A bigger picture

When the big picture keeps getting darker, writes Margaret Renkl (as paraphrased by a Times headline-maker) it helps to zoom. Chance the Gardener was right, there will be new growth in spring. That's the bigger picture.  But zoom in, for a closer peek into dark corners, or out, for a more expansive view? In reveals life in fine-grained detail, the not-quite-micro world we normally miss. 

Bigger still is the cosmic perspective that only comes into focus when we zoom out, so effectively refracted in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. "The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.” Well, we bring our capacity to notice and appreciate the beauty, and to talk about it. There are always better things to talk about than most of what preoccupies us day to day. We must put the news in its place.

In CoPhi today we turn to the ancient Skeptics, whose unwillingness to commit and thus risk error and possible conflict shrinks and diminishes the picture dramatically. The better skeptic commits to the search for knowledge and truth, even while doubting its completion. We also note Dayton Tennessee's outsize claim to evolutionary-historical importance. Ask me about my first landlord.

In A&P we again wonder if justice can be retributive or retribution just, and entertain a view called neuronaturalism -- the thesis that, in imagining options, evaluating them, and making a decision, "each of those mental processes just is (or is realized in) a complex set of neural processes which causally interact in accord with the laws of nature." 

Part of my neural processes are already on their way to Chicago, where I'm scheduled to participate in a panel for the William James Society. One of our panelists has had to withdraw because her flight from China has been cancelled, hope the forecast of a big snowfall doesn't cancel mine from Nashville.

I'll be continuing my reflections on James and his pal Josiah Royce, and whether I've long tilted too far to the former's corner without giving the idealist his due. In other words, have I missed a bigger picture in which pragmatist and idealist stride together in affirmation of naturalism, meliorism, and "the beloved community"? Probably.

“Unless you can find some sort of loyalty," said Royce, "you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.” My advocacy of James is some sort of loyalty, but it doesn't (I now think) require or gain from a repudiation of his friend's mostly-complementary non-competing views. 

“If this life is not a real fight," said James, "in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

There's still room in Royce's world for nobility in the fight for liberty and justice for all. I didn't see that before, now I do. I'm finally seeing a bigger picture.