Class,
I write to let you know what’s on my mind. I admit to being very saddened by the destruction of Notre Dame- more saddened than other tragedies. I was upset with myself about this; but in thinking about it more, Notre Dame is a symbol of human excellence and a symbol for our search for meaning and our belief in transcendence and beauty. That's what I am so sad about.
It tries to give you a broad overview of the some of the most important ideas of human thought and have you begin to explore the way humans have made meaning across centuries and across continents. I admit to not particularly liking how much we have to cover as I feel we never have the chance to go deeply enough into any topic; still, I appreciate what the creators of the course were trying to accomplish.
The builders of Notre Dame understood that ideas matter. They built this building according to the Golden Mean. (If you have time, watch this video. It is beyond cool.)
The builders also incorporated ideas from Neo-Platonism; essentially the idea that there are ideas and concepts beyond our understanding; higher realities. They did this through building huge flying buttresses to support the building thereby letting the walls of the cathedral itself be walls of beautiful glass. Through this emanating light let in by the glass, they believed they could begin to get a sense of this higher reality. The builders weren’t just trying to build a pretty building. They were trying to capture ideas in stone and glass. That’s why the building is so magnificent.
Ideas matter. Ideas matter. Ideas Matter. More than anything I want you to know this from this course. We study the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution let people more closely observe and understand nature- thus Galileo observed the earth revolving around the sun and not the other way around. This new understanding of the reality of things led humans to question traditional understandings of religion, because the old, religious explanations no longer made sense.
And so, we had the Enlightenment- a dawn of a new understanding of our place in the order of things. This Enlightenment led us to question governments and so the Western world saw a series of revolutions changing the old order of governments. Without the Scientific Revolution, there couldn’t have been an Enlightenment and without and Enlightenment there wouldn’t have been Revolutions. Maybe I should have had you do the Ben Franklin reading in the packet, for in it he talks about scientific observation. It was this close observation that eventually led to new types of political structures to be created.
Again, ideas matter. Thomas Paine’s seemingly Common Sense ideas hadn’t been articulated before he wrote them. And though clear pressures towards political upheaval in the American colonies were building, it was Paine’s ideas that pushed many towards a hitherto unacceptable and unimaginable break with Great Britain.
Ideas matter. When Abbe Sieyes asked and answered these questions:
What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? To become something...
He opened up news ways of understanding for millions of French and after that the old unquestioned order would no longer go unchallenged.
I want you to understand more than anything the consequences of ideas for both good and bad. The destruction of Notre Dame shows us that what we think can last forever can disappear overnight. I worry about the toxic power of some ideas percolating in our civic discourse. They are ugly and can metastasize. On the other hand, we human beings also have the capacity to create deep beauty that celebrates creation and our rightful place in it.
Credits:
Created with an image by skeeze - "earth space moon"