Notes on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness -- Phil A231

William Jamison - Instructor

Criticism, interpretation, and evaluation

Chapter 6

How do we justify our aesthetic judgments? When I say something is beautiful – or something is ugly – how do I justify what I say? From what has gone before we might already assume that there is no more primal source for such judgments that I can resort to. 

Bibliography

State Of Fear by Michael Crichton

I was encouraged to read this by a colleague who had been encouraged to read it by several of her students. I recall reading “Congo” and enjoying that and I enjoyed the movie “Jurassic Park” – so I figured it would be a pleasant read. The reason for the encouragement was because, I presume, the thesis of the book horrified my colleague who has done a great deal of work regarding the effects of global warming. Here is a book written by an author that has a proven track record of being popular – this book is clearly written in a style that has “make me a movie” all over it. It is loaded with sex, violent action, and stupidity – the kind of stupid characterizations that leave you sitting there annoyed with the character who doesn’t see coming what you do. So this book is going to have a lot of impact. But what does it teach? Whether it is clearly C’s view that global warming is a politicized fiction intended to fill the fear vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet threat or not – I am at least under the impression that C really just feels we do not know enough about the nature of nature to be certain enough to know what we are talking about – is he certain there is too much certainty in the world? Does he really feel we should stop trying our best to know as much as we can and act on that? It does seem that he seriously interprets the data collected to indicate that we are having little impact on the weather and that organizations using fear mongering tactics are more often than not liable to make things worse than better – and for a worse reason than just ignorance. They do it to make money and grow competitively against other organizations regardless of the damage they cause. In this book radical environmentalists are the enemy. They are deliberately setting up catastrophes in order to stimulate public investment in their organizations. These folks are evil. Does that not leave us with the impression that environmentalists might really be like that in some ways? At least some of them?

But I know many scientists and they are not like that. They seriously are concerned about the environment and do not have much to gain financially by their efforts – publishing academic books and teaching are not really that profitable after all. Is all of the concern socially constructed and constructed for the worst reasons so that we readers (and potential viewers) can beware and avoid our support for environmental causes?

Perhaps a good idea is to read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” either before or after reading this.

FYI here is a web page for Pfauen Insel: http://www.berliner-verkehrsseiten.de/pfaueninsel/Bilder/bilder.html

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