Header image: KF in Dall-E
(2019) Moving Images of Eternity
Preface
- Technology dissolves time, replacing it with an endless immediacy, substituting simulation for embodied experience, ocularcentrism for orality, the cloud occluding what is concealed underneath the Internet of things.
- Grant knew that pinning all our hopes on technology—rendering it an idol—abdicates our moral responsibility to relegate it to its proper place, a prosthetic extension of compassion, for example, another medium of justice.
- Curriculum is crucial, as it authorizes what students study and teachers teach.
- e.g. PISA: reduces learning to standardized test scores and teaching to test preparation, threatening to restructure schools into technological sites of political socialization, conditioning children for compliance to a universal, homogeneous state of mind.
- Today I work at one of the biggest industrial education plants in North America CMenzies
- encouraging readers to proceed more slowly, encouraging contemplation, not takeaways.
- “Take-away” is a concept emphasizing action, relegating information to its utility.
- Subjectivity is what technology eviscerates,
- accepting (not without struggle) that my secularism has its spiritual subtext
- By reactivating his alarm, we might re-experience a past when there seemed to be more time, time when we were less submerged in the screen. From that past we might find our way to a future unforeclosed by the present.
Intro
Education is itself the purpose of our existence.
George Grant
- 90 intro “It is implicit in Grant’s thought,” Parel (1992, 149) writes, “that religion is the single most powerful force that can counteract the baleful effects of modernity.” That almost seems a progressive argument for accepting religion “as if” it were true, a strategic justification. There are also epistemological ones as well, as I shall discuss later.
Intro p9: Modern science and thought—or modern truth-seeking—has shown us that life is without purpose. 120 George Grant
- 120 Davis and Roper 2009b, 968. Grant credits Nietzsche for making this plain. In cosmological terms, I accept that life is without purpose—except, at some instinctual level, survival—but I cannot rule out that Grant knew otherwise. Without cosmological purpose, one accords meaning to one’s life oneself, as Sartre (whom Grant first admires, then comes to loathe) has Roquentin realize in Nausea. One’s seemingly self-conferred project substitutes for cosmological structure as it informs, even propels, one daily life, and in doing so, affords meaning, not only instrumentally rationalized but also intrinsically (or so it seems to me) satisfying. But studying Grant has encouraged me to think “as if” Grant did indeed know otherwise. In short, I study George Grant for the same reason he studied Simone Weil: “The reason why I study the writings of Simone Weil is that I learn from them” (Davis and Roper 2009b, 808).
“The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”
Søren Kierkegaard
Intro p16: Fourth, while secularist 211 during my adult life, studying Grant has provoked me to rethink religion, not its relation to the state (where my sympathies remain with secularism, if only for the protection of religion), but within my subjective life.
Perhaps, Terence Penelhum is right:
The world is only properly described as absurd, or lacking in meaning, if it is without some significance that by rights it ought to have period to say that it is absurd is to react to the absence of something that you think it is reasonable to expect to be there. In our culture this is to respond to the absence of the sort of meaning that Christianity has taught us is present in it. Now if Christianity is false, then one has no right to expect it to be there, and no right to cry ‘Absurd’ at the world that lacks it. All one is doing is shaking one’s fiist at the empty sky. As secularization advances the sense of absurdity can be expected to pass and is already beginning to do so
Terence Penelhum
“[I]t is misleading to oppose faith and secularity in a manner that implies a given person must be an example of the one or of the other, but cannot show traces of both.” 212
- 211 Evidently an agonistic, the journalist Charles Taylor ([1982] 2006, 138–139) registers his difference with Grant on the matter of religion: “Unlike Grant, however, I had not discovered God in the course of my travels…. By the time I came to tackle Grant, I knew that a conservative must finally acknowledge the existence of some such order… In my case, however, this belief was the product of mere mind: I had never had a mystical experience of the Deity, or whatever term might best define that higher intelligence. I knew it was there, but I hadn’t felt it. Clearly this would limit my ability to fathom Grant, although it did not inhibit me from plunging into the more political aspects of his thought.” I am not entirely sure “higher intelligence” is “there,” although in studying Grant I have tried to act “as if” it might be. Politically, I’ve been no conservative—certainly in no sense the term has political currency in the contemporary United States—but here too Grant’s rather different sense of the appellation I found appealing, so much so that I suggest that being “progressive” today may mean becoming “conservative” as Grant defines. In any case, like Taylor, these differences have not prevented me from plunging into Grant’s thought.
Why p54: What should one study in a time like ours? One answer is George Grant’s critique of time, technology, and education. I use the singular because I think his critique of the three topics is intertwined. Time as only history194—technology as “enframing”195—education as objectifying:196 these specify Grant’s indignation over a totalizing civilizational idolatry, his lifelong protest against substituting197 inappropriate objects for what they represent. Grant implies that appropriate objects—like religious icons—can become subjects that serve the sacred. It is “as if”198 there could also be academic icons that remind us of what lies beyond them.199
- 198 “If one sees that historicism is true but that it is deadly to the soul,” Grant mused, “then one way of opting out of the deadliness of the situation is to go in for mythmaking” (Davis and Roper 2009b, 313). For me, allegory is a form of mythmaking that emphasizes the ethical meaning of what happens in the world. If my invocation of “as if” amounts to a “secularized faith,” Penelhum (1983, 105) judges it “literally unthinkable.” Logically, yes, but imaginatively too? 199. Conservative Christians contest this suggestion. Beale (2008, 311), for instance, declares that “created objects do not contain God’s living Spirit, and to the degree that people revere them, they will become devoid of the spirit—unspiritual.”
Attunement p267: For Grant attunement—again Cayley understands—follows the exercise of “our capacity to accept or refuse a timeless order which we did not make, which we cannot fully comprehend, and for which we cannot finally be responsible.”114 For me, that decision “to accept or refuse” is not one made in an instant and for evermore, nor once made can it be enacted fully. It is an ongoing decision, requiring (for me at least) constant contemplation115 of what might be beyond empirical (observable, audible) experience, what might be, even in some incomprehensible indirect way, influencing it. While one cannot be responsible for what lies “beyond time and space,” ethically one can act as if 116 one were (at least partly) responsible for what happens here, as implied, it seems to me, in Grant’s supposed “synthesis” of Athens and Jerusalem.117 Non-coincidence with what is—living within the gap 118—installs subjective freedom, implying that there is always, or almost always, a move to make, even if only inwardly. Whether that makes us responsible for what happens is an even more complicated story, as ethicists testify. 119
- 115 As the sentence in the main text implies, I am more aligned with psychoanalysis, wherein such contemplation and meaning found are in the service of unknotting the past and allow the contorted present to dissolve into a freer future.
- 116 Conducting oneself “as if” is hardly the only sleight-of-hand one commits, as behaving as if one will live through the day is a baseline assumption of many who do not suffer terminal illnesses, starvation, military or terrorist threat.
- Attunement 166 In his essay review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s As If: Idealization and Ideals, Thomas Nagel points (2018, 35) out that the book’s title and theme references Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), whose The Philosophy of “As If” (1911) suggested that, in Nagel’s summary, generative thinking often depends on “idealizations” or what Viahinger termed “fictions,” an instance of which is Adam Smith’s proposal that human beings are motivated mostly by self-interest. While Vaihinger appreciates the utility of idealization, Nagel continues, he was also aware of its risks, reminding readers that fidelity to a concept of truth remains necessary. Nagel acknowledges “that our best understanding may come from theories or models that are not strictly true, and some of which may contradict each other,” a fact one should not allow to “undermine our belief in the existence of the truth” (38). My point is that thinking and acting “as if” allows us to understand (however partially, momentarily) what otherwise we might not, a view echoing Grant’s invocation of Credo ut intelligam
KF Credo ut intelligam / peripheral vision
If we aren’t constantly recreating ourselves in thought and in imagination, the people we come near won’t learn anything from us.
George Grant