There's nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves—this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There's something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences. - REBECCA GOLDSTEIN
It's frustrating that Goldstein can't separate truth from beauty from herself. It's one thing - a great thing - to find great beauty in mathematics, "objective" truths and etc - but it's another thing altogether to close the book, so to speak, and place it back on the shelf. She makes statements like
[C.P. Snow's book] had a big impact on me, impressing me with the hollowness of bifurcating the intellect and the passions. The intellect is passionate.and I'm hopeful - but she follows that passion out to the bitter end. It is possible to utilize reason and to find the beauty in it (I could say 'beauty' instead of 'reason' as well) without tricking yourself into thinking that reason is some gift of God, an absolutely True assessment of the natural world as it is. I don't think reason needs to be worshiped as Zeus in order for it to be useful, breathtaking, etc. Let's not kid ourselves... that kind of stubbornness breeds war and spite and etc...
It's interesting though that in this decade - if I can make a gross generalization based on the content of Arts and Letters Daily; why not, here goes - it seems that Truth is making a comeback, and it's a bitter, vengeful one. What's that, Mr. N?
There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
