The Quest that Was Fruitless and Long

 Apology
(For Eleanor Rogers Cox)
by Joyce Kilmer 

For blows on the fort of evil
 That never shows a breach,
For terrible life-long races
 To a goal no foot can reach,
For reckless leaps into darkness
 With hands outstretched to a star,
There is jubilation in Heaven
 Where the great dead poets are. 

 There is joy over disappointment
 And delight in hopes that were vain.
Each poet is glad there was no cure
 To stop his lonely pain.
For nothing keeps a poet
 In his high singing mood
Like unappeasable hunger
 For unattainable food. 

 So fools are glad of the folly
 That made them weep and sing,
And Keats is thankful for Fanny Brawne
 And Drummond for his king.
They know that on flinty sorrow
 And failure and desire
The steel of their souls was hammered
 To bring forth the lyric fire. 

 Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett,
 McDonough and Hunt and Pearse
See now why their hatred of tyrants
 Was so insistently fierce.
Is Freedom only a Will-o’-the-wisp
 To cheat a poet’s eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it’s a noble cause
 In which to sing and to die! 

 So not for the Rainbow taken
 And the magical White Bird snared
The poets sing grateful carols
 In the place to which they have fared;
But for their lifetime’s passion,
 The quest that was fruitless and long,
They chorus their loud thanksgiving
 To the thorn-crowned Master of Song.

Taste, Good and Bad

 Scott at "Astral Codex Ten" recently had a skeptically tending discussion of taste (in the good taste and bad taste sense), Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste. As the title suggests, it is mostly about analogies, which is very ironic -- I assume unintentionally -- since historically one of the roles that has often been assigned to taste is sorting out whether analogies are good or bad. That is, analogical reasoning has often been regarded as involving a component requiring judgments of good taste about the fittingness of the analogy -- you need good taste in analogies to reason well with them. And the argument of the post arguably fails from the starting gate because there seems no objective sense for 'friendly' and 'hostile' here. As has been recognized at least since Hume, almost everything is analogous to almost everything, just in different ways and in different degrees, so obviously taste is analogous to all of the analogues given here, and its being so has in itself no relevance to any evaluation ('friendly' or 'hostile') of taste itself. But the post does do a helpful job of raising some important questions for the subject. 

The post and the comments discussion jump around too much to say anything very unified about them, and actually giving my own view from scratch would be a rather more complex work than I presently have the time for. But a few points are worth noting that are relevant to improving not merely this discussion of taste but a lot of others as well; so take what follows to be just using this case as an example for points that are in fact worth considering in many other discussions.

(1) The discussion (not just in the post) suffers greatly from failing to distinguish at least three different senses of 'taste', which historically are usually distinguished as 'subjective taste', 'objective taste', and the 'faculty of taste' (sometimes called the 'sense of taste'). The 'faculty of taste' is our ability to sort things into categories like beautiful and ugly, reasonable and unreasonable, elegant and inelegant, striking and dull, funny and unfunny, and other such evaluative labels that are determined not by abstract proof but by judgment based on perception. 'Objective taste' is about things so evaluated (the 'objective' here has an old-fashioned meaning of  'having to do with the object of the faculty of taste, whatever that may be' rather than 'real') -- e.g., Jane Austen is a great novelist, sunsets are beautiful, such-and-such design is clumsy. 'Subjective taste' in this sense is concerned with indivudal use of the faculty of taste; it is related to personal preferences, but in practice people do not treat subjective taste as private in the way that some personal preferences are -- matters of taste are pretty much always shareable things.

(2) These distinctions are connected to what is generally called the paradox of taste -- people treat taste as non disputandum but very obviously dispute it, sometimes in the same breath. Subjective taste seems not disputable; but a very large portion of actual disputes people ever have are clearly about matters of objective taste. Indeed, there is an argument that could be made that almost all disputes that are not purely concerned with matters of memory or direct observation are about objective taste. We never stop disputing matters of taste; Scott can't even write a post skeptical of good taste and bad taste without arguing it as a matter of taste.

(3) That point is worth (a taste word) a little expansion. The arguments Scott gives in the post are in fact arguments based on judgments of taste. Here are some of the phrases that suggest that Scott uses:

mysterious
especially helpful
fraught
seems perverse
pointless
find it hard to believe
vaguely reasonable-sounding
fake
semi-fake
mostly be suspicious of

All of these are terms that can be associated with judgments of taste; some of them can be associated with other things, too, of course, but I think it can reasonably be argued that they are all in Scott's post capturing judgments of taste, either his own or, in some cases, of other people that his argument requires that we all be able to understand. The mysteriousness that Scott keeps accusing other accounts of taste as having, for instance, is not a structural feature of the accounts, but a negative judgment on the basis of his personal experience of adequacy and inadequacy in explanation. Obviously people who accept such accounts do not judge them to be mysterious in this way at all; Scott is effectively accusing people who put forward such accounts of having bad taste in explanations, just without using the words 'bad taste'. 

(4) It is somewhat peculiar (a taste-word) -- given some of the points made -- that there is no discussion of scientific taste (to use Alexander Gerard's term from An Essay on Taste). It is a common view that there is an essential taste-component to both experimental design and theoretical development. For instance, people will argue that becoming a competent experimentalist requires getting a feel for elegance of experimental design; people will argue similar things for mathematical theorizing in physics or reasoning in scientific inquiry. And these are clearly concerned with objective taste. I would suggest that Scott and his particular readers would find it easier to navigate these issues by actually looking at matters of taste that directly impinge on their own interests. One does not expect most readers of Astral Codex Ten to be usually very informed about how fashion designers and avant-garde architects actually cultivate their sense of taste and how they communicate and argue their judgments of taste with others of similar background. It seems more reasonable (i.e. it is in better taste with regard to reasoning) to start with kinds of taste about which one is more likely to be informed.

(5) Several of the arguments in the post and in the comments on the post seem clearly to suggest that taste is actually a social sense. This fits quite well with a major strand in historical theories of taste. For instance, John Stuart Mill holds that good taste is the cultivated ability to make usually accurate justifications about what people with the relevant background and familiarity with the experiences would generally prefer. As a utilitarian, Mill holds that the standard of taste is the greatest happiness principle -- beautiful objects, for instance, are those the experience of which increase overall happiness -- so it's not surprising that he thinks it has the social element, but he's not the only one. Kant, for instance, holds that judgments of taste are judgments of what is valid for human experience in general, requiring the sort of free play of imagination that makes it possible for us to take a higher stance than a selfish point of view.

But it's odd (another taste-word) to describe what are in fact very common and ordinary social interactions but to use derogatory terms like 'priesthood of semi-fake justifications'. This at least needs much more exploration if it's not to be mysterious (another taste word). If it's about how things are 'landing' in the general experience of a given social group, how are the justifications fake or semi-fake, rather than the way things are actually justified in this case? How is it a 'priesthood' in the derogatory sense to be a member of one's own social circle? Because that's what many of the descriptions would then amount to -- the 'friendly' and 'hostile' analogies are really then just positive and negative descriptions of 'being a member of a particular social group with its own shared interests and experiences'. 

An example. One could very well call Bay Area rationalists a 'priesthood covering themselves with a fig leaf of semi-fake justifications', and it would in fact describe how many people regard them, i.e., as faddish people trying to justify their taste in fads as rigorously rational. But the negativeness of the description would be purely rhetorical if it reduced to meaning that they were members of a particular social circle who often had a good sense of how other people in that social circle would judge things. Well, of course: that's how social interaction in a social circle tends to go. You would expect Bay Area rationalists often to have a good sense of how Bay Area rationalists would experience and judge things if they experienced them in a certain way; you would not find it surprising that this would change over time if the social structure and social interactions of Bay Area rationalists also changed over time; you would not be surprised to discover that some Bay Area rationalists were better at correctly anticipating what Bay Area rationalists in general would regard as good or bad, although you probably would be surprised if someone regarded as himself as a Bay Area rationalist and had no sense of how Bay Area rationalists in general would see things. 

And so on with any other social circle. Avant garde circles, for instance, arise when people who share intensive interest and familiarity with artistic techniques begin focusing on art that is specifically trying to express those techniques as means of originality. This is one reason why avant garde circles tend to denigrate 'kitsch', because 'kitsch' is the farthest pole from avant garde -- kitsch is art that wholly subordinates considerations of technique to the creation of typical (i.e., unoriginal) sentimental experiences like 'uplift' or 'excitement' or 'coziness'. Social circles with a taste for kitsch are social circles in which people don't really care about artistic techniques in themselves; thus they tend to denigrate the avant garde. But if taste is a matter of how a social circle experiences things, then when people make these kinds of judgments, there's nothing fake or semi-fake about them; they are describing how things actually are evaluatively received by the social circle. Their justifications are tendentious, but they are correct in their context: kitschy things rarely express technical originality very well; avant garde things are usually very poor sources of typical sentimental experiences. These are facts about human experience.

Of course, one might hold that taste is not about how things are received in the experiences of a social group. But then it would seem that you could only assess things like fakeness and semi-fakeness by looking at the reasoning people use in particular cases, not in the very general and generic way the post does. And it seems that one's assessment of accounts of taste is not going to be very good (another taste word) until one first determines this point. (Which is why historically people have usually started here, rather than trying to start with an overall assessment of all of taste on a general level in the Astral Codex Ten manner.)

Music on My Mind

 

Don McLean, "Oh My, What a Shame".

Links of Note

 * Matthew Minerd, The Providential Structuring of Humanity through the Spiritual Soul's Relation to the Body, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Carl Olsen interviews Bishop Erik Varden, at "Catholic World Report"

* Hui-Chieh Loy & Daryl Ooi, Conceptions of Knowledge in Classical Chinese Philosophy (PDF)

* James Ungureanu, Sir Isaac Newton as Religious Prophet, Heretic, and Reformer, "Church Life Journal"

* Ariel Melamedoff, Shepherd's Metaphysics of Emergence (PDF); I'm not sure emergence is the right concept to use here, but it's an interesting argument.

* Edward Feser, Hume's Trojan Horse, reviews Aaron Alexander Zubia's The Political Thought of David Hume, at "Claremont Review of Books"

* Caleb Cohoe, To What Extent Must Creatures Return to the One? (PDF)

* Cheryl Misak, The underground university, at "Aeon"

* Edith Hall, Who can claim Aristotle?, at "Aeon"

* Ben Page, Dis-positioning Euthyphro (PDF)

* Peter Mommsen, Educating for Freedom, at "Plough"

* Ryan Miller, Artifacts: Ontology as Easy as It Gets (PDF)

* Ed Condon, What if the Vatican actually goes broke?, at "The Pillar". At some point I think it has to be recognized that you can't have a globalized version of the kinds of services the Holy See began to provide in the late medieval period and Renaissance while doing it on the budget of a regional grocery store chain; either you need massively greater revenue or you just have to start admitting that you can't provide the services, however nice they might be. But this seems something that people have severe difficulty understanding; they demand that the Holy See do vast numbers of costly things and also that it have no money to do them. But the problem is in some sense baked in, and continues from its beginning -- most of what we think of as corruption of the Church in the Renaissance is a byproduct of people doing the same thing then. If you increase demands and but do not increase revenue concomitantly, you are incentivizing cheating on one or the other or both.

* Benjamin Randolph, ‘When will the wickedness of man have an end?’ The Problem of Divine Providence in Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (PDF)

* Henrik Karlsson, Authenticity as Dialogue, at "Escaping Flatland"

* Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, Is Knowledge a Justified Belief? (PDF)

* David Yaffe, In Love We Disappear, on Leonard Cohen, at "Tablet"

Chrysorroas

 Today is the feast of St. Yanah ibn Sarjun, more commonly known as St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church, who was sometimes nicknamed Chrysorroas, the Stream of Gold. From the De Fide (Book IV, Chapter 11):

Every action, therefore, and performance of miracles by Christ are most great and divine and marvellous: but the most marvellous of all is His precious Cross. For no other thing has subdued death, expiated the sin of the first parent , despoiled Hades, bestowed the resurrection, granted the power to us of contemning the present and even death itself, prepared the return to our former blessedness, opened the gates of Paradise , given our nature a seat at the right hand of God, and made us the children and heirs of God , save the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. For by the Cross all things have been made right. So many of us, the apostle says, as were baptized into Christ, were baptized into His death, and as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. Further Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Lo! The death of Christ, that is, the Cross, clothed us with the enhypostatic wisdom and power of God. And the power of God is the Word of the Cross, either because God's might, that is, the victory over death, has been revealed to us by it, or because, just as the four extremities of the Cross are held fast and bound together by the bolt in the middle, so also by God's power the height and the depth, the length and the breadth, that is, every creature visible and invisible, is maintained. 

 This was given to us as a sign on our forehead, just as the circumcision was given to Israel: for by it we believers are separated and distinguished from unbelievers. This is the shield and weapon against, and trophy over, the devil. This is the seal that the destroyer may not touch you, as says the Scripture. This is the resurrection of those lying in death, the support of the standing, the staff of the weak, the rod of the flock, the safe conduct of the earnest, the perfection of those that press forwards, the salvation of soul and body, the aversion of all things evil, the patron of all things good, the taking away of sin, the plant of resurrection, the tree of eternal life.

The Glory of Celestial Mirth

 As Winds That Blow Against a Star
(For Aline)
by Joyce Kilmer 

Now by what whim of wanton chance
 Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance 
 Walk weary and laborious ways? 

 But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
 May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
 The glory of celestial mirth. 

 The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
 Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
 As winds that blow against a star.

Joyce Kilmer is best known for his poem, "Trees" ("I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree...."), perhaps the most extraordinarily popular poem to be intensely (and, I think, understandably but nonetheless unfairly) hated by many poets, but in fact he has a wide and diverse poetic oeuvre, usually characterized by deliberate restraint in the use of poetic devices that gives his work an almost conversational, straight-to-the-point feel even when he is being quite clever. His poetry is often an excellent lesson in just how much you can do with the simple. For about five years -- from the publication of "Trees" to his death by a German sniper's bullet on July 30, 1918 at the age of 31-- he was arguably the most popular Catholic poet writing in English in the entire world, and certainly the most popular in America. During World War I, he was known for volunteering for dangerous military intelligence assignments and was highly respected for his coolness under pressure; he is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in Picardy, France.

The Disposition to Love Something Apart from Intention to Use It

 A propensity to wanton destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature (spiritus destructionis) is opposed to a human being's duty to himself; for it weakens or uproots that feeling in him which, though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any intention to use it. 

 [Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Book I, Chapter II, Episodic Section, sect. 17, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Gregor, tr. & ed. Cambridge University Press (New York: 1996) p. 564.]

Two Modes of Sacramental Efficacy

 The sacraments work in two ways. One way is by actually being administered. The other way is by being desired. The reason for this is that the sacraments are instruments of God's justifying mercy, and God sees the human heart....Hence, even though natural things have no effect without being presently employed, the sacraments have an effect just by being desired. But they have their fullest effect when the sacraments are actually administered.

[Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet IV, Question 7, Article 1, from Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, Nevitt & Davies, trs., Oxford University Press (New York: 2020) p. 352. While the immediate topics are baptism and penance, Aquinas explicitly states later that this applies to the other major sacraments.]