Benjamin Franklin spreads the word

The Word

Franklin: Do not do what you would not have known.

Fool: I would not have known had you not told me, but could you give an example?

In which I prove myself a coward...

There Are Monsters

(Image from You Tube)

Let me admit up front that horror films scare me. I usually avoid them, even the dumb ones that don't scare anybody else. I have a propensity to believe that evil lurks in the dark corners of our world, and my vivid imagination supplies the uncanny details.

Yet . . . these films exert an attraction on me, and I occasionally try to watch one, partly to prove to myself that I'm not a coward . . . but I'm nearly always proven wrong.

Anyway, this past weekend, I was alone because my wife and kids were off on a jaunt to a traditional Korean folk village, leaving me to care for the cats and work on my academic things. On Saturday afternoon, I took a break from my own duties and rode my bike through the labyrinth of streets down to the river and then along the bike path there. I rode for about an hour upstream until I reached an old railroad that marks the usual turnaround point for me and my family whenever we ride this route. I stopped there for a couple of beers as reward, then returned downstream to where I'd begun and turned off the path and back into the maze of streets to find my way home.

In all, I'd been out riding for nearly three hours and felt a bit spent from the exertion. After a shower, I decided to relax by watching a scary ten-minute film titled There Are Monsters that I found advertised on You Tube.

Bad decision as a way to relax. It scared me . . . but, as acknowledged above, I'm easily unnerved by horror films. Predictably, as darkness fell, I came to realize the gravity of my situation, for I was alone in my apartment except for those dark entities supplied by my suspicions about the world and my overactive imagination.

Bedtime threatened the sleep of reason that produces monsters, and I found myself reluctant to go into my bedroom alone, partly due to a scene in the film, so I decided to sleep on the sofa, where the cats would keep me company. But the cats didn't cooperate. They thought that I was acting weird and kept themselves far away . . . or did they sense some dark entity within? Cats are mysterious creatures and perhaps have their own feline fears about things lurking in the minds of their masters. Left to myself, I therefore did not sleep so well, for I needed to maintain a strong defense against things that don't exist but scare us anyway. I must have succeeded, for I don't recall suffering any nightmares, and I somehow survived my dark night of the soul.

Anyway, for braver souls who want to check out the film, just click here -- but only if you don't mind a bit of profanity in the movies that you see -- and after you've watched, you can report back on how much more courageous you are than I am.

Augustine: Curiosity in the Catalog of Vices...

Aristotle, Copy of Lysippos

Louvre Museum

"All men by nature desire to know."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let us look again today into Hans Blumenberg's chapter "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices" (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age), in which Blumenberg discusses St. Augustine's classification of "curiositas" as a vice.

I want to reflect on a couple of paragraphs in which Blumenberg notes that Augustine criticizes that cupidity (cupiditas) of vain desire in the appetite of our insatiable curiosity (curiositas) to seek knowledge beyond our proper limits, i.e., beyond either utility (utilitas) or self-knowledge:

When we return . . . to the central passage, book 10, chapter 35 of the Confessions, some light is shed on the catalog of the levels of curiositas: After amusment as a mutilated corpse, theatrical shows are mentioned, and from here a transition to investigation of nature and to the magical arts is found. The riddles of nature, to which the mere desire to know applies itself, are characterized as objects that lie praeter nos [beyond us], in the double sense that neither are they seen from the point of view of their utilitas nor do they relate to man's self-knowledge. Investigation of the things that nature does not make openly accessible to man is of no use to him. This proposition involves the teleological assumption, familiar from Cicero, that the degree of a thing's theoretical accessibility indicates its 'natural' relevance for man. When he goes beyond this region of what lies open to him, he obeys the cognitive appetite that is justified by no other interest.

The appeal to nature proves itself here, as so often, to be an ambiguous type of argumentation, whose self-contradiction Augustine seeks to avoid by not attributing a natural status to man's inherent cognitive appetite but instead interpreting that appetite -- as always where cupiditas is applied -- as a consequence of the condition of man having fallen away from his original nature as a result of his original sin. The first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics has become, through the omission of "by nature," a description of man's status defectus [failed, defective condition]. On this assumption, confirmation by the "predilection for sense experience" can no longer be a "sign" from which the vindication of the disinterested purity of the theoretical attitude "independent of need" can be obtained. The grasp at the 'tree of knowledge' caused the unregulated cognitive appetite to degenerate into the vana cura [futile care] of a godless state of being fallen into the power of the world. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 314)

The famous first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics states:

All men by nature desire to know. (Aristotle, Metaphysics (350 B.C.), translated by W. D. Ross)

Blumenberg's point is that Augustine, despite his appeal to the teleological point about not going beyond what nature has laid open to our senses, cannot consistently accept even Aristotle's assumption, grounded in nature, of our cognitive right to any knowledge, for our original nature has been distorted, as has been nature itself.

Augustine may rely upon Aristotle to critique our 'busybody' tendency to inquire into nature's riddles, a realm beyond that which is teleologically fit for us to know, but Augustine's views on the double aspect of fallenness -- mankind and the world both being fallen -- entail that the teleological fitness of mankind to the world no longer holds since sin has entered the world through Adam and Eve and ruined God's creation.

For Augustine, therefore -- if he were to be consistent -- curiosity about the cosmos would inevitably lead reason into the coils of error through any attempt whatsoever to study nature, given its deceptive, quasi-Gnostic appearance, let alone a foolhardy attempt to investigate the even more recondite riddles of nature.

Let's return to this tomorrow...