More Oracles

Sometimes I think that literature and/or academic thought is like an oracle. So much of it can be a sign of the times: even though we say that we steer clear of Baconian idols, the parameters of our work can be delineated by the current dialogue of a period in history. If an oracle gives a sign, then the sign for this context is self-serving. And yes, I generalise.
One of the characteristics of our age is how science has infiltrated the modern imagination. Except all of the doubts and fears of the early 19th century have gradually become drowned out, which means we are left with the belief that truths can be reached through observation. We forget that writers like Dickens and Eliot drew attention to the hubris of such scientific enthusiasm. The former - who, despite encouraging workers to find beauty in the mundane, quotidian machine - joked at how the fervour to make scientific discoveries could mean making them out of mistaken observation. The latter questioned just how all-seeing this new scientific vision was: the answer - a scientist may be blind to his own life.  Do we consider such reservations quaint?
Since then, some authors took the rational approach to observation and lifted it to deity status. It is a sign of the times. I often think back to what Dickens wrote in a book review about how discovery of scientific phenomena replaces the old gods of superstition. I would modify what he wrote, and propose: one form of god replaces another - i.e. even an atheist believes in something. Hence the word "oracle" in the title: to harken back to more ancient forms. And the poorly understood past! Gadamer has shown how some very key ideas from ancient thought were misunderstood by more modern philosophers... How can it be that in a time of looking "forwards" we are so blind to the past.
Thus literature becomes secular, all things less moral. These are signs of the times. And not the first time such signs have blinked at the crossroads.
Some scientists promised that science was a poetic distillation of natural actions. But I think that in denying the impressionistic aspect of man's existence, it has only made us blind to our projections, or even worse, fulfilling Keats' prophecy that science would unweave a rainbow. It is interesting that those thinkers who argue for a cure to the ailments of our age suggest poetry: this argument can be found in Heidegger, Kenneth Burke and to some extent Guy Davenport. But they are preaching to the choir, because just one glance at a university just a century after the fact, and we see cloistered buildings dedicated to just one stem of the larger flower. I ask myself, as a novice thinker, what it means to have a tiny field of one's own. Is the sign of the times a smaller and smaller audience? Is it self-serving, or is there a way to branch out?

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