Heroes Not Zombies

I came across this phrase of Emerson’s the other day

Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live.

And the first thing I thought was “Tis curious that we only live as deep as we believe”! But then I decided to track it down and see it in its context. It comes from his “The Conduct of Life” in the section where he writes about beauty. There are some real gems in that piece of writing.

Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm’s length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds?

Can we really know about plants only by treating them as objects to measured, weighed and classified? And what happens when we apply that approach to human beings too?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.

“The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature”. Wow! How true is that? And isn’t that exactly where our present approach often falls down? We fail to see what we are studying in its “relations”. 

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us.

and

Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There’s a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make?

These last two passages raise a subject we don’t hear much about, but I think we are beginning to hear more now, and will hear even more in the years ahead. It relates to Einstein’s famous question about the Universe….

Is the Universe friendly?

And it also relates to Iain McGilchrist’s point about the two different approaches to the world from our two different cerebral hemispheres. If it’s true, which I think it is, that we create the world we live in through what we pay attention to, what our values and beliefs are, then what kind of world do we create from this detached, materialistic scientism?

What is life like for someone who sees things that way? And what’s life like for someone who sees things the way Emerson is suggesting? Do you think the Universe is a hostile place, that everything happens by chance, and nothing has any meaning?

What I share here in this blog is just my experience, just snippets from the life of me, how I experience life, what stimulates my thinking, my passions, my imagination. But it’s the way I approach the world which creates this particular world I’m living in and sharing with you.

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