dom.blog

Ooh, I love lectures at the moment. Many historians aren’t so fond of attending, and though I tend to side with Matt’s “well, we are paying for it” line I think I also just enjoy the format. (Part of me will always see it as a luxurious indulgence just to be able to sit back and not have to contribute anything, unlike school.) But yes, today we had some rather cool stuff on natural law, and it’s great to have someone kindly walk you through from Aristotle to Hobbes. And it also reminds me of the rather useful chameleon-like ability of History to take on many other subjects: why, to take an entirely hypothetical example, would anyone ever want to run away and do – ooh, I don’t know – A-Level Philosophy, say, when they could stay in a rather more comprehensive educational experience?

And talking of Philosophy, I must take advantage of the ever-present incestuousness (not my phrase) of blogs and have a barely disguised rant against the very idea of an ‘opposition’ between Arts \ Humanities and Science. Yeah yeah, I know CP Snow got there first, but at times I even find it rather difficult to understand how on earth anyone could believe in such a thing.

For two things to oppose each other, they must first be playing the same game, yes? A tennis player can oppose another tennis player over a game of tennis, but a tennis player cannot meaningfully ‘oppose’ a basketball player since each are playing under rather different rules. You can oppose someone who says that killing is right by arguing that killing is wrong, but not by arguing that killing is great fun. (For the people who will inevitably read this and smirk knowingly at how ‘black and white’ these examples are, they might want to consider what a beautiful example of opposition they are setting up between ‘black and white’ and ‘shades of grey’.)

Science is the method (the method, dammit, not the body of knowledge) by which we seek to understand the physical world. The Arts is demonstrably not, even though it might sound a bit like it, since the ‘physical world’ of Science is the world which would exist without us anyway. (Obviously, something like ‘the human brain’ wouldn’t exist without us, but the underlying concepts behind how that one specific organ operates would.) Artistic works are – to state the blindingly obvious – subjective. It is us – or other conscious minds – who think of something as being beautiful or terrifying or profound. Sure, a poet who talked about the beautiful night sky and then insisted that this was an objective truth about the sky would be setting themselves up in opposition to Science, but they would also be setting themselves up in opposition to another poet who thought of the dark and gloomy night sky as a harbinger of doom.

OK, so they’re not in opposition to each other in what they actually say. But perhaps one is ‘more important’ than the other, and so the opposition is actually between which you consider more important. But importance is subjective – importance doesn’t exist without us. So you have to ask… important for what? And why are we bothering to even come to an answer, when we know very well that we don’t – and couldn’t – choose between them?

Proclaiming that you can somehow compare the relative merits of Arts and Science is to make a nonsense of language, which is precisely the thing that the “read some poetry!” brigade (and they’re right, it’s good stuff) claim to value so much. It’s equivalent to accosting someone on the street and shouting “Oi! You claim to be a good person, but here you are walking down the street, an action which is nothing to do with right and wrong!”. Or berating this blog post for being a really terrible skipping rope.

(Advertisement – hey! Are you an Arts undergraduate feeling a little bit needy for some Science? Then ask a medic over dinner how antiretrovirals work! I did, and I got a beginner’s course in RNA absolutely free.)

P.S. Aha, so you’ve noticed that by this logic religion – or more specifically, theology – can’t be said to be ‘in opposition’ to Science, since it isn’t a method by which we seek to understand the physical world? The problem is that theology actually makes a great deal of claims about the physical world, and therefore – sorry – most definitely is. Unless your theology is entirely and absolutely metaphysical, which seems to hinge on the admission that its existence would make absolutely no difference one way or the other to the physical world at all. “We’re all dreaming in a world and there could never be any evidence of the ‘real’ world.” “God exists and must be known by faith alone, but takes no interest and has no effect at all on the universe.” Well, fantastic – now start choosing (how, again?) between the infinite varieties of such untestable beliefs.)

Greetings!

I am composing this blog entry late on Friday night (in sexy Notepad no less) with no available Internet connection with which to post it. But it feels long-overdue to write, and if all goes to plan tomorrow morning I shall head down to a marvellous little café down the road which offers free wireless connections – and sockets, and Louis Armstrong in the background – and blog away. Sadly, I only discovered the ‘free wireless’ quirk tonight and have spent the rest of the week jumping through innumerable hoops to try and get the Internet in my room! It is coming, honest… though I suspect nothing will arrive over the weekend, so a semi-permanent residence sipping hot chocolate in the café it is!

Oh, my room? It’s fine and very decently sized, though nothing spectacular, as with the house itself. But since Oliver and Owen arrived on Wednesday – along with Abi just down the road – there’s been a really good house spirit of cooking (still without hobs though, sorry Saoirse) and eating together which probably approximates to a ‘normal’ university experience without all the drinking. Almost a shame that Hall will return soon I shall blog photos soon!

The first few days of living here were very weird, mind you, without either the Internet or many people. Although in general this was Not A Good Thing it did allow me to join Abbi in discovering the strange delights of solo cinema visits: I only can’t remember if I’ve ever done it before! But on Sunday night I decided to take advantage of the last night of the Cambridge Film Festival to see Conversations With My Gardener. It’s a French film (an oh-so-very-French film) about an unlikely friendship between a ‘respected Parisian painter’ (I’m copying from the booklet here) and a retired railwayman who happened to have been schoolmates together. There’s a strange freedom involved in going to the cinema alone which allows you to really immerse yourself… now what I really need is the energy to additionally immerse myself in the swimming pool opposite the house for some high-falutin’ ‘exercise’

I hope everything is going wonderfully for all you freshers! And thanks to my blogging friends who filled up my Outlook tonight via the magic of RSS with their lives – happy or sad – allowing me to feel connected to home again. (Seriously, how cool is technology really? All I have to do is let Outlook bring in its trawl from across the web when wireless is available and it’s all waiting for me to read and digest in my room with no Internet to be found. Yay!)

Right, this has probably turned out to be very long without the ever-present temptation of the post button, so I shall bid you all goodnight now – or should that be good morning? – and sleep silly dreams. Like last night when I dreamt that Brown had discussed socialism in a party conference speech. Worrying.