Grandeur in this view of life:
It’s very hard for me to select any part of any text of Stephen J. Gould. I do love his writing, his view, his style. It is one the most powerful exemplars of what enlightenment means and was the first time I’ve met a view up to the scope of Darwinist's implications, far beyond biology or philosophy of science. Gould tells us about sports, beauty, arts, democracy, remains, yes, about the Full House. I became a Gould fan soon after a tragedy and I had a professor who used to talk to me about his work. It was pure joy, hard-working, and discovery. My political view changed forever in the same way that I left the eschatological beliefs to the bible stuff and theologians of all kind. And I felt so good. There is grandeur is this humble way of life. Thank you always, Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos. Thank you, Stephen Gould.
É muito difícil selecionar qualquer parte de qualquer texto de Stephen J. Gould. Eu realmente amo a escrita, a perspectiva e o estilo dele. É um dos mais potentes exemplares do que significa esclarecimento e foi a primeira vez em que encontrei uma visão à altura da extensão das implicações do darwinismo, para muito além da biologia ou da filosofia da ciência. Gould nos ensina a respeito de esportes, beleza, artes, democracia, restos, sim, a respeito da Casa Cheia (há tradução para o português, dessa obra prima? Não sei). Eu me tornei fã do Gould logo após uma tragédia e tive um professor com quem costumava conversar a respeito do trabalho dele. Era pura alegria, trabalho árduo (eu não sou bióloga!) e descoberta. Eu nunca mais pensei politicamente da mesma maneira. Eu abandonei as crenças escatológicas para as coisas da bíblia e os teólogos de todos os tipos. E me senti bem. Há grandeza nesta humilde forma de vida. Obrigada para sempre, Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos. Obrigada, Stephen J. Gould.
Here is the final part. I have no time to make a Portuguese version of it. Não tenho tempo de traduzir para o português. Let’s enjoy ignorance, variation, hazard, Gardens, oceans, and the Full House perspective. It also has some very good advices for the History of philosophy and its never ending valse of method and canon. Enjoy!
“If science stands too far from a right wall to worry about limitation, and if great performers nearly touch the wall but do not feel diminished by restricted domains of potential improvement, then a third category of creative arts does face a potentially painful dilemma based on our decision to adopt an ethic of innovation that awards greatness only to those who devise a novel style (a criterion not always followed in Western history, but very strong at the moment).
Suppose that the mile run had disappeared as a competitive sport as soon as a hundred people covered the distance in less than four minutes. Given an ethic that exalts perennial originality in style of artistic composition, the history of classical music (and several other arts) may fall into such a domain. One composer may exploit a basic style for much of a career, but successors may not follow this mode in much detail, or for very long. This perpetual striving for novelty may grant us joy forever it a limitless array of potential styles awaits discovery and exploitation. But perhaps the world is not so bounteous. Perhaps we have already explored most of what even a highly sophisticated audience can deem accessible. Perhaps, in other words, we have reached the right wall of styles that a sympathetic, intelligent, but still nonprofessional audience can hope to grasp with understanding and compassion.
The standard retort of artists to charges of inaccessibility has become such a mantra that any questioner gets quickly dismissed as a hopeless Philistine: “The complaint could only be made by a pitiful, dried-up old guard. They said the same thing of Beethoven, and of Van Gogh. The future will vindicate us. The cacophony of today will be hailed as a grand innovation tomorrow.” As Beethoven said to a conservative musician who wondered out loud whether his Razoumovsky Quartets could be denned as music: “They aren’t for you, but for a later age.”
Fine. Sometimes. But will this claim always wash, and should we regard its venerable status as above criticism? I think that we should take the argument of the right wall as a serious alternative: perhaps the range of accessible styles can become exhausted, given the workings of human neurology and the consequent limits of understanding.
Perhaps we can reach a right wall of potential popularity, where our continued adherence to an ethic of innovation effectively debars newcomers, whatever their potential talents, from becoming the Mozart of the new millennium.
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I don’t know how else to resolve what I like to call the “German virus problem.” Between 1685 (the birth of Bach and Handel) and 1828 (the death of Schubert), the small world of German-speaking people gave us the full life spans of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, to mention just a few. Where are their counterparts today? Who, in the vastly larger domain of the entire world, with musical training available to so many million more people, would you choose among late-twentieth-century composers to rank with these men?
I can’t believe that a musical virus, now extinct, was then loose in the German-speaking world. Nor can we deny that many more people of equal or greater potential talent must now be alive and active somewhere on this planet. What are they doing? Are they writing in styles so arcane that only a rarefied avant-garde of professionals has any access? Are they performing jazz, or (God help us) rock, or some other genre instead? I do suspect that these people exist, but are victims of the right wall and our unforgiving ethic of innovation.
I don’t have any solutions to propose. I don’t think that we should find these folks and let them master an old style to write Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony or compose Mozart’s opera on the tragedy of King Lear. I do understand why such an activity might be deemed unappealing. Nonetheless, I do think that we should face the problem and rethink some knee-jerk notions about novelty above all, and future accessibility for anything.
Finally, what major lesson can we learn from the general model of Full House — the focus on variation as an ultimate reality, and the relegation of means and extremes to a realm of Platonic abstraction (sometimes useful, but always less than the whole)? I like to think of myself as a tough-minded intellectual, a foe of all fuzziness from alien abductions to past-life regressions. I hate to think that an intellectual position, hopefully well worked out in the pages of this book, might end up as a shill for one of the great fuzzinesses of our age — so-called “political correctness” as a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.
And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake — for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature’s ontology, and not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot.
Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative — and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations.
In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellences — where McDonald’s drives out the local diner and the mega-Stop & Shop eliminates the corner Mom and Pop — an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to stem the tide and preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation itself.
We turn, with fascination and respect, to the lines that Darwin carefully chose to end his revolutionary book, the Origin of Species. He did not celebrate evolution by lauding the development of human intelligence or any upward march to preordained and preferable complexity. Rather, he chose to honor life’s bursting and hustling variety in contrast with the dull repetition of earthly revolution about the sun in all its Newtonian majesty (he also acknowledged life’s beginning at the left wall):
“Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
He began these final line?, with the best epitome of all: “There is grandeur in this view of life.”
The final part of the splendid The Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould
Obituário de Gould, que nos deixou cedo demais, aos 60 anos, na Nature.
