Thomas D. Kennedy on 'Idle' Curiosity

The Fragmented Postmodern Self?

...and that curious, onlooking cat...

(Image from criticarte.com)

As some readers will have noted, I've been exploring the status of "curiosity" in a number of relatively recent posts, beginning in November of last year, for a research project on "care" that Warren T. Reich has invited me to participate in.

The parameters of that project are large and expandable, so one central difficulty lies in keeping the research plan limited enough to be successfully undertaken. One area that Reich has asked me to look at is the role of curiosity in the emergence of the scientific revolution. Hans Blumenberg finds enormous significance in the process whereby curiosity came to be legitimated as a positive intellectual attitude and argues that this legitimation enabled the emergence of modern science and technology.

I've already gone into some of Blumenberg's reasoning, but deepening an understanding of his views is not my aim in this post. I do want to note, however, that he seems to have little sympathy for the Ancient and Medieval critiques of curiosity -- a point that's pretty obvious to anyone reading his study of theoretical curiosity's trial.

I note this because not everybody stands convinced that curiosity is a thoroughly good thing. Indeed, some continue to think of it as an intellectual vice. I've just read a critical article by the philosopher Thomas D. Kennedy (Valparaiso University), who argues that curiosity is an intellectual vice particularly characteristic of our Postmodern Age, an age so taken with overstimulation of the eyes and ears and sensations generally that it literally drives us to distraction, to inattention to a proper integration of our experiences into a integrated self.

Kennedy thus expresses sympathy for Augustine's critique directed toward "the lust of the eyes" and explains what he finds troubling about "idle curiosity":

What is problematic about curiosity, as [Josef] Pieper and such predecessors as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bernard of Clairvaux argue, is that curiosity both distracts us from proper attention to that to which we ought to be attending and disposes us to attend in the wrong sort of way whenever we do turn to that to which we ought to be attending. To repeat, the vice of curiosity both (a) interferes with the proper objects of attention and (b) the proper means of attention. Curiosity typically distracts us from attention to the right things. We look for the new sight, the next visual thrill. Mouse in hand, we surf from Web site to Web site, on the prowl for something a little faster, a little glitzier, than the last sight. And should we pause and attend to the right things, curiosity disposes us to attend in the wrong sort of way. Again, the curious person surfs the Web, thrilled by the look or the sound of a page without considering whether look or sound may interfere with the message of the page. Or, the curious person neglects the printed page for it does not thrill as the Web search does.

Curiosity, then, is a mental habit, a disposition to attend to the world in a particular way, that way consisting of a heightened sensitivity to and awareness of information and cognitive experiences that are mentally stimulating and thrilling. It is the habit of intellectual thrill-seeking, a fixed disposition to abandon understanding for the sake of the interesting, the novel, the superficially stimulating. (Thomas D. Kennedy, "Curiosity and the Integrated Self: A Postmodern Vice," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 4.4 (2001), pages 46-47)

For Kennedy, curiosity is synonymous with idle curiosity, a superficial attention to sensations, a lack of genuine care for understanding. Curiosity of this sort, of course, would have had little to contribute toward the development of modern science but would, rather, have acted as a distracting force.

Like Aquinas, Kennedy offers "studiousness" as the virtue to cultivate for an antidote to the vice of curiosity:

By contrast, those with the corresponding virtue of studiousness, the disposition to a guided and reflective pursuit of knowledge, a prudent attention to God, to the world and to oneself, will be disposed to see the world. That seeing requires a discipline of looking, of studying what is there to be seen and heard. One focuses, ignores the temptation of distracting sights and sounds, in order to get in touch with what is present to him or her. With respect to the moral life, that seeing calls for an awareness of who one is and a sensitivity to the relation between one's self-understanding and one's beliefs, feelings, and actions. In short, studiousness is a necessary condition for self-integration. (Kennedy, "Curiosity and the Integrated Self," page 49)

Kennedy stipulates that one's careful rather than curious attention to God, the world, and oneself should be "prudent." I wonder what this prudence consists in. Blumenberg might consider the Medieval thinker's focus upon God, to the exclusion of the world (and perhaps of oneself), imprudent. Prudence would advise an openness to new experiences as a crucial corrective to narrowmindedness. The extreme character of Augustine's critique directed toward curiosity would close one off to the world, as Blumenberg has rather brilliantly shown.

Yet, I understand what Kennedy -- and Augustine -- mean about idle curiosity being superficial, for the internet stands as an ever-present temptation threatening to distract me from my more serious studies. There's a moral struggle involved in not allowing myself to be idly distracted by You Tube and suddenly realize that an hour has slipped away.

I'd like to say that I've resolved this problem of the proper balance between curiosity and studiousness, but a resolution of that point will have to wait until greater insight on my part.

Mere Curiosity

Hans Blumenberg

A Curious Man

(Image from Suhrkamp Insel)

I believe that I mentioned in this blog a couple of weeks ago that Warren T. Reich had asked me to participate in his work on the history of care, focusing upon curiosity in the sense of what Hans Blumenberg called "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity" in his great tome, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

I agreed to take part in this endeavor and so wrote an email to one of my old Berkeley mentors, John Heilbron, who now lives in a very small British village with only one pub but still manages to produce great works in the history of science:

Greetings from Jeff Hodges. I suppose that you're getting accustomed to my bolts out of the blue.

I hope that you are doing well, and I suppose that you've un-retired two or three times by now, despite your wife's wishes...

Your onetime mentioned desire that I become a scholar (a remark dating back to 1983 or thereabouts) might finally be coming to fruition. I had been asked by a Korean scholar to act as a respondant at an international conference last week, and one of the speakers was Warrren T. Reich, the man who founded the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, and his was one of the papers that I had to respond to.

I suppose that I must have learned some intellectual rigor, academic discipline, and research skills from the history-of-science program, for in Reich's reply to my response, he stated, "Professor Hodges' response to my paper was the finest that I have ever heard at any conference that I've attended." I was astonished, to say the least, for Professor Reich is 75 years old. I guess that I just happened to say the right things.

Anyway, he has asked me to participate in a research project on the history of "care" -- specifically, Care: A History of the Idea and Its Practice. Because I had mentioned the term "curiositas" and its treatment in Hans Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Reich wants me to deal with the theme of curiosity and its relation to the developement of modern science. He also wants me to keep an eye to the project's larger theme, i.e., the history of "care."

I recalled from a seminar (perhaps the one that we held in Bancroft Library, a seminar in which Rebecca referred to Galileo as "dropping his balls"), that you once mentioned that "care" and "curiosity" are etymologically related. I believe that Blumenberg had also noted this in his book, but what I'm 'curious' to know is if you could suggest a bibliography relevant to this topic.

Don't go to any trouble, of course, and my role in this project is just one among 75 researchers, though I'd be a "Senior Research Scholar," which sounds honorable enough. If you're especially interested in knowing about the project, I could forward you the description that was sent to me on "Curiosity, Science, and Modernity."

At any rate, you might be interested in knowing what I'm up to these days.

John must have been out-of-village, for I didn't hear from him for over a week even though he's ordinarily very prompt. Here's his eventual reply:

Many congratulations on your performance as commentator and its results. Too often commentators just want to show off and say nothing useful to the speaker or the audience.

I don't know of a bibliography of care/curiosity. For curiosity/wonder in early modern science there is the not-so-good book by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, which will give you some orientation. I would not be surprised if care/curiosity had an entry somewhere in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Other clues might be found in historical dictionaries like the OED. You might begin by reviewing the meaning of "curiosus" in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.

Take care.

Well, those are some places to start, and I have John's ironic blessing and will indeed take 'care'. I suppose that the paucity of information is a good sign that much remains to be done. I've already checked Amazon Books for what it has on the book by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, which turns out to be titled Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. I've written a note to myself on this book:

Lorraine Daston is Director of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and Women's Studies at Harvard University, so the authors are reputable scholars.

However, John Heilbron, historian of science and one of my mentors at UC Berkeley, mentioned this book but characterized it as "not-so-good."

I've only seen it at Amazon, where I had access to its table of contents and index:

Table of Contents:

Chapter 3: Wonder Among the Philosophers (page 109):

The Philosophers against Wonder (page 110)
Curiosity and the Preternatural (page 120)

Chapter 8: The Passions of Inquiry (page 303)
Ravening Curiosity (page 305)
Wonder and Curiosity Allied (page 311)

Index (page 502): curiosity:

9-10
definitions of: 397, n. 57; 434, n. 12
Enlightenment rejection of: 303-16; 258-58; 356
and magic: 396, n. 51
medieval attitudes toward: 92; 122-25
seventeenth-century attitudes toward: 218; 273-74
terminology for: 434, n. 7

From what I've seen of the book at Amazon, it would appear to link curiosity to wonder and the older sense of the object of curiosity as something 'odd' -- more an object of wonder as presented in the tradition of "paradoxography" than as a phenomenon to be investigated, a 'curiosity' (though I gather that part of the book is a history of how attitudes toward curiosity changed and became more positive).

Anyway, this is part of my initial foray into the obscure, liminal territory of 'curiosities' -- that rare realm of remarkable wonders that surpass our reason. One question for me is how curiosity changed from a willful distraction from things serious to a serious faculty that we should care about and for.

Curious readers are invited to respond...

"O death, where is thy sting?"

El Greco, Saint Paul

"much possessed by death"

(Image from Wikipedia)

In taking leave of Professor Warren Reich last Thursday, we spoke briefly about the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who has recently had a book published on our modern secularity titled A Secular Age.

I hadn't heard of the book, but Reich informed me that my old Berkeley advisor Robert Bellah had praised it highly as "possibly the best book that he'd ever read." Those were Reich's words in recalling the blurb from Bellah on Secular Age's cover. On the basis of that recommendation, Reich told me that he intended to read the book.

I think that I'll also have to read it ... as soon as I finish Rosenstock-Heussy's Out of Revolution.

I've looked at the Amazon site and found Bellah's exact quote:

"This is Charles Taylor's breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment."

At about 80 years of age, Bellah is speaking of a rather long lifetime, so the book is therefore edging out a lot of fine competitors, including his own Habits of the Heart.

Taylor and his new book were therefore on my mind when I received my periodic email from Commonweal Magazine and discovered that he has published an article relevant to the Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference that I recently attended. The article is titled "The Sting of Death: Why We Yearn for Eternity."

The title is borrowed from I Corinthians 15:55 and occurs within a longer passage by Paul on Christ's victory over death:

50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Corinthians 15:50-57, KJV)

The passage is not exactly a simple one, though it's perhaps clear enough. Here's my take:

Christ has overcome death, presumably through his own resurrection from the dead (though this particular passage does not specify), and through his victory, believers will be transformed at the end times' final resurrection from their corrupted bodies to incorruptible bodies that live immortally, thereby drawing out death's sting, the very sin that had corrupted humankind and rendered humanity subject to the judgement of death according to the law, a judgement that Christ himself had undergone for humanity's sake in order to bring corrupted humankind uncorrupted back to God.

As I said, perhaps that's clear enough. Most commentators agree that verse 54's words "Death is swallowed up in victory" are borrowed by Paul from Isaiah 25:8: "He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces." As for verse 55's sting of death, Paul seems to be thinking of Hosea 13:14, although that verse does not easily lend itself to Paul's use:

I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes. (Hosea 13:14, KJV)

I'm tempted to ask, "O death, where is thy sting?" It's not exactly there in the King James Version. The New American Standard Bible slips it into the verse:

Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from death?
O Death, where are your thorns?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion will be hidden from My sight. (Hosea 13:14, NASB)

But this version is perhaps being harmonized to I Corinthians 15:55 -- though I'd need to do a lot more leafing through commentaries to be sure.

John Milton, I'll note in passing, perhaps locates this sting, somewhat mythologically, in the personified image of Death as a fearsome if amorphous entity bearing a "dreadful dart":

...black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; (Paradise Lost 2.670-2)

Also in the same passage, the personified figure of Sin appears and refers to this as a "mortal Dart" (2.729). I take it that Milton is thinking -- among other things -- of I Corinthians 15:55.

Be that as it may, Paul himself says that the sting of death is sin, by which, he means that the sting of death is the very corruption that sin brings to bring on death. More briefly put, the sting of death is death itself.

And that is how we usually understand the phrase, but what does Charles Taylor mean? This:

What is hardest of all ... is the death of loved ones. For death is one of the things that makes it very difficult to sustain a sense of the higher meaning of ordinary life, in particular our love relationships. It's not just that these relationships matter to us a lot, and hence there is a grievous hole in our lives when our partner dies. It's also that, because these relationships are so significant, they seem to demand eternity. A deep love already exists against the vicissitudes of life, tying together past and present in spite of the disruptions and dispersals of quarrels, distractions, misunderstandings, resentments. By its very nature it participates in gathered time. And so death can seem a defeat, the ultimate dispersal that remains ungathered.

In Professor Christopher M. Moreman's presentation on Friday, he located the all-too-human belief in God within the fearfulness with which we encounter the certainty of our own death, a mysterium tremendum in the sense meant by Rudolf Otto in his seminal work, The Idea of the Holy. According to Moreman, this terrible sense of our own death leads us to project onto the nonbeing of death a great Being in our own image who will rescue us from death.

Taylor would say no, that's not the dialectic. The experience that really leads us to long for eternity is not some trembling before the ineluctable certainty of our own death but the loss of those whom we love so dearly.

Though I don't entirely dismiss Moreman's argument, I think that Taylor comes closer to what most people feel about death. We can often come to some acceptance of our own death. But the death of one's mother, father ... of grandparents? Of a beloved spouse? Of a loved child?

These are the sting of death.

Warren T. Reich on the Consolation of Phronesis?

Boethius (480-524/5) Teaching Students Consolation

Folio 4r in 1385 Manuscript of Consolation of Philosophy

MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11), Glasgow University Library

(Image from Wikipedia)

Because I'm even more pressed for time this morning, I'll just paraphrase the summary that I've prepared of Professor Reich's paper, "Consoling the Dying and Those Who Mourn: Reviving an Ancient Tradition," which he presented yesterday and which I'll be commenting upon in a session of the conference today:

Reich informs us that the most fundamental and proper form of care that we can show to those who are dying or mourning is by consoling them, which offers an active, direct, and practical approach to these problems, in contrast to the virtues of empathy and compassion, which are also important but which are not essentially connected to action. Consolation thus fills a need that no other virtue can, and Reich turns to the lengthy, 3000-year-old 'European' tradition of consolation for 'new' sources to draw upon in care for the dying. Among these sources are pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones. Common to all three is an understanding of consolation as aiming at anxious care, which consolation attempts to alleviate. Of particular interest is that Reich extends the consolation to be provided far beyond an art of dying to an art of living, an extension that he also finds in late antiquity and that he suggests may be needed even in our present, anxious times, for the various sorts of anxiety can be depicted as a single, unified object of consolation: anxious worry. Reich notes three approaches within the Christian tradition toward alleviating anxious worry: a belief in security, especially divine security; a willingness to let God be God; and a trust that one can cast one's cares upon God and be cared for in return. Reich calls this third sort a care-care dialectic and treats it as something that human beings can also provide, offering consoling care for the anxious care. In the ancient practice, consolation meant not to share grief but to remove it by appeal to reason and exhortation. This practice entails an art of living well, of knowing the telos of human desire and action, and of seeking happiness. Reich goes on to note the stages that a sufferer undergoes cases of severe health problems and in cases of dying, and he suggests that at a stage where the consoler and the one being consoled are communicating, the consoler should cite and comment upon aphorisms, for these resonate with the larger traditions of practical wisdom (phronesis) from which they stem and have been used in the past to console because they draw upon a broader, richer ground of moral understanding. Reich concludes by calling for a broad-based effort to recover the long tradition of consolation and bring it again into use. In my opinion, he has made a good case for this need, and he has even raised the central question that I would raise, namely, how to develop consolation for a pluralistic society of competing beliefs and values.

That last point is the tough one. In our fragmented, postmodern world of competing values, can a caregiver console the dying if their values are fundamentally different? Some religious traditions are exclusivistic and offer no consolation to those outside. A caregiver belonging to an exclusivistic religion might believe that consolation follows from conversion and that the means toward converting the outsider would first involve raising the outsider's level of anxiety about what to expect after death before extending the only hope of consolation.

That sounds like an issue for discussion at the conference today.

Response to Warren T. Reich on ars moriendi

Aristotle

Philosopher of Phronesis

(Image from Wikipedia)

I suppose that I can now name one of the scholars whose papers I'm responding to.

Yesterday at Sogang University's Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference, I responded to two papers, but I'll report on just one of my two responses, the one I made to Warren T. Reich's paper on "The Art of Caring for the Dying: A Crisis in Western Culture."

Professor Reich, by the way, is a Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), where he holds a position as Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and Ethics.

I won't summarize his entire article here because I'm pressed for time this morning, but I'll draw some passages from my response to a distinction that he made between negative and positive empathy, and I'll also include some observations relevant to caring for the dying:

You make the interesting point that empathy for the feelings of another requires not simply positive but also negative attention to the other as an individual. I confess that I had never thought of this negative aspect of empathy, by which you mean our need to diminish the attention given to anything distracting us from feeling 'with' the other.

...

I'm not a professional caregiver, but when I lived in Tübingen, Germany, I knew a young man named Daniel from Uganda who was dying of AIDS. I didn't know him well, but because we had a friend in common and because Daniel was very alone, I decided to visit him every afternoon in his hospital room on my way back from the theology library where I was pursuing my doctoral research. In doing so, I had to learn a capacity within myself to be with another person who is dying, and that requires patience, something that I'm not abundantly endowed with. I had to give up my impatience, my desire to do things quickly, for I did not know how long his dying might take. Perhaps by negative empathy, you mean something like that? I also had to relinquish some other things, such as disgust, for I occasionally had to help hold Daniel as the nurse wiped him clean after he had used the toilet. That also involved my overcoming my own trepidation about the virus that he carried. However, my knowledge of the disease helped me in that, for I knew that HIV is very hard to contract.

...

Recently, I have read reviews of a book by a young physician who has learned some of the lessons [about empathy, consolation, and care for the dying] that you describe. Her name is Pauline W. Chen, and her book is titled Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality. She also maintains a blog, and in an entry titled "Our two jobs," she writes:

I met a woman whose father had practiced surgery from the 1950's until his death from pancreatic cancer in the 1980's. He had a very busy practice and on top of his clinical duties was chairman of surgery at two of the local hospitals.

One day, this woman went to visit her father at the hospital. She found him in a patient's room, sitting at the bedside and reading the Bible aloud to his patient. When he later left the patient's room, his daughter asked him, "Why were you reading to that patient?"

"She asked me to read from the Bible to her," her father replied. "And because I could no longer do anything for her medically, I did what I could." (Chen, Amazon Blog)

Chen tells us that she was trained in surgery at a time when therapeutic failures were an exception but that older surgeons learned at a time when such failure was the rule. Older doctors understood the importance of taking time, and Chen advises younger doctors to learn the importance of doing so as well:

[S]ometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do has nothing to do with another drug or operation. Sometimes all we can -- and should -- do is simply be with our patients, make them comfortable. Sometimes the very best thing we can do as someone's doctor is to sit at their bedside, take their favorite book, and read aloud. (Chen, Amazon Blog)

I think that Chen and you are asking us to develop wisdom, a sense for the right thing to do.

From your citation of Walt Whitman as nurse and as poet, I gather that you would agree that he was one who had this sort of wisdom. Concerning the wisdom of knowing what to do, I am reminded of an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln:

Towards the end of the war, Lincoln went to see Seward, his Secretary of State, a man with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had managed to break both his arm and his jaw in a carriage accident. Lincoln found him not only bedridden but quite unable to move his head. Without a moment’s hesitation, the President stretched out full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near Seward's, and they held an urgent, whispered consultation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep. Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might be avoided. Of how many other great men can that be said? (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) page 487; citing David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Touchstone, 1996) 580-1)

William H. Seward was not dying, of course, but he was suffering, and Lincoln showed wisdom in extending a special kind of compassion -- negative empathy in relinquishing his dislike for the man, and positive empathy in recognizing that Seward needed company, someone to be there in his suffering until he drifted off to sleep.

Could we call this sort of practical wisdom by Aristotle's term for it: phronesis? Or is it a different sort of ethical wisdom? If so, could you suggest a different term?

Such was a portion of my response to Professor Reich's interesting paper on the issue of how to care for the dying, which I cannot quote directly since it is not yet published. Reich seems to have liked what I said, for he replied by remarking at the outset that my response "was the finest that he had ever heard at any conference that he had attended in his life," or something to that effect. I was so surprised that my astonishment may have interfered with my capacity to retain his exact words, which were, actually, the nicest thing that anybody's ever said to me.

Anyway, he did confirm that he was thinking about Aristotle's category of phronesis, or "practical wisdom," and he later asked me if he could have the sources for the quotes from Chen and Johnson.

Now, I must ready myself for another day at the conference.