We’re all familiar with the use of the word “focus” as a sort of psychological term; for example, “You need to stop worrying and focus on getting the job done.” I suspect most people probably understand this usage as a borrowing from photography, which would give “to focus” a meaning something like “to direct one’s attention toward a specific object so as to make that object stand out clearly from all others.”
However, the use of “focus” in photography is itself a borrowing. The word is Latin in origin and originally meant “hearth.” Thus, it referred to the center of the home, around which the life of the family revolved, the source of warmth, of nourishment and, most importantly, of light. On that basis, the term has clear symbolic ramifications; Pythagoras is held to have taught that at the center of the universe is a kind of metaphysical fire which he called Hestia, which of course is the name of the Greek goddess of the hearth.
Pythagoras also was believed by some ancient writers to have been the first person to use the word “kosmos” as a name for the universe. Our modern word “cosmos,” as a term that simply means “the physical universe,” is not at all equivalent to the ancient Greek word, which carries implications of orderliness and beauty (hence the English word “cosmetic”). Thus, some recent translators of ancient Greek writings have taken to using the phrase “world-order” to translate “kosmos.”
The idea that there might be some sort of overall order in the universe has become quite alien over the past couple of centuries as advances in physical science have been interpreted as somehow disproving traditional beliefs about God, creation and the meaning of it all. In the extreme view, we live in a universe of randomness in which any meaning that exists is what we ourselves create by the heroic exercise of individual will.
I think that view is untrue. I also think it’s unscientific. And some scientists these days are starting to recognize at least that it’s inadequate, because if you look around the universe, you find that there is in fact quite a bit of orderliness. So there’s a fair amount of studying going on of “self-organizing systems” and “emergent order.” You can even find reputable scientists discussing our “order-producing universe” – which might be another way of translating “kosmos.”
Still, after decades of repetition by the intellectual elite, the idea of an essentially random, meaningless existence has had a pervasive influence on Western culture. Following Darwin and Nietzsche, and even more after Einstein and Heisenberg and their colleagues, we’ve learned that we live in a universe that has no center, no order, no purpose – the product of an inexplicable cataclysm, and fated merely to collapse back into nothingness or fizzle away into a tepid and inert miasma.
In a kind of parallel development, the centering-point in our lives has gradually disappeared. The hearth gave way first to the radio, then the television, though both could still provide a “focus” for family life. But then we needed personal TVs in every bedroom, and 200 channels to watch instead of just three. Then it was a computer wired to the Intenet, and now a cell phone, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a PDA. And while the techie fans of such things may claim they’re more “connected” now, it really all tends toward disconnectedness, a decrease in shared experience and an increase in isolation – in other words, a more random and meaningless existence, but self-inflicted.
What I plan to do in this blog is find opportunities to call attention to how the underlying order of reality is reflected even in the seemingly messy and disorderly details of life in today’s world. I’ll probably make fairly frequent reference to the economy and financial markets, because I have professional expertise in those areas and they’re especially interesting these days to a lot of people. But there’s nothing I’ll rule out as a topic of discussion, because everything is connected, nothing in this universe is explainable without reference to everything else, the history of each thing is the history of us all. Or as Tennyson put it:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
However, the use of “focus” in photography is itself a borrowing. The word is Latin in origin and originally meant “hearth.” Thus, it referred to the center of the home, around which the life of the family revolved, the source of warmth, of nourishment and, most importantly, of light. On that basis, the term has clear symbolic ramifications; Pythagoras is held to have taught that at the center of the universe is a kind of metaphysical fire which he called Hestia, which of course is the name of the Greek goddess of the hearth.
Pythagoras also was believed by some ancient writers to have been the first person to use the word “kosmos” as a name for the universe. Our modern word “cosmos,” as a term that simply means “the physical universe,” is not at all equivalent to the ancient Greek word, which carries implications of orderliness and beauty (hence the English word “cosmetic”). Thus, some recent translators of ancient Greek writings have taken to using the phrase “world-order” to translate “kosmos.”
The idea that there might be some sort of overall order in the universe has become quite alien over the past couple of centuries as advances in physical science have been interpreted as somehow disproving traditional beliefs about God, creation and the meaning of it all. In the extreme view, we live in a universe of randomness in which any meaning that exists is what we ourselves create by the heroic exercise of individual will.
I think that view is untrue. I also think it’s unscientific. And some scientists these days are starting to recognize at least that it’s inadequate, because if you look around the universe, you find that there is in fact quite a bit of orderliness. So there’s a fair amount of studying going on of “self-organizing systems” and “emergent order.” You can even find reputable scientists discussing our “order-producing universe” – which might be another way of translating “kosmos.”
Still, after decades of repetition by the intellectual elite, the idea of an essentially random, meaningless existence has had a pervasive influence on Western culture. Following Darwin and Nietzsche, and even more after Einstein and Heisenberg and their colleagues, we’ve learned that we live in a universe that has no center, no order, no purpose – the product of an inexplicable cataclysm, and fated merely to collapse back into nothingness or fizzle away into a tepid and inert miasma.
In a kind of parallel development, the centering-point in our lives has gradually disappeared. The hearth gave way first to the radio, then the television, though both could still provide a “focus” for family life. But then we needed personal TVs in every bedroom, and 200 channels to watch instead of just three. Then it was a computer wired to the Intenet, and now a cell phone, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a PDA. And while the techie fans of such things may claim they’re more “connected” now, it really all tends toward disconnectedness, a decrease in shared experience and an increase in isolation – in other words, a more random and meaningless existence, but self-inflicted.
What I plan to do in this blog is find opportunities to call attention to how the underlying order of reality is reflected even in the seemingly messy and disorderly details of life in today’s world. I’ll probably make fairly frequent reference to the economy and financial markets, because I have professional expertise in those areas and they’re especially interesting these days to a lot of people. But there’s nothing I’ll rule out as a topic of discussion, because everything is connected, nothing in this universe is explainable without reference to everything else, the history of each thing is the history of us all. Or as Tennyson put it:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
No comments:
Post a Comment