Yesterday, en route to Greenbelt, I read a bunch of current affairs magazines. Big philosophical issues on what it is to be human never seemed far from the surface of many articles.
In Standpoint, Ray Tallis and Roger Scruton have a fascinating exchange, covering matters from the genius of the common law (a case of bottom-up wisdom) to our cultural inheritance from the Pleistocene (almost nothing that matters). Their thoughts come together on the issue of music.
For Tallis, it provides the quintessential example of human freedom, arising from the mystery of consciousness: there's no causality in music - one note does not deterministically lead to another - and yet a melody or motif is a whole, in that it makes sense to us, speaks to us. Scruton adds that the astonishing thing about music is that it enables us to share another individual's first-person point of view. Its thrill is, in part, in experiencing the world together. Moreover, music does not happen in the material world, where sound is but a sequence, but happens because we are invited to participate in another world, its world.
Which partly goes to explain why Nicholas Humphrey's account of beauty, in Prospect, won't do. Trapped in an instrumental world - of utility, not violins - he explains it like the peacock's tail: a matter of sexual display. But this is surely a case of evolution explaining away what it purports to explain. If you don't like the aesthetic insights of Scruton and Tallis on music, which challenge this reductionism, then how about the hard observation of the physicist, that the beauty of equations is a key test of their explanatory power. Humphrey would say that the perception of beauty in the physicist's equations arises because they represent stable forms, and we are attracted to stable forms because stability is desirable in a sexual partner. Is it just me, or are you thinking, 'shaggy dog story'?
In truth, there's a battle going on in these debates about the veracity of naturalism, which leads to a third piece I read. According to André Comte-Sponville, naturalism does not entail giving up on notions of the sacred, the absolute, the holy. But, as John Cottingham argues, the natural world, as nothing more than natural process, can deliver none of these things. Thermodynamics alone decrees that everything awaits final destruction, and before that fateful day, all values are human projections.
Cottingham believes that revisionist atheists, like Comte-Sponville, are having their spiritual cake and eating it, co-opting religious ideas whose metaphysical foundations they simultaneously reject. The implication is that they should have the courage of their convictions and make that leap of faith...
