The Un-Neutrality of Questions

How do we come to pose our questions? When we pose them, how do we go about answering them? No problem just falls from heaven. Something awakens our interest—that is really what comes first! At the beginning of every effort to understand is a concern about something: confronted by a question one is to answer, one’s knowledge of what one is interpreting is thrown into uncertainty, and this causes one to search for an answer. In order to come up with an answer, the person then begins asking questions. But no one asks questions von sich aus [just from oneself]—apropos of nothing. To think otherwise is simply to fall into scientific ideology. No, understanding is not something that takes place at the end of humanistic research about an object, it stands at the beginning and governs the whole process of questioning, step by step. –Gadamer in Conversation, 50

God’s Law vs. Man’s Law?

I’m curious about this paragraph:

What! The flaw in the cuirass of society could be found by a magnanimous wretch! What! An honest servant of the law could find himself suddenly caught between two crimes, the crime of letting a man escape, and the crime of arresting him! All was not certain in the order given by the state to the official! There might be blind alleys in duty! What then! Was all that real! Was it true that an old bandit, weighed down by condemnations, could rise up and be right at last? Was this credible? Were there cases then the law ought, before a transfigured crime, to retire, stammering excuses?

Yes, there were! And Javert saw it! and Javert touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he took part in it. They were realities. It was abominable that real facts could reach such deformity.” –Les Miserables

Hugo wants us to think that Valjean should be released from his lifetime penalty. He wants us to feel that it’s wrong for Flavert to capture him. Is he right in doing this?

On Knowing Truth

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the hearts of men by this double light, has seen nothing, and knows nothing of the truth. –Les Miserables

Right Feeling

The proper use [or rhetoric] is lawful and necessary because, as Aristotle points out, intellect of itself ‘moves nothing’: the transition from thinking to doing, in nearly all men at nearly all moments, needs to be assisted by appropriate states of feeling. – A Preface to Paradise Lost, 53

Seeing through Other Eyes

You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work ‘in the same spirit that its author writ’ and to avoid chimerical criticism. – A Preface to Paradise Lost, 64

Dying Culture

The central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally. Consequently the problem of social survival is not only a political or economic one; it is above all things religious, since it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots both of society and the individual are to be found. [Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, xxxi]

Materialism Destroys Culture

The spiritual alienation of its own greatest minds is the price that every civilization has to pay when it loses its religious foundation, and is contented with a purely material success. We are only just beginning to understand how intimately and profoundly the vitality of a society is bound up with its religion. It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture. The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense, the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture. [Dynamics of World History, 136]

Lewis on Escapism

What then is the good of—what is even the defence for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist—on Dante’s earthly paradise, Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer’s or Spenser’s Lady Nature, ro the Mariner’s skeleton ship? …The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves… We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. [C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism]

Seeing Through Many Eyes

“My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books…But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” [C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism]

Dawson on Sociology

It may be said that it is not the business of a sociologist to concern himself with religious beliefs or philosophical theories or literary and artistic traditions, since they lie outside his province and are incapable of scientific definition or quantitative analysis; yet, on the other hand, it seems absurd for him to study the physical environment of a society and to neglect the spiritual forces that condition its psychic life. [The Dynamics of World History, 24]