(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - Welcome, David.

Thank you for sitting down to talk with me today.

We had a conversation a few years ago, you may or may not remember when we were both teaching music and we were thinking about, I mean, in sophomore music we do musical analysis, harmonic analysis of different pieces.

Not that different than what we do when we do close readings of other texts to sort of dig into the details to try to figure out what's going on.

And I remember you made a comment that I thought was really interesting about the way that harmonic analysis might reveal something, which is not exactly what's, you know, the meaning of a text, but sort of the world that the text is coming out of.

What I was thinking of, the sort of epistemological context, sort of the artist is walking through the world, experiencing it in a certain way, and that, that might seep into the piece of art in a way that we might detect in the case of music, harmonic analysis.

I think we were talking about sort of the 145 movement, which is so characteristic of so much music we listen to.

In any case, I thought that was really interesting.

Thinking about the way art reflects sort of a walk through the world.

And I thought I wanted to start there.

I'd like to ask you about that in general, just hear you think about that a little bit.

But also ultimately, and this doesn't have to happen immediately, I know that you are a photographer and I'm curious about how that thinking informs your own work or how you think those two things together.

- What I think I recall of that conversation was that I was saying something about the way that the structure of music reflects something about the human experience generally.

That one of the motifs for most of us inexperienced is going away from home and then returning home.

And that's one of the structural aspects of the musical traditions that we study in sophomore music.

So, there's that level, which has to do with the way that the thing is crafted.

But I probably had in mind also, or certainly have in mind these days, the way that art is conveying a general sense of the world.

You know, not just a motif like away from home and return to home, but also, some sense of what kind of world this is, what kind of quality it has or what its atmosphere is.

And one way to understand the books that we study is that they're sharing with us a particular sense of what it's like to inhabit the world and what kind of world this is and maybe helping equip us to navigate the world better.

- And it makes me wonder whether, do you think that, that capacity for art to reflect the world that we live in, is that on the artist's mind?

Is that something intentional or is it the reflection you kind of can't help it as someone who's living in a world.

I wanna think that, that relationship between the making of the art and this these larger sort of forces at work, how do you think about that?

- I think the level on which we can't help it is very important, because that's our sort of, that's what becomes the ordinary way of being for us is that we have some sense of what it is to be a person or a sense of what kind of world this is, and we proceed on that basis.

And so, I think for most of us, it doesn't become especially conscious.

It's just our sort of our way of operating.

And what might be distinctive about artists and people who do a lot of thinking and writing is that they try to bring that forward in a more explicit way.

And I would say that part of what we're seeking when we encounter art, or we read a good book, is some stronger more coherent way of being in the world.

So, while for most of us it is just a kind of background thing and we're not especially aware of it.

We sometimes sense that there's some kind of deficiency or that we're not as poised as we would like, or we're not as happy as we would like, or the world isn't making sense to us.

And so, then what the artist, or the writer, or the philosopher can offer is some rendering of a more coherent world.

So, I think for most of us it's in the background, it's something we can't help or we don't address directly, but then there can be a more deliberate effort to bring it forward, make it available to others, consider it oneself and so on.

And I would say this is part of what the life of the mind is for.

It's for the sake of thriving, and the thriving is accomplished, at least in part by coming to know one's world in a way that can make it hospitable, or at least more hospitable than it would be otherwise.

So, it's a way of becoming more fully at home.

So, that might bring us back a little bit to the structural language of music.

And so, music becomes a kind of indicator of one of the central challenges that we have, which is, okay, how indeed will I situate myself in the world such that I can thrive or if not thrive at least be okay.

And I think the challenges are more severe these days than they may have been before.

Not that I'm buying into a full declinist narrative, but I think I can at least say that this era may not be worse than others, but it's different than others.

It's got its own way of being challenging.

- So, that's really interesting.

And I wonder how you think about it when we get to senior year where in some sense both our philosophic and literary readings seem to almost pose a challenge to this notion of coherence.

In some way, we feel as though something has gone wrong.

How do you think about that?

- Sure, I think we have a couple of tendencies in the traditions that we deal with in the undergraduate program.

From the very start, there's a kind of restlessness and also, an impulse tort order.

So, in the "Odyssey of Homer", which our freshmen read, Odysseus is away from home.

He's struggling to get home.

He undergoes these various adversities.

He's also adventuring along the way.

And then in the Hebrew scriptures in the Book of Genesis, which we read in the sophomore year, we have an expulsion from the garden.

And so, that's another kind of alienation or not being in the place one would want to be.

So, you have a narrative in the tradition of the Greeks and you have a narrative in the Jewish tradition.

And both of those are talking about things not quite being right and what it's like to not be where you would want to be and to be wandering, for example, in the Book of Exodus.

So, that's one tendency.

And then we start to get a strong sense of clarity in the theological tradition and the philosophical tradition as we sort of address the restlessness through trying to find ordered ways of understanding ourselves and understanding a cosmos.

And that's an effort, which by early modernity gets moved out of a religious frame and it becomes a kind of secular endeavor, the rise of science and technology.

So, if we started out aware of the liability to not have things as we want them to be that introduces a kind of insecurity.

And then there's a seeking of security, the security, for example, of religious salvation.

But by early modernity with people like Bacon and Descartes, there's a sense that we will seek security elsewhere.

We're gonna seek it through human endeavor.

And this is part of the sort of the advent of the modern condition.

So, you know, to oversimplify quite a lot, there's some way in which by the time we get to senior year what we're seeing is some of the results of that effort.

There was this effort to become more self-sufficient in a strictly human sphere.

It turns out somehow that doesn't work as well as we'd like.

On the other hand, the older approaches don't appear persuasive to all of us.

And so, that introduces some kind of, introduces a kind of tension, which you see in "War and Peace" where those characters are discussing problems about the meaning of life.

Same thing in in "Brothers Karamazov".

And in "Brothers Karamazov", you especially see the problem of suffering that suffering is central to the human experience and is part of what raises the question of what life is for and what it means and the question to what extent suffering can be alleviated.

And I think that also shows up in some of the texts we read later on concerning the history of slavery in America.

And it becomes clear that there's immense suffering that we inflict on one another and we have to work through how, you know, how is it possible to have a world that's more just.

So the overall, I mean, and this is just me sort of putting forward a very simplistic account, but it's helpful I think for the educational project to have some kind of, some rough sense of what things might amount to, and then you try to stay open to revising it as you find it insufficient.

We're aware of alienation and difficulty as a fundamental condition of being human that's there from the outset.

And it's present in everyone's experience day to day.

And whether through religion or philosophy, there are these efforts to find a more stable sense of assurance, a sense that there might be an ultimate order.

And especially, in our current time, this is very helpful, because we're sort of impoverished with regard to models of ways of being human.

You know, what's conventionally presented is so narrow.

There are very few models.

It's being a consumer, or being an earner, or being an economic actor, or sort of elaborating one's selfhood in some way.

And those are some of the visions that are available to us, if we're just sort of inhabiting the popular culture.

But what's helpful for most of us, or would be helpful is to have a broader palette of possibilities, a broader set of visions of what it could mean to be human.

And I think that's part of what we do in the program is walk through quite a few of those.

In any case, we have the sense of alienation as a fundamental difficulty.

We see these different ways of trying to resolve it, but something happens in the modern era fairly.

And it's creeping up on us for a long time, but it becomes especially difficult in the last couple of centuries.

I'm not sure how to characterize it exactly, but something about where we end up makes meaning hard to get hold of.

And by this I mean the kind of meaning that would actually animate your daily life and give you a sense that you know where you stand or you know how to proceed.

- And that goes back to the beginning of the conversation insofar as we're thinking about art as maybe a place where meaning like that could be expressed.

Is that, I mean maybe we can shift into thinking a little bit about your own relationship to your own art and this question.

- Yeah.

- But if we think about art as a place where in a world maybe impoverished of models for meaning that that's the call.

I mean, is that how you're thinking about it?

- Despite being a kind of amateur practitioner myself of something like art, I have mixed feelings about its sufficiency.

I think what it does for me is, it helps me apprehend a kind of unity to experience that might otherwise be hard to get hold of.

And I think that's a good practice.

And I think it's been very nourishing to me.

So, what I've been doing on and off since I was a teenager is doing black and white photography.

First in film, with film and then more recently digital and that has somehow always felt of appease with the more sort of abstract, or linguistic, or conversational, or book-oriented efforts.

And so, it's not that it's disconnected for me from let's say the philosophic project, but I don't know whether I can subsist on just what I get from trying to see the world, trying to step into a kind of coherent vision through artistic practice.

But maybe all that means is that the same provisionality that I think applies to philosophic work also applies to art.

That I would be foolish to think that I'm already in possession of some complete answer or some complete response.

I do think having these things as ways of being tethered are very helpful and great sources of joy.

So, they're very good on that level.

And what, I guess to go back to the sense of contingency.

Part of what we emphasize here, and I think it's very important is that we mean to ask questions, consequential questions, but we also are very suspicious of any tendency to prematurely settle on some kind of finished solution.

Maybe that's a way in which we continue to be wandering a little bit like Odysseus that we're sort of, you know, we want to explore plenty of things and we expect to arrive home, but there's something, there's some way in which to settle prematurely would be a problem.

- I guess I wanted to not leave this yet, because I wanted to ask a little bit about you make a nice comparison between the kind of work we do here and what it means to engage artistically with the world.

But I wanted to ask, and this is partly just because I think that you have lots of interests that are kind of, I don't, we can talk about this, but in conversations a kind of something about the world and the resistance of the world and being in the world and doing things, it's a dangerous dichotomy to have that and then the life of the mind.

I don't think that's quite right, but because you are someone who sort of dives into that realm of making, if we could reflect a little bit on the difference.

So, there are these similarities, but in your experience doing photography what's different about using your hands or can you talk about that sort of world making thing that happens in photography versus, say, the way we find meaning in the books.

- Being embodied, being in the world, knowing how to fix things, knowing how to make things, you know, which could be everything from, you know, knowing how to do things with machines, to knowing how to, you know, repair something in your house, knowing how to cook, knowing how to make clothing, that these are all activities, which though some of them are newish, like working on, you know, engines and things.

These are deep, durable aspects of being human and they are really important to our being full human beings.

And if one were to try to inhabit a realm of pure abstraction or a realm of pure thought, that wouldn't be a happy condition.

And now, someone at this point might bring up the kinds of claims that get made about contemplation and in the ancients and also in like Dante's "Divine Comedy" where there's some kind of vision of the ultimate, and it looks to be a vision that wouldn't have a lot to do with gritty things like eating.

You know, or taking a walk out in a world of stuff.

But to me, it seems that these embodied activities are contemplative activities and are not fundamentally different from a direct apprehension of what's real.

So, if you were to have a kind of theological vision of the deepest reality of things, I'm not sure that would be distinguishable from what it's like to have already had.

It wouldn't be of a different kind.

It'd be distinguishable, but not a totally different kind of thing from what it's like to have a deep relation to the things around you and to have a kind of a sort of intimacy with one's world.

So, I think what I'm after, or what I mean to say is that there's a kind of, that there's something contemplative in embodied experience and contemplation is not something remote from or disdainful of very ordinary things like the wilderness, like the various implements one uses to get things done.

So, the intellectual project, the project of reading and thinking and discussing that we undertake here and which is a kind of introduction to this lifelong undertaking of the life of the mind.

That I see as being oddly not in, it's not at a different level or in some other realm from knowing how to be in the world, which is maybe an odd claim.

I don't know if it would make sense, but that's how it looks.

- I like the claim.

It leads me to another question, which is when we're thinking about our lack of models say, and you listed a number, which I'm not gonna be able to remember, but things like consumption and maybe sort of self expression in a certain way.

Different models we have of living meaningful lives, which may are deficient in some way, not enough in some way.

When you bring the philosophical sort of life of the mind.

Where one might think, well, the way back, the way to a more meaningful ground might be to engage these deeper thoughts.

Some people turn to religion, you know, to get something soulful in some way.

- Sure, yeah.

- But by weaving it together as you just have, and I appreciate with just doing stuff in the world that those aren't actually separate activities.

It does make me wonder what kind of model, if we were to imagine models, it doesn't look as though the model would necessarily, or even sort of, we wouldn't privilege.

I'm not the wise, you know, sort of yogi.

- Yeah.

- Outside the world who knows and we go and seek wisdom from.

You're suggesting something much more integrated.

- Yeah, I don't think that renunciation is where it's at, because separation from the ordinary, to my mind has to be for the sake of the ordinary that is say it's not that life has lived is some kind of terrible thing that we ought to denounce and there's some other pursuit that would be better.

It's rather that to whatever extent we step away from the ordinary as one does you know, when going to college for example.

It's for the sake of becoming better attuned to the real.

Where one presupposes a fairly nuanced sense of what the real is.

The real is not just pursuing economic goods, for example.

And this is what's so I think vivifying about what we do at St. John's is that is that one he's very powerfully portrayed these other understandings, whether it might not like a vision of the human being that's not economic, not reductive.

- I'm trying to think about whether we get an example of a human who is really the intersection where the philosophical meets the, I don't know what we wanna call it,- - Yeah.

- ordinary life.

- Yeah.

- We get a lot of characters who struggle with that kind of tension.

And then we get theoretical characters like Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith".

I would say for me as an example, it's, you know, on the one, the kind of landing of the "Knight of Faith" in the ordinary world.

He looks just like everyone else, you know, he goes home and enjoys his pot roast or I think as compared to the tax collector.

You know, there's no difference, no wavering difference between a being who is walking through the world in ordinary ways, embodied and one who has sort of access to this nuanced sense of the real, that make those ordinary ways somehow not superficial, but the deepest thing.

But I wonder if we have examples, I think it's hard when you think about it what that model would look like, because the danger is, we take just the worldly stuff, right?

So, someone, it is not clear to me it's enough of an example to watch someone really enjoying their food.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (upbeat music)