四篇必背文章
Thomas Hardy’ s impulses as a writer, all of which he indulged in his novels, were numerous and divergent, and they did not always work together in harmony. Hardy was to some degree interested in exploring his characters’ psychologies, through impelled less by curiosity than by sympathy. Occasionally he felt the impulse to comedy (in all its detached coldness) as well as the impulse to farce, but he was more often inclined to see tragedy and record it. He was also inclined to literary realism in the several senses of that phrase. He wanted to describe ordinary human beings; he wanted to speculate on their dilemmas rationally (and, unfortunately, even schematically); and he wanted to record precisely the material universe. Finally, he wanted to be more than a realist. He wanted to transcend what he considered to be the banality of solely recording things exactly and to express as well his awareness of the occult and the strange.
In his novels these various impulses were sacrificed to each other inevitably and often. Inevitably, because Hardy did not care in the way that novelists such as Flaubert or James cared, and therefore took paths of least resistance. Thus, one impulse often surrendered to a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromise, simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower. In this instance, the new impulse was at least an energetic one, and thus its indulgence did not result in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous, risky, and highly energizing impulse in favor of what was for him the fatally relaxing impulse to classify and schematize abstractly. When a relaxing impulse was indulged, the style—that sure index of an author’ s literary worth—was certain to become verbose. Hardy’ s weakness derived from his apparent inability to control the comings and goings of these divergent impulses and from his unwillingness to cultivate and sustain the energetic and risky ones. He submitted to first one and then another, and the spirit blew where it listed; hence the unevenness of any one of his novels. His most controlled novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, prominently exhibits two different but reconcilable impulses—a desire to be a realist-historian and a desire to be a psychologist of love—but the slight interlockings of plot are not enough to bind the two completely together. Thus even this book splits into two distinct parts.
Computer programmers often remark that computing machines, with a perfect lack of discrimination, will do any foolish thing they are told to do. The reason for this lies, of course, in the narrow fixation of the computing machines’ “intelligence” on the details of its own perceptions—its inability to be guided by any large context. In a psychological description of the computer intelligence, three related adjectives come to mind: single-minded, literal-minded, and simpleminded. Recognizing this, we should at the same time recognize that this single-mindedness, literal-mindedness, and simplemindedness also characterizes theoretical mathematics, though to a lesser extent.
Since science tries to deal with reality, even the most precise sciences normally work with more or less imperfectly understood approximations toward which scientists must maintain an appropriate skepticism. Thus, for instance, it may come as a shock to mathematicians to learn that the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom is not a literally correct description of this atom, but only an approximation to a somewhat more correct equation taking account of spin, magnetic dipole, and relativistic effects; and that this corrected equation is itself only an imperfect approximation to an infinite set of quantum field-theoretical equations. Physicists, looking at the original Schrodinger equation, learn to sense in it the presence of many invisible terms in addition to the differential terms visible, and this sense inspires an entirely appropriate disregard for the purely technical features of the equation. This very healthy skepticism is foreign to the mathematical approach.
Mathematics must deal with well-defined situations. Thus, mathematicians depend on an intellectual effort outside of mathematics for the crucial specification of the approximation that mathematics is to take literally. Give mathematicians a situation that is the least bit ill-defined, and they will make it well-defined, perhaps appropriately, but perhaps inappropriately. In some cases, the mathematician’ s literal-mindedness may have unfortunate consequences. The mathematicians turn the scientist’ s theoretical assumptions, that is, their convenient points of analytical emphasis, into axioms, and then take these axioms literally. This brings the danger that they may also persuade the scientists to take these axioms literally. The question. central to the scientific investigation but intensely disturbing in the mathematical context—what happens if the axioms are relaxed?—is thereby ignored.
The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument that is convincing only if it is precise loses all its force if the assumptions on which it is based are slightly changed, whereas an argument that is convincing through imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying assumptions.
One of the principal themes of Walzer’ s critique of liberal capitalism is that it is insufficiently egalitarian. Walzer’ s case against the economic inequality generated by capitalism and in favor of “a radical redistribution of wealth” is presented in a widely cited essay entitled “In Defense of Equality.”
The most striking feature of Walzer’ s critique is that, far from rejecting the principle of reward according to merit. Walzer insists on its validity. People who excel should receive the superior benefits appropriate to their excellence. But people exhibit a great variety of qualities—“intelligence, physical strength, agility and grace. artistic creativity, mechanical skill, readership, endurance, memory, psychological insight, the capacity for hard work—even moral strength, sensitivity, the ability to express compassion.” Each deserves its proper recompense, and hence a proper distribution of material goods should reflect human difference as measured on all these different scales. Yet, under capitalism, the ability to make money (“ the green thumb of bourgeois society”) enables its possessor to acquire almost “every other sort of social good,” such as the respect and esteem of others.
The centerpiece of Walzer’ s argument is the invocation of a quotation from Pascal’ s Pensees, which concludes: “ Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another.” Pascal believes that we owe different duties to different qualities. So we might say that infatuation is the proper response to charm, and awe the proper response to strength. In this light, Walzer characterizes capitalism as the tyranny of money (or of the ability to make it). And Walzer advocates as the means of eliminating this tyranny and of restoring genuine equality “the abolition of the power of money outside its sphere.” What Walzer envisions is a society in which wealth is no longer convertible into social goods with which it has no intrinsic connection.
Walzer’ s argument is a puzzling one. After all, why should those qualities unrelated to the production of material goods be rewarded with material goods? Is it not tyrannical, in Pascal’ s sense, to insist that those who excel in “sensitivity” or “the ability to express compassion” merit equal wealth with those excel in qualities (such as “the capacity for hard work”) essential in producing wealth? Yet Walzer’ s argument, however deficient, does point to one of the most serious weaknesses of capitalism—namely, that it brings to predominant positions in a society people who, no matter how legitimately they have earned their material rewards, often lack those other qualities that evoke affection or admiration. Some even argue plausibly that this weakness may be irremediable: in any society that, like a capitalist society, seeks to become ever wealthier in material terms disproportionate rewards are bound to flow to the people who are instrumental in producing the increase in its wealth.
Extraordinary creative activity has been characterized as revolutionary, flying in the face of what is established and producing not what is acceptable but what will become accepted. According to this formulation, highly creative activity transcends the limits of an existing form and establishes a new principle of organization. However, the idea that extraordinary creativity transcends established limits is misleading when it is applied to the arts, even though it may be valid for the sciences. Difference between highly creative art and highly creative science arise in part from a difference in their goals. For the sciences, a new theory is the goal and end result of the creative act. Innovative science produces new propositions in terms of which diverse phenomena can be related to one another in more coherent ways. Such phenomena as a brilliant diamond or a nesting a new theory. The goal of highly creative art is very different: the phenomenon itself becomes the direct product of the creative act. Shakespeare’ s Hamlet is not a tract about the behavior of indecisive princes or the uses of political power, nor is Picasso ’ s painting Guernica primarily a prepositional statement about the Spanish Civil War or the evils of fascism. What highly creative artistic activity produces is not a new generalization that transcends established limits, but rather an aesthetic particular. Aesthetic particulars produced by the highly creative artist extend or exploit, in an innovative way, the limits of an existing form, rather than transcend that form.
This is not to deny that a highly creative artist sometimes establishes a new principle of organization in the history of an artistic field; the composer Monteverdi, who created music of the highest aesthetic value, comes to mind. More generally, however, whether or not a composition establishes a new principle in the history of music has little bearing on its aesthetic worth. Because they embody a new principle of organization, some musical works, such as the operas of the Florentime Camerata, are of signal historical importance but few listeners or musicologists would include these among the great works of music. On the other hand, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is surely among the masterpieces of music even though its modest innovations are confined to extending existing means. It has been said of Beethoven that he toppled the rules and freed music from the stifling confines of convention. But a close study of his compositions reveals that Beethoven overturned no fundamental rules. Rather, he was an incomparable strategist who exploited limits—the rules, forms, and conventions that he inherited from predecessors such as Haydn and Mozart, Handel and Bach—in strikingly original ways.