Unfortunately, detached objectivity2 is often rapidly expanded to value-free objectivity2 […]. In value-free objectivity2, all values (or all subjective or “biasing” influences) are banned from the reasoning process. This meaning of objectivity derives support from the idea that values are inherently subjective things, and thus their role in a process contaminates it, making it unobjective. In an effort to prevent this, philosophers and scientists have argued that we need to exclude values from science, particularly ethical and societal values. Note how much broader this prohibition is from prohibiting values from supplanting evidence. Values can play many roles in the reasoning process aside from displacing evidence, from focusing interests and questions to determining which errors are more tolerable. However, we remain under the grip of a post-positivist hangover that all (non-epistemic) values in the (internal stages of the) scientific reasoning process are bad. We fear that any role for values (which some positivists defined as inherently meaningless) in epistemic processes will “distort” knowledge. We train scientists to believe that values are not allowed in science and they must ward off any appearance of personal values or personal judgments playing a role in their doing of science. Thus, scientific papers have a very formulaic structure in which the role of the scientist as active decision-maker in the scientific process is deftly hidden.
Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity”
A friend tells me he was holding
his mother’s hand as she lay dying.
At the end, her final words were,
“I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.”
“Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him”
or “we’ll be together again”
but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing
that language almost means
then frightens us when it doesn’t—
love, we say, God, we write,
and the words fall short. We dream
of lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,
a word is worth a thousand pictures.
What you say doesn’t have to be true.
It only has to be imaginable.
Where is my friend’s father?
In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say,
or sorting nails in the workshop.
Or in the yard, unlearning
the constellations so he can see the stars.
David Kirby, “Not the Almost-Right Word”
[T]he destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost, “Climate and Punishment”
In my serpentine researches
I came on a book review in Poetry
which began, with sublime assurance,
a comprehensive air of majesty,“The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom; languageso twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.”
I was never altogether the same man after that.
John Berryman, “Olympus”
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”, in Four Quartets
You swim with people then get out of the water, and you’re really with them, when you’re wet and drying off. The sun on you, drying up. Like being in a dream together. Moving between elements with someone, that’s special.
Harriet Clark, The Hill, in Dan Piepenbring, “New Books”
What is the difference between light and lighting? There is an etching called The Three Crosses by Rembrandt. It is a picture of the earth and the sky and the Calvary. A moment rains down on them, the plate grows darker. Darker. Rembrandt wakens you just in time to see matter stumble out of its forms.
Anne Carson, “Short Talk on the End”, in Short Talks
Lucian Freud’s art, whatever its merits, contains within itself the fundamental limitation of misogyny, which is a form of partial sight, a handicap with precise consequences if you happen to be a portraitist whose subjects are often women. For example, the Celia Paul whom Freud believed he saw, whom he set out to paint[, …] was not really the person lying before him. This is not to claim that Freud’s portraits are either ‘wrong’ (whatever such a word could be mean in this context) or even bad, but simply that they are notably partial, being blind to so much; indeed, to the essential quality of the subject in question. Freud thought he saw it all, purely, clearly, without distortion—that was his fame.
But when it came to women, he did not see. Misogyny, whatever else it might be, is a form of distortion, a way of not seeing, of assuming both too much and too little.
Zadie Smith, “The Muse at Her Easel”, in Dead and Alive: Essays
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.
Walker Percy, in Geoff Dyer, introduction to Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints
At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love each other without knowing much about it.
Albert Camus, The Plague
“I suppose,” he began, once there was a cup of tea for each of us on the cocktail table between our chairs, “that I’m writing this in my late style.” He wasn’t reading from pages, as he had before. It took me a moment to realize that he was counting on the notebook that I thought it had been my idea to bring. I started scribbling. “My very latest! I’ve never been entirely sure what late style is supposed to be. A conscious simplicity—digging a channel in the hope that its sides will contain the yaw that cognitive decay knocks into the boat? Or is it the resignation that an older artisan is likely to feel about the familiarity of his tools? The overfamiliarity. I imagine a pianist, at the end of her career, thinking, Oh, just these notes, then? There aren’t any others in the keyboard, by any chance? But it’s not notes, exactly, I don’t think, that she would be getting tired of. Any more than it would be words for a novelist. Or for a philosopher, for that matter. I think it’s more likely to be phrases, for a musician. Or ways of shaping phrases. And characteristic moves, for a philosopher. Logical and, as it were, procedural moves. Moves in the game. Maybe what’s meant by late style is that one gets tired of one’s own manner, of the little ways of solving the little problems, ways that have become so habitual they no longer feel chosen—ways of opening an inquiry, say—sidling up to it or attacking it head-on—whatever your personal predilection happens to be—and instead of finding new ways, instead of experimenting the way a young person does, you accept the familiarity, accept the simplicity of not choosing, and make an effort to attack a new problem, or maybe an old problem, of greater scope, using the old ways of solving as tools. At its best, anyway, that’s what I think late style would be.”
Caleb Crain, “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk About Death Is Funny”