark vision of survival of the fittest.
It is possible to replace this pessimistic Darwinism with a much more optimistic version that maintains the role of 'natural selection' but emphasises co-operative strategies in evolution (from reproduction of genes to animal societies) and that individuals are not passive but active and so can change their selection pressures by their own behaviour.
It is also possible to replace the mechanistic world-view with a view of the universe as 'creative' and with emergent levels: and this is Popper's approach with his theory of W1, W2 and W3. Popper's view is important on many levels, not least because it contains a tacit assertion that no development in our understanding of W1 (i.e. no development in the 'natural sciences') will provide an answer adequate to account for morality or aesthetics [the only 'W1 account' of morality and aesthetics would be a reductive one]. So developments in the natural sciences have been vital in overthrowing the Newtonian/Cartesian/Kantian view of a mechanistic W1, but they are not adequate - and will never be adequate - to provide a framework that gives autonomy and value to morals and aesthetics.
I suggest Popper is (roughly) right about this.
D
L
