It's interesting that I named this blog as such as I did. I took it from a terrific William James's biography I read several years ago. In it, it mentioned how Mr. James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would gather on the weekends to deliberate about their latest philosophical musings. Mr. Holmes would call their discussions twisting the tail of the cosmos (or twistlig the tail as they would say in old speak).
I fell in love with the phrase. It sort of encompassed what I wanted this blog to be about. Exploring truth (and beauty) and looking at it from a vast vantage point.
But Mr. Holmes would not be a fan.
Mr. Holmes, one of our country's finest lawyers, Supreme Court justices and statesman, was also a polymath: well read in philosophy, economics, sociology, and literature. Having such breadth of knowledge allowed him to argue positions from many sides, without the need or desire to land anywhere.
In an article in the New York Times (from 1964), Alpheus Mason reviews some of Holmes's correspondence. Mason says, “Holmes's skepticism, expressed in words that sometimes shock, belies deeply religious feeling. Awed by man's profound ignorance, he was humbled before the great mystery posed by the unknown and unknowable. The assumption of absolute truth revealed arrogance—the one sin he could never forgive. He hated the man who knows that he knows.”
And yet, there were some key principles Mr. Holmes knew that he knew.
In regards to natural rights, Mr. Holmes said, “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” And that “truth is simply the majority vote of the nation that could lick all the others.” Such statements reflects a man hell bent on denying any absolutes to the point of radical relativism.
So much for intellectual (or ontological) humility.
Truth is a tricky thing. We want to be open, but not so open that are minds fall apart. And we don't want to dismiss the paths of wisdom open to us, nor the source of that wisdom. In the process, we can make explicit our principles of Reality, because they are there whether we are aware of them or not.
Mr. Holmes was open to inquiry, but somewhere within the bounds of scientism and populism. As many in our era, it is part of our (post)modern disease.
He would consider this blog to be full of ontological arrogance (or at least arrogance he would not agree with), since my inquiry always hangs off God. As such, we never exclude anything in that inquiry, but put them in their proper order.
For that sir, I am sorry. But I do thank you for the phrase anyhow.
* * *
Postscript: I was recently contemplating Holmes's quote, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” I would guess that even he was groping for some deeper faith beyond materialism to settle into.
