The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

Upon my third (perhaps fourth) reading of Tolkien's classic, I am struck by how little the story provides to the reader. Tolkien's work rarely feels heavy-handed and indeed puts a tremendous burden upon the reader to make their way in a world which is only gradually, and never completely, revealed to them. A deserved charge is that the tale too frequently references people, places, and events which otherwise go unacknowledged within this vast created world. While such references often allude to magical occurrences and fanciful creatures, the limited information provided suggests, rather than explains, a broader world which stretches beyond the character's times and actions. As the stakes and the scope grow, the reader, along with the four hobbits, gradually moves beyond their own parochialism. Thrust into world-altering events, the four hobbits grow as we would expect of a youth coming into adulthood. Throughout their journey they are exposed to, though never fully engaged with, a more 'adult' world of the powerful and terrible. The mystery they move through remains only partially illuminated. Similarly, to whom is the world ever fully understood?

The History of Ornithology - Peter Bircham

If, as mentioned in an earlier review, there is no such thing as 'art,' only artists, we might similarly add that there is no such thing as 'ornithology', only ornithologists. Specifically, Bircham's account tells us only that the history of British ornithology has been composed by individuals (almost exclusively men) who are best understood within the confines of their era, their educational and field training, and the mode of biological and ecological science that prevailed in their lifetimes.

Much of this recounted history is as uninspiring as many non-ornithologists might assume. Too often it reads as a catalog of amateurs and academics. Debates surrounding Linnean nomenclature and listing techniques (among other issues) are treated primarily as esoteric territory battles with little exploration of how ornithology and ornithologists impacted the broader biological sciences. By keeping the focus narrowly upon ornithology, but not pursuing any specific aspect in too much depth, topics of certain interest - the first British bird book written, studies of migration, species classification - are sometimes subsumed to the inclusion of biographical synopsis of ornithologists' lives. At its weaker moments this history reads more like a chronicle. Relatively unexplored is the question of why a history of British ornithology is necessary and what it teaches us not only about the field and the biological sciences, but about our evolving relationship to birds and the environment at-large.

There are some great mysteries and wonders of the past, which Bircham touches upon; these convey a sense of how ornithological understanding has changed. We do well to remember that many of our scientific matters of fact are mediated and authorized by technological developments. How could proto-ornithologists have known where swallows migrated before the exploration of interior Africa? Without radio tracking how could avian movements be traced from county to county? Let alone country to country? Physical and social technologies (e.g. the development of laboratory sciences) were never a given as ornithology moved beyond bird-watching and cataloging to stand as a robust field of inquiry. Early chapters of Bircham's account transport the reader to a time when even the term scientist was unheard. These provide interesting moments of reflection. Missing is a more explicit engagement in these moments, and more clear discussion of why they raise questions which are pertinent for the modern reader.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women - Donna Haraway

Lenses through which we see and languages through which we speak, are each integrally constitutive of how and what we know. Of the world we create and thus inhabit. The (re)invention of nature will be composed of how we imagine the divide between ourselves and the world - thus how we envision ourselves. In this collection of essays, Donna Haraway seeks to replace the closed, coherent imagined self with a social and world-inhabiting and creating identity which is more thoroughly local, contingent, and provisional. Simians, cyborgs, and women all represent alternate not-quite-fully human identities which have been used to draw boundaries in the hegemonic, masculine, reductionist, economic western patriarchy. Haraway seeks an alternate epistemology which is specifically located and thus not parochial, but which is strengthened through its intimate familiarity of perspective. The view from nowhere, she suggests, is no view at all.

Haraway takes the perspective that all scientific texts are situated entities susceptible to critique. Taking the position of social-embeddedness to a logical conclusion, she asks how the modes of metaphor and seeing through which we experience the natural, say studies of primatology, will condition our ways of understanding the always partially uncertain world. Visions of dominance hierarchies which focus upon aggression within primate communities risk overlooking how mutualistic interactions may also play a central role in group functioning and maintenance. When we draw parallels between our primate relatives and the human social world - as though chimps were somehow archaic people 'unpolluted' by the cultural factor - suddenly 'human nature' is imagined to likewise be expressive of dominant-subordinate relationships. This perspective feeds-back: our perspective along these lines deepen, altering how we see the world.

Rather than juxtapose the human with the natural, Haraway suggests that we are all more emblematic of the cyborg. That is, our bodies have been, and will continue to be, hybrids, composed of the natural world and technologies. She rejects the question, but what, underneath it all, is truly the human? There is no 'underneath it all.' The relationships which we embody are constitutive of reality. Hope to separate the human from the world - as though we would each have an unpolluted essence - are always false hopes. We are positioned and thus privileged within that unique position to know and express one of many worlds. Reality is the ever-transforming meeting place between the mind and the world. Never closed, always partial.

The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Nietzsche

If "existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" (p. 128), then what is real is that which is created at the interstitial meeting point of the observer and the observed. The real is thus local and created; it is explicitly positional.

Nietzsche examines the dual-nature of the inherited western perspective, what he terms the Apollonian and Dionysian, and critiques the disappearance of the Dionysian perspective. The Apollonian, or the rational, the knowable, has subsumed the older, more primal Dionysian. Using the metaphor of Olympian Gods and Titans, Nietzsche believes the expulsion of the Titans, of a certain naturalness which prefigures the social, has left western thought and western society both impoverished and incoherent. How are we to know that, pace Socrates, 'knowledge is virtue'? The compulsion which drives the scientist or the philosopher, the spirit which animates the use of the rational approach and/or the dialectic, comes not from phenomena, but from that deeper, hidden aspect of the real. Nietzsche would echo - and somewhat alter - Schopenhauer,  in terming this hidden aspect the will.

It is a somewhat fine point to differentiate between that which underpins Nietzsche's world and that which Socrates/Plato would term the eternal and the changeless (often the Forms). Nietzsche's main complaint is that Socrates/Plato has taken one side of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality and subsumed all of reality to an Apollonian perspective. The triumph of reason is, and has been, for Nietzsche, groundless, somewhat ironic, and has contributed to a widespread cultural impoverishment that 19th century Germany suffered greatly from (the sympathetic reader might extend this assessment to our contemporary situation). Whether this was Plato's intent or not, is debatable (see Zuckert 1985, Nietzsche's Rereading of Plato). What is clear is that Nietzsche takes the philosopher, and his teacher, very seriously. The implications he draws from these Athenians' teachings suggest we should as well. They have crafted the position we inhabit and thus the real we embody.

The Story of Art - E.H. Gombrich

"There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists."

Gombrich's history of western art, from the antecedents of the Greeks to the modern era, traces the developments of artistic style and expression. Gombrich's investigation is, by needs, somewhat bifurcated. Early art is examined for the developments of technique, while art following the achievements of the Greeks primarily emphasizes how different artists responded to the legacies of their forebears. Gombrich is quick to recognize, and eager to reiterate, that we cannot view post-Roman art as simply progress beyond the imperfect attempts of the earlier eras. Besides the exquisite form of Greek statuary (known primarily through Roman copies), fresco, relief, and architectural works sought to convey the natural world in a different manner than we might today.

The truth of perception, as it related to absolute perspective versus the perspective of the individual, is a matter of intellectual history, and has evolved greatly over time. The last two hundred or so years of western art history mirror much of the varying pendulum swings which encapsulate the broad array of perspectives on how the individual sees, ought to see, or might possibly see the world. And the extent to which this problem is worth pursuing. The shift to individual perspective (primarily expressed through painting), maps onto changes in the subject matter for art. As individual perspective replaced the divine or total viewpoint, the subjects of art evolved from the sacred, towards the actions of the royal and powerful, and finally towards the common or volk. Though Gombrich does not emphasize this aspect, the reader can project transformations in social and political arenas which would have accompanied, reacted too, and been anticipated by much of the art which has reflected and shaped the western world.

Gombrich's account stays close to the central question of humanity's relationship with a world not of our making. The man-nature relationship - as mediated by the social, the political, the religious, and the economic (among many other contemporary labels) - is, in Gombrich's estimation, the central concern of the artist. Within this arena we may recognize men's and women's relationships with themselves. We are each somewhat an unknown quantity; not of our own creation. If Gombrich has a criticism of modern art it is that this wrestling has become obscured - overshadowed by the purely personal and the need to express the novel. We might, similarly, read this into the modern condition: the question of what is good being replaced by what is new. Whether this reflects, anticipates, or is in response to the broader social prospect is the question of the artists' role in society. This too has changed, and will no doubt continue to evolve.

My First Summer in the Sierra - John Muir

Wonder is an emotion often left unshared, unstated. Perhaps wonder is principally born of novelty. Yet when novelty becomes almost de rigueur in our daily experience, might we then lose the capacity to wonder, to marvel at the unexpected and the unforeseen? Perhaps novelty which ensconces us can no longer deserve the name. Or, perhaps, wonder is indicative of the truly meaningful. John Muir speaks of, and revels within, a sense of wonder.

The mysteries of the universe are legion. Within his small corner of it John Muir sought to, step by step, trace these mysteries in the hopes that he might find them more easily understood. Muir found the nourishment of his wonder in the big outside beyond man's confining structures. My First Summer in the Sierra is primarily an account of discovery at the nexus of the self and the natural world. For Muir, the evocations which are drawn from him rely upon the experience of wonder at the natural - what he and his contemporaries would have called the sublime. It is marvelous to note that Muir's capacity for awe and wonder is undiminished. He seems nurtured by the natural which he inhabits. In its vastness and intricacies the world makes and remakes Muir anew each day. The sustaining power speaks to a spiritual fullness.

Muir's account occasionally overflows with details of plants and animals that the uninitiated may find distracting. Yet, we see that his careful attention to particularity, his learned knowledge of the world, helps to foster his feelings of connection and wonder. In this we can see that the world is also of our making. While the landscape may impose its grandeur upon Muir, he has also turned himself into a willing vessel for the message. By making his eyes that see, ears that hear, and feet that feel the compulsion to explore, Muir has also helped to create a world which is capable of imparting lessons, both quiet and thunderous. The world is both of his making and forever slightly beyond his reach. Thus the mystery remains and as knowledge deepens Muir's wonder grows apace.

The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown

Once again, Robert Langdon is on the run. Chasing truth; being chased by shadowy forces. This time the setting is Washington DC and the Masons are Langdon's historical interlocutor. Puzzles, twists, art, history, attractive and brilliant women in their thirties - The Lost Symbol is a Brown page turner much like any other.

There isn't much particularly novel to say about Brown's work, nor much that separates this one from any other. So I wanted to take a second to ponder the hidden reality that Brown evokes in this and the other adventures of Robert Langdon. Though each tale is clearly a work of fiction, the reality they inhabit/create is meant to serve as a referent for our own. The possibility of these stories is informed by a history we can imagine to exist below the one we have generally agreed upon. Brown almost seems to argue that, if we have eyes to look properly, we might view the lessons and passages of history very differently. That taking a different approach to what we understand about our common past can drastically reorient our shared present.

The loss of the modern - frequently espoused by Langdon - is that we have forgotten that the knowledge of the present has not necessarily superseded the wisdom of the ancients. Rather than pit modern ways of knowing against past understandings, Brown constructs a world in which the forgotten messages of the past are crucial to a deeper perspective on the present. To this end he may be one of History's (as a discipline) most notable contemporary proponents. However, we are mistaken if we assume that Brown is little more than a history geek and conspiracy buff. If we take his writing to be indicative of his ethics, Brown believes that the ultimate service of historical understanding is the formation of the complete person. The historical message we read in his work, time and again, is that of a divided society replicated in divided people. Both the world and the people who strive within it can only be healed by reconciling the shared reality of reason and faith.The whole person, like the whole society, must necessarily contain and be amenable to the teachings of both.

Surely the fast-paced action and twisting intrigue of Brown's stories are the method for keeping the reader enraptured within his shade of a fiction that we imagine as possible. The hook is the hope that secrets, which we can imagine could be true, are revealed. Yet the moral is that the past is a rich field of meaning; one which the present remains connected to. If it seems that our modern condition is that of floating in a space of uncertainty, Brown reminds us to pay attention to the pathways which lead us to the past - they might point us towards the future.