The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is also one of our most penetrating and subtle essayists. Her new collection, The Givenness of Things, brings together her writing on subjects ranging from the limits of neuroscience to America’s gun problem, what it means to be a Christian writer and her friendship with President Obama. She spoke to Prospect’s Sameer Rahim
Sameer Rahim: In the collection you identify a strain within modern neuroscience that you describe as “arbitrarily reductionist.” Could you elaborate?
Marilynne Robinson: The tendency in the human sciences for a long time has been toward a reductionist simplification. You hear people talking about human interactions in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. A very primitive economic model is being imposed on human behaviour. You see this all the time. In the instance I was talking about, a neuroscientist was claiming that fear shows up the same way in a primate as it does in a human being, which just erases away the whole cultural phenomenon of being human. It’s reductionist in a way that I don’t think would stand one minute of scrutiny were it not always assumed that reductionism is objective and that it yields verifiable truth.
SR: Science has produced so many tangible benefits for mankind. Does this it make it harder to challenge?
MR: I’m really not certain that I accept that the reductionism I’m talking about is comparable to science or technology. Quite the opposite. To be able to analyse a problem into elements is obviously valuable. Scientists are always discovering new complexities that they never anticipated—there’s always these blooming of new questions out of observation. Reductionism of the kind that I object to is a dead-end reductionism—saying this is all there is, I have accounted for human behaviour.
SR: To what extent do you think modern religion—say Christianity in America—has adopted a similar kind of reductionism? Trying to find scientific proofs for the existence of God or literal accounts of the Book of Genesis?
MR: Yes I think there is probably a relationship: the authority of a very defective model of truth… When you read any great thinker, like William Shakespeare for example, they are paradoxical. They make you understand that contrary things are true at the same time. This is absolutely not the direction of a great deal of thought, whether it’s in fundamentalist religion or in psychology departments.
SR: So is this reductionism an attack on the humanities as well as an attack on religion?
MR: I wouldn’t say it’s an intentional attack. I would say it’s a kind of falsification of the nature of reality that has consequences in many, many areas. One of the things that is disturbing to me is that when something is obviously crude—Adam on the dinosaur, for example—there’s a polarising mentality that says, oh that’s other people, that’s an outback region of culture and consciousness. In fact, I think things that are simplistic actually thrive in economics departments and anthropology departments and so on. The critical parts of society are not being effectively critical now. It’s a problem.
SR: Does the popularity of New Atheism have something to do with what you’ve just described, or perhaps what is thought of as religiously inspired terrorism?
MR: Terrorism? People have done terrible things in every context in all times. I remember Cambodia. To ascribe these terrible firestorms of human destruction to any single factor is to refuse them the historical context that they properly should have. I don’t think that the New Atheists are more appalled by these sorts of things than anyone else. I don’t think they discovered the fact that these things are grievous. I believe that the mind has its journey through the world and it goes through all sorts of veils, and so I have a presumptive respect for atheism. To the extent that it’s a considered interpretation of the world, it’s highly deserving of respect. But to have it shackled to this horribly, horribly misconceived scientism degrades the whole conversation regarding issues of religion.
SR: Often in the collection you declare yourself a Christian as though that were surprising or even shocking. Why might this be so in America, a country which has plenty of practising Christians?
MR: In this country we have a custom or norm which I very much respect, which is that we have large areas of effective secularism—like my great big public university. I think it’s wonderful to have huge areas of society in which these kinds of differentiations among people are not made. And so I’m actually violating a standard that I live by when I say, “I’m a Christian”… But that does not give me the right to assert my sense of things in ways that entrench on other people. It’s an aspect of my Christian belief that I don’t have that right. I don’t want to sound factionalised, at the same time it is simply true as a matter of fact that my worldview is based around a tradition and a theology that are very important to me.
SR: Does it feel lonely being a Christian writer in America?
MR: Absolutely not. I don’t assume that other people who do not make that statement are not Christian or religious in some other way. I think that they’re simply observing the norm that I typically observe myself of not making a declaration that can sound sectarian. But at the same time there’s a difference between criticising Christianity from the inside… and criticising it from the outside, which many people do. From the point of view of people who aren’t Christians they are effectively disqualifying themselves, in a way, by not understanding what they’re talking about. I think that Christianity in America is urgently in need of criticism: I can criticise it from within because I actually know it. And so because I’m in a position when I say I’m a Christian to criticise Christianity, it’s important for me to say I am a Christian.
SR: You recently met with President Obama in Iowa. He’s often described as having the sensibility of a writer. Do you agree?
A: Absolutely, yes. That’s one of those things that’s very interesting about my friendship with him: it’s very much like a friendship with a writer. Simply the way he thinks about things in a wider context, deep time, in ways that frankly with other politicians you’re not aware of it.
SR: Has having writer’s sensibility helped or hindered him as president?
MR: I think he has had very difficult choices to make. Other presidents have been pilloried, like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter... He, Obama—and I don’t speak for him, this is my interpretation of him—it is important for him to insist on the dignity of his office, the limits of his office, the honour that is deserved to the structures of democracy, which we have received. I think he felt very strongly the need to do that because there is so much gibberish now, people who befog the political world intentionally. I do know he has a very deep love of a classical America that is capable of democracy and is capable of orderly government, and is capable of progress, reform, advancement.
When I sound sceptical or cynical, he always corrects me and says: “this is transitory, this is passing.” And I think his way to perhaps ease the transition into a better historical moment is to protect the dignity of the government insofar as he can do that, and he has done that very effectively. He’s much admired now—suddenly people realise what they’ve had. But I think he has done that at tremendous expense to himself. God-willing we will learn to appreciate what he has in fact done.
SR: Perhaps naively some of us thought that the election of a black president might improve US race relations.
MR: He was re-elected [in 2012] by a wider margin than his first election. The people who have put themselves in opposition to him, the people who said from the beginning that they were going to make him a one-term president and erase his legacy, they have not been ashamed to stimulate the darkest feelings among the most retrograde people—to their eternal shame. These people have been stirred up, they have been intentionally inflamed. I don’t think we can have a clear view of what his race has meant to America.
SR: In your essay “Fear” you analyse America’s relationship with guns. Over the last five years I counted nearly 100 school shootings alone. Is this solely to do with easy of access to weapons, or there is a wider cultural crisis in America?
MR: I find that whole phenomenon incredibly difficult to understand. I’ve never seen a gun, I would not touch a gun, I don’t own a gun. In fact the number of people who own them is falling continuously, but the people who have them have more of them and more dangerous ones. It’s very strange to me that we’ve lived with the second amendment for a very long time, over two centuries now, but only recently have we seen it subject to the radical interpretation that we’ve seen. People act as if they’re protecting something traditional, when in fact this whole thing is a profound innovation, a departure. I don’t know what it means about the present state of the culture that there are people who want these things. I grew up in the mountains of the west. My ancestors were ranchers and they had hunting guns. But the idea of actually having a gun with the intention of shooting another person would have seemed bizarre to them. I think the movies maybe have gotten some people suddenly drunk on the idea of potency of—I don’t know what. But it’s pathetic. At base it’s pathetic.
SR: In your essay “Value”, you write that “the West is giving up its legal and cultural democracy, leaving it open to, or ceding it to, the oldest and worst temptations of unbridled power.” You seem pessimistic about the state of America.
MR: I’m not sanguine about the state of the western world. It’s not simply America. The racism of Europe, which is of a different stripe but very very dangerous with a terrible history, it’s in conversation with our own racists… I mean something larger than simply our own context, though we’re responsible for ours.
SR: Is this related to the way we organise our economy?
MR: All sorts of odds things are happening. We’re going back to a more primitive economy where capital is incredibly concentrated, incredibly mobile, people are finding safe havens in other countries that are basically losing control of their own economy and polity due to these infusions of money that is in many ways the product of theft, of corruption, so the democratic state—to the extent that any of us has achieved it—seems to be being pulled off its moorings by a return to an economic order that makes a great many people effectively powerless. When you look at the economic conditions of the world, we haven’t done badly here. The general public doing is well in comparison with other nations but they’re not doing as well as they ought to be.
SR: You are proud to call yourself a liberal. But you also write that “Those who hate Fox News are as persuaded by its representation of the country as its truest devotees.” Is there something worrying about the anger in American political discourse?
MR: I think that’s true. There’s a kind of crazy, arbitrary excitement in identifying my side and your side, like soccer hooligans or something, and while there’s not much meaning in these loyalties there’s great passion in them. They simply pass beyond the point where they take compromise or conversation to be a desirable thing.
SR: Turning to some of of your favourite writers. In the book you interpret the theology of Shakespeare’s works. Was he a religious thinker or a thinker about religion?
MR: I think he was a religious thinker. There was a lot of magisterial theology current in England during his lifetime. But he is also magisterial. I think he’s perfectly capable of being implicitly theological at the same level of seriousness as any of these contending theologies. Very often people try to put him in one category or another: that’s a mistake; it’s a misreading of the kind of mind he had. I’m much more interested in seeing how he sees than I am in trying to clap him into one tradition. It could be that he changed his mind from place to place, turning things over. It’s only respectful to read him as someone whose thinking is his own.
SR: You do identify the idea of grace and forgiveness in the later plays such as The Tempest?
MR: Yes and I think theology has turned round the question of grace a very long time. That he opened the question and enlarged it qualifies him as a theologian in his own right.
SR: You also talk about your admiration for Calvin, a figure you say is much-dismissed these days without being read. Why do you think he isn’t read?
MR: One of the questions that has plagued my life is: why isn’t anybody read more? [Laughs.] One of the things that just astonished me is that I couldn’t find a Marxist who had read Marx. That is literally true. You know when I read Capital—wow! Completely a book I would never have anticipated, precisely because I had spent so much time talking to academic Marxists. They know nothing about him. He’s a good prose writer, he gives you an interesting insight into a period in history. Why not read him? It’s just astonishing to me.
On Calvin, I was teaching Moby-Dick in a graduate seminar and I’ve read it many times of course always been much aware that it’s very freighted with theology, but it was only then that it occurred to me to read the theology he must have been in conversation with, which is of course Calvin. I’ve been in Calvinist traditions all my life but it never even occurred to me that I should read him. I don’t understand that. Just about every great influential text—including the Bible—is incredibly unread. You'd think people would just have more curiosity than that.
SR: Do you there’s something particular about Calvin? Is there something about his ideas that are not amenable to modern society?
MR: One thing you have to remember is that your society is perhaps different from my society. [Laughs.] I think Calvin had a much bigger impact here than in Britain, partly because he is so strongly associated with the English Civil War. I think he was in a way expurgated. During Shakespeare’s lifetime Calvin was actually the writer most read in England. The most popular book during his lifetime was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which is very Calvinist. After the English Civil War there was a great stepping back from theology altogether. These issues had become incendiary—literally. But the Calvinists who lost the war in England or, whose revolution failed, came to America. The fact of their being a discountenanced minority in England stimulated their seriousness about their tradition in this country—and that lasted a long time, probably well into the early 20th century. I think there are a lot of impulses that remain Calvinist in this culture, perhaps more than any other culture that I am aware of at any rate.
SR: I was struck by your writing about historical interpretations of Jesus—the so-called higher criticism developed in Germany in the 19th century, which you write that “Liberal Christianity defers to.” Is the search for the historical Jesus the wrong kind of search?
MR: It’s so strange. Jesus was a man living in a province who never made monuments to himself, never rallied an army. There is no historical truth for the existence of any person, except the traditions that come down from him. Of course there are the monument builders, there are the Alexanders and so on. People will talk about the Greek philosopher Epictetus as though they knew him personally, and at the same time doubt the existence of Jesus. You simply have to have humility in the face of what it is plausible to know and the fact that you can’t know about these ancients in the same way you know about Robert Kennedy does not disprove their existence—it’s simply how history is. It seems to me that Jesus is singular enough that it is very reasonable to assume that he was a teacher that taught in a way that was memorable and was retained and explored and then spread fantastically through the ancient world. This seems to be a perfectly reasonable assumption. On the other hand to say we can know exactly this and we don’t know that—we don’t know things like that about any obscure contemporary of Jesus, so there’s really no reason, it’s just naive historically to act as though his non-existence can be proved by the fact that it can’t be proved. There are lots of people whose existence it would be very hard to demonstrate. It’s a stupid use of what appears to be rigorous thinking.
SR: Can we link it back to scientism. A certain kind of proof is the only proof allowable?
MR: Exactly. And in the same way, there are many things that spontaneously imply themselves to me and one of them is that our capacity to know is at the same time brilliant and radically limited— both of these things at the same time. There was a time during the early development of science that people thought that knowledge could be exhausted. Everything that we’ve learned since then has completely disproved that idea. We’re just now finding out that physical matter is a tiny, tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. That’s a perfect metaphor for the fact that reality exists far in excess of our ordinary perceptions and inferences. Human history is such an amazing thing, that it should have unfolded on this one little planet, that it should be so engrossed with itself, it’s mysterious in the same way anything else is, and to act as if we could know it exhaustively and make statements about it definitively is simply naive.
The Givenness of Things is published by Virago
Sameer Rahim: In the collection you identify a strain within modern neuroscience that you describe as “arbitrarily reductionist.” Could you elaborate?
Marilynne Robinson: The tendency in the human sciences for a long time has been toward a reductionist simplification. You hear people talking about human interactions in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. A very primitive economic model is being imposed on human behaviour. You see this all the time. In the instance I was talking about, a neuroscientist was claiming that fear shows up the same way in a primate as it does in a human being, which just erases away the whole cultural phenomenon of being human. It’s reductionist in a way that I don’t think would stand one minute of scrutiny were it not always assumed that reductionism is objective and that it yields verifiable truth.
SR: Science has produced so many tangible benefits for mankind. Does this it make it harder to challenge?
MR: I’m really not certain that I accept that the reductionism I’m talking about is comparable to science or technology. Quite the opposite. To be able to analyse a problem into elements is obviously valuable. Scientists are always discovering new complexities that they never anticipated—there’s always these blooming of new questions out of observation. Reductionism of the kind that I object to is a dead-end reductionism—saying this is all there is, I have accounted for human behaviour.
SR: To what extent do you think modern religion—say Christianity in America—has adopted a similar kind of reductionism? Trying to find scientific proofs for the existence of God or literal accounts of the Book of Genesis?
MR: Yes I think there is probably a relationship: the authority of a very defective model of truth… When you read any great thinker, like William Shakespeare for example, they are paradoxical. They make you understand that contrary things are true at the same time. This is absolutely not the direction of a great deal of thought, whether it’s in fundamentalist religion or in psychology departments.
SR: So is this reductionism an attack on the humanities as well as an attack on religion?
MR: I wouldn’t say it’s an intentional attack. I would say it’s a kind of falsification of the nature of reality that has consequences in many, many areas. One of the things that is disturbing to me is that when something is obviously crude—Adam on the dinosaur, for example—there’s a polarising mentality that says, oh that’s other people, that’s an outback region of culture and consciousness. In fact, I think things that are simplistic actually thrive in economics departments and anthropology departments and so on. The critical parts of society are not being effectively critical now. It’s a problem.
SR: Does the popularity of New Atheism have something to do with what you’ve just described, or perhaps what is thought of as religiously inspired terrorism?
MR: Terrorism? People have done terrible things in every context in all times. I remember Cambodia. To ascribe these terrible firestorms of human destruction to any single factor is to refuse them the historical context that they properly should have. I don’t think that the New Atheists are more appalled by these sorts of things than anyone else. I don’t think they discovered the fact that these things are grievous. I believe that the mind has its journey through the world and it goes through all sorts of veils, and so I have a presumptive respect for atheism. To the extent that it’s a considered interpretation of the world, it’s highly deserving of respect. But to have it shackled to this horribly, horribly misconceived scientism degrades the whole conversation regarding issues of religion.
SR: Often in the collection you declare yourself a Christian as though that were surprising or even shocking. Why might this be so in America, a country which has plenty of practising Christians?
MR: In this country we have a custom or norm which I very much respect, which is that we have large areas of effective secularism—like my great big public university. I think it’s wonderful to have huge areas of society in which these kinds of differentiations among people are not made. And so I’m actually violating a standard that I live by when I say, “I’m a Christian”… But that does not give me the right to assert my sense of things in ways that entrench on other people. It’s an aspect of my Christian belief that I don’t have that right. I don’t want to sound factionalised, at the same time it is simply true as a matter of fact that my worldview is based around a tradition and a theology that are very important to me.
SR: Does it feel lonely being a Christian writer in America?
MR: Absolutely not. I don’t assume that other people who do not make that statement are not Christian or religious in some other way. I think that they’re simply observing the norm that I typically observe myself of not making a declaration that can sound sectarian. But at the same time there’s a difference between criticising Christianity from the inside… and criticising it from the outside, which many people do. From the point of view of people who aren’t Christians they are effectively disqualifying themselves, in a way, by not understanding what they’re talking about. I think that Christianity in America is urgently in need of criticism: I can criticise it from within because I actually know it. And so because I’m in a position when I say I’m a Christian to criticise Christianity, it’s important for me to say I am a Christian.
SR: You recently met with President Obama in Iowa. He’s often described as having the sensibility of a writer. Do you agree?
A: Absolutely, yes. That’s one of those things that’s very interesting about my friendship with him: it’s very much like a friendship with a writer. Simply the way he thinks about things in a wider context, deep time, in ways that frankly with other politicians you’re not aware of it.
SR: Has having writer’s sensibility helped or hindered him as president?
MR: I think he has had very difficult choices to make. Other presidents have been pilloried, like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter... He, Obama—and I don’t speak for him, this is my interpretation of him—it is important for him to insist on the dignity of his office, the limits of his office, the honour that is deserved to the structures of democracy, which we have received. I think he felt very strongly the need to do that because there is so much gibberish now, people who befog the political world intentionally. I do know he has a very deep love of a classical America that is capable of democracy and is capable of orderly government, and is capable of progress, reform, advancement.
When I sound sceptical or cynical, he always corrects me and says: “this is transitory, this is passing.” And I think his way to perhaps ease the transition into a better historical moment is to protect the dignity of the government insofar as he can do that, and he has done that very effectively. He’s much admired now—suddenly people realise what they’ve had. But I think he has done that at tremendous expense to himself. God-willing we will learn to appreciate what he has in fact done.
SR: Perhaps naively some of us thought that the election of a black president might improve US race relations.
MR: He was re-elected [in 2012] by a wider margin than his first election. The people who have put themselves in opposition to him, the people who said from the beginning that they were going to make him a one-term president and erase his legacy, they have not been ashamed to stimulate the darkest feelings among the most retrograde people—to their eternal shame. These people have been stirred up, they have been intentionally inflamed. I don’t think we can have a clear view of what his race has meant to America.
SR: In your essay “Fear” you analyse America’s relationship with guns. Over the last five years I counted nearly 100 school shootings alone. Is this solely to do with easy of access to weapons, or there is a wider cultural crisis in America?
MR: I find that whole phenomenon incredibly difficult to understand. I’ve never seen a gun, I would not touch a gun, I don’t own a gun. In fact the number of people who own them is falling continuously, but the people who have them have more of them and more dangerous ones. It’s very strange to me that we’ve lived with the second amendment for a very long time, over two centuries now, but only recently have we seen it subject to the radical interpretation that we’ve seen. People act as if they’re protecting something traditional, when in fact this whole thing is a profound innovation, a departure. I don’t know what it means about the present state of the culture that there are people who want these things. I grew up in the mountains of the west. My ancestors were ranchers and they had hunting guns. But the idea of actually having a gun with the intention of shooting another person would have seemed bizarre to them. I think the movies maybe have gotten some people suddenly drunk on the idea of potency of—I don’t know what. But it’s pathetic. At base it’s pathetic.
SR: In your essay “Value”, you write that “the West is giving up its legal and cultural democracy, leaving it open to, or ceding it to, the oldest and worst temptations of unbridled power.” You seem pessimistic about the state of America.
MR: I’m not sanguine about the state of the western world. It’s not simply America. The racism of Europe, which is of a different stripe but very very dangerous with a terrible history, it’s in conversation with our own racists… I mean something larger than simply our own context, though we’re responsible for ours.
SR: Is this related to the way we organise our economy?
MR: All sorts of odds things are happening. We’re going back to a more primitive economy where capital is incredibly concentrated, incredibly mobile, people are finding safe havens in other countries that are basically losing control of their own economy and polity due to these infusions of money that is in many ways the product of theft, of corruption, so the democratic state—to the extent that any of us has achieved it—seems to be being pulled off its moorings by a return to an economic order that makes a great many people effectively powerless. When you look at the economic conditions of the world, we haven’t done badly here. The general public doing is well in comparison with other nations but they’re not doing as well as they ought to be.
SR: You are proud to call yourself a liberal. But you also write that “Those who hate Fox News are as persuaded by its representation of the country as its truest devotees.” Is there something worrying about the anger in American political discourse?
MR: I think that’s true. There’s a kind of crazy, arbitrary excitement in identifying my side and your side, like soccer hooligans or something, and while there’s not much meaning in these loyalties there’s great passion in them. They simply pass beyond the point where they take compromise or conversation to be a desirable thing.
SR: Turning to some of of your favourite writers. In the book you interpret the theology of Shakespeare’s works. Was he a religious thinker or a thinker about religion?
MR: I think he was a religious thinker. There was a lot of magisterial theology current in England during his lifetime. But he is also magisterial. I think he’s perfectly capable of being implicitly theological at the same level of seriousness as any of these contending theologies. Very often people try to put him in one category or another: that’s a mistake; it’s a misreading of the kind of mind he had. I’m much more interested in seeing how he sees than I am in trying to clap him into one tradition. It could be that he changed his mind from place to place, turning things over. It’s only respectful to read him as someone whose thinking is his own.
SR: You do identify the idea of grace and forgiveness in the later plays such as The Tempest?
MR: Yes and I think theology has turned round the question of grace a very long time. That he opened the question and enlarged it qualifies him as a theologian in his own right.
SR: You also talk about your admiration for Calvin, a figure you say is much-dismissed these days without being read. Why do you think he isn’t read?
MR: One of the questions that has plagued my life is: why isn’t anybody read more? [Laughs.] One of the things that just astonished me is that I couldn’t find a Marxist who had read Marx. That is literally true. You know when I read Capital—wow! Completely a book I would never have anticipated, precisely because I had spent so much time talking to academic Marxists. They know nothing about him. He’s a good prose writer, he gives you an interesting insight into a period in history. Why not read him? It’s just astonishing to me.
On Calvin, I was teaching Moby-Dick in a graduate seminar and I’ve read it many times of course always been much aware that it’s very freighted with theology, but it was only then that it occurred to me to read the theology he must have been in conversation with, which is of course Calvin. I’ve been in Calvinist traditions all my life but it never even occurred to me that I should read him. I don’t understand that. Just about every great influential text—including the Bible—is incredibly unread. You'd think people would just have more curiosity than that.
SR: Do you there’s something particular about Calvin? Is there something about his ideas that are not amenable to modern society?
MR: One thing you have to remember is that your society is perhaps different from my society. [Laughs.] I think Calvin had a much bigger impact here than in Britain, partly because he is so strongly associated with the English Civil War. I think he was in a way expurgated. During Shakespeare’s lifetime Calvin was actually the writer most read in England. The most popular book during his lifetime was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which is very Calvinist. After the English Civil War there was a great stepping back from theology altogether. These issues had become incendiary—literally. But the Calvinists who lost the war in England or, whose revolution failed, came to America. The fact of their being a discountenanced minority in England stimulated their seriousness about their tradition in this country—and that lasted a long time, probably well into the early 20th century. I think there are a lot of impulses that remain Calvinist in this culture, perhaps more than any other culture that I am aware of at any rate.
SR: I was struck by your writing about historical interpretations of Jesus—the so-called higher criticism developed in Germany in the 19th century, which you write that “Liberal Christianity defers to.” Is the search for the historical Jesus the wrong kind of search?
MR: It’s so strange. Jesus was a man living in a province who never made monuments to himself, never rallied an army. There is no historical truth for the existence of any person, except the traditions that come down from him. Of course there are the monument builders, there are the Alexanders and so on. People will talk about the Greek philosopher Epictetus as though they knew him personally, and at the same time doubt the existence of Jesus. You simply have to have humility in the face of what it is plausible to know and the fact that you can’t know about these ancients in the same way you know about Robert Kennedy does not disprove their existence—it’s simply how history is. It seems to me that Jesus is singular enough that it is very reasonable to assume that he was a teacher that taught in a way that was memorable and was retained and explored and then spread fantastically through the ancient world. This seems to be a perfectly reasonable assumption. On the other hand to say we can know exactly this and we don’t know that—we don’t know things like that about any obscure contemporary of Jesus, so there’s really no reason, it’s just naive historically to act as though his non-existence can be proved by the fact that it can’t be proved. There are lots of people whose existence it would be very hard to demonstrate. It’s a stupid use of what appears to be rigorous thinking.
SR: Can we link it back to scientism. A certain kind of proof is the only proof allowable?
MR: Exactly. And in the same way, there are many things that spontaneously imply themselves to me and one of them is that our capacity to know is at the same time brilliant and radically limited— both of these things at the same time. There was a time during the early development of science that people thought that knowledge could be exhausted. Everything that we’ve learned since then has completely disproved that idea. We’re just now finding out that physical matter is a tiny, tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. That’s a perfect metaphor for the fact that reality exists far in excess of our ordinary perceptions and inferences. Human history is such an amazing thing, that it should have unfolded on this one little planet, that it should be so engrossed with itself, it’s mysterious in the same way anything else is, and to act as if we could know it exhaustively and make statements about it definitively is simply naive.
The Givenness of Things is published by Virago
