TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 94
John-Paul: If you are climbing a mountain to have the “gosh wow experience,” you're not actually fully embracing the ecstatic. Beauty wounds us to lead us to the truth of the good. There is a good to the thing in and of itself, but there's also a good that pushes beyond that, that pushes to the transcendent.
Ryan: You may have noticed that the genealogies of modernity thread of this podcast has been on a bit of a hiatus. That's because I've been on sabbatical and I've been focusing on my next book, which is actually about genealogy. With this episode, we're starting a new feature. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to read all of the sub stacks and magazines and blogs that I want to read, and I'm hungry for audio versions of those things.
I like to listen to them while I'm walking to work, but so far my appetite has not been satiated. I can't find enough journalism in audio form to get me through the week, at least, not enough that's being read by an actual human being. Meanwhile, we've been producing the Genealogies of Modernity journal for more than three years, at the rate of about two articles per week. It's like a substack, but it's on a webpage, and it's an online journal. In this journal, scholars from across the humanities and social sciences write short essays on questions related to genealogy, modernity, and often Christianity, the kinds of things that this podcast thread focuses on. Most of the essays are written for a non-academic audience. They translate academic expertise into engaging prose. Even if the odd essay is of interest mostly to other academics we work with the authors to translate that essay out of the discipline so scholars outside of their home discipline can read it and appreciate it. We've got a great stable of authors and a superb editorial staff, and they work to bring scholarship to a wider audience, like this podcast.
In this new format, we are merging the podcast and the journal authors of Genealogies of Modernity journal essays will read them aloud, and then the Beatrice Institute operations manager, Weston Sims, will follow up with a brief interview. We'll still be doing long-form interviews as in the past, but probably not until I return from sabbatical in the fall.
In the meantime, we'd love your feedback on this new venture, and if you haven't already, it's a great opportunity to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. We're so grateful for your listenership, and we'd also be very grateful if you could help spread the word. Now, I'll hand it over to Weston Sims!
Weston: Hi y'all, I'm Westen Sims sitting in for Ryan McDermott. It's my pleasure to be running a new feature of the Genealogies of Modernity thread of this podcast. In this episode, we feature an article from the Genealogies of Modernity journal, read aloud by the author, followed by a brief interview. Today, I'm delighted to welcome John Paul Heil, reading his article, “Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck.”
John Paul is a Quirt Fellow at Mount St. Mary's University. John Paul, welcome to the Beatrice Institute Podcast.
John-Paul: Thank you so much, Weston. I'm happy to be here.
Weston: Now I'm going to turn it over to John Paul to read his article, “ Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck.”
John-Paul: “ Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck,” written by John Paul Heil. Two months ago, I was almost beheaded in the mountains of Allegheny County. Now, in fairness to my would-be executioner, it was a stressful situation and I wasn't entirely blameless. Road signs on the highway had just informed us that the right lane would be closed for work in a thousand feet. Which was good news for me, I was in the left lane, and bad news for the guy on my right, the driver of a semi-truck transporting and advertising frozen poultry products. Presumably taking his cargo as a suggestion, the driver decided that it was time to play chicken. He shifted gears and attempted to speed past me, blowing by the posted 40 mph truck's speed limit to reach a healthy 70 mph, which I matched.
Our rivalry would come to a head on a bridge across the valley in front of us, where the lane closed. I was suddenly faced with a decision. Do I hit the gas and betray the spirit of my 2016 Honda Civic, a car which my mother sold me on four years ago as a vehicle which would signal responsibility, safety, and prudence to my university colleagues, and, she hastened to mention, perhaps even a future wife? Or do I give way to the 18 wheels of entropy on my right and be stuck behind him for the next several miles? I hit the brake and slowed down. Just in time to narrowly escape the truck's swerve into my lane and avoid the guillotine of his trailer, which was mere inches away from turning my sedan into a convertible, we safely began crossing the bridge.
As I stewed in my prudence, doing my best to not take the truck's bright red declarations of chicken personally, and safe in the sure knowledge that no date has ever been impressed with my responsible Honda, I looked to my left and saw, just for a moment, the Allegheny Valley open up into miles of lush green.
Green, sun-bathed mountains, trees as far as the eye can see dotted not only the smaller hills in the foreground, but the two enormous mountains it stood between. It was beautiful. I can't put it into words. But I knew, as this scene receded into my rearview, that what I had seen had been for me.
“For thus says the Lord, the creator of the heavens, who is God, the designer and maker of the earth, who established it, Not creating it to be a waste, but designing it to be lived in. I have not said to the descendants of Jacob, Look for me in an empty waste.”
I suspect I'm not alone in this sort of experience, that you've had a moment where you've caught a glimpse in nature of something so beautiful it's wounding. And yet, this beauty would not be, unless you were there to see it. Even if one of the chicken cutlets being transported on that truck had resurrected, and seen the same view of the mountains I saw, the beauty in the form of those mountains would have been completely unintelligible to that miraculous bird. Only human rationality, our capacity to be in relationship with the Logos, enables us to receive and understand the essence of nature, to respond to its BEING we see unveiled before our eyes, and yet, even as it is revealed, it remains veiled. We understand immediately that it is not only incommensurable to whatever we are able to say about it, but that its essence remains so much more than even what we're able to see of it.
Knowing a thing truly cannot exhaust the truth of the thing itself, its mystery, the meaning of its being, which consists of and can only be responded to with love. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says in The Theologic, “Knowledge can be explained only by and for love. Love is inseparable from truth, and truth originates from love.” To see a thing well, to see it truly, is to wonder at it, to see that it is more than just a mere fact, but as something which, in the intelligibility of its appearance, gives the thing in itself its integrity and plentitude, its completed, meaningful essence, its radiant glory.
Truth and love's connection is made manifest in the particular attention the seer gives the scene, if our sight corresponds to the reality of what we see. In other words, if we are actually taking the time to see the mountain as it is, what was hidden is unveiled and its possibilities are realized. But the idea was nonetheless signed and creatively stamped by the seer who calls the beloved scene into fullness of being through her loving gaze and attentiveness. To see a mountain well, to see it truly, is to see how it actually is, with the eyes of love. And this brings that which you love more fully into being what it is while also making you more fully who you are. In seeing a mountain's beauty, you see not only the mountain itself, but also that you are, in some way, made to love that mountain.
No matter how much you look at it, you will never exhaust its beauty, as long as you look at it truly, with love.
What room is there for love in mountain modernity? Do the mountain moderns featured in the inaugural episode of Genealogies of Modernity believe that man is meant for the beauty of nature? Across the board, the answer is no. Petrarch concludes that it is absurd for human beings to spend so much time and energy climbing mountains, but to not put even a fraction of that effort into what really matters, namely, contemplating spiritual things. “How earnestly we should strive,” he concludes, “not to stand on mountaintops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.” For Burkhardt, this makes Petrarch a less accomplished modern. Though Burckhardt claims the Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful, Petrarch provides no account of the view from the summit, not because the poet was insensible to it, but on the contrary, because the impression was too overwhelming.
“It is not until the 16th century,” Burckhardt continues, “that we see fully painted in words the splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian sunset.” The measure of man's relationship with beauty for Burckhardt, is his ability to not be overwhelmed by it. To keep his head enough to put it into words.
William Wordsworth argues that only a privileged, enlightened few have the requisite knowledge to appreciate natural beauty, and are thus the first to climb mountains for aesthetic pleasure, in contrast to the uneducated poor, who have no use for such things.
Ironically, Petrarch critiques the ignorant, the poor in wisdom, precisely for climbing mountains only for the view, when they should instead be contemplating spiritual heights. Petrarch would see Wordsworth as regressing to an old vice, not trailblazing a new aesthetic experience. Even Leslie Stevens, who rightly points to the love of the natural beauty of mountains as bound up with some essential and noble part of human nature, ultimately praises natural beauty by contrasting it unfavorably with the ugliness of human techne, the detestable parallelograms of English farming, or the homogenized chessboard fields of the Mississippi Valley, which he claims “has given me occasional nightmares,” and all of which he believes will breed horrific overpopulation.
In all cases, man and nature's beauty are purely extrinsic from one another. Man must either ignore beauty, or put it into words, or earn his access to it through education and status, or take great care not to touch it with his polluting stewardship or filthy progeny. Man and nature do not call each other into deeper being. Beyond a reaction of, “gosh, wow!” nothing changes in the human heart when it encounters beauty. Certainly, there is no sense that beauty is a common good, and that seeing beautiful things is not just a capacity of human nature, but a necessity for its flourishing.
For each of these figures, the notion of building a church overlooking an alpine valley would be a distraction, either from what's going on in the church, as in Petrarch's view, or from the importance of one's own gratification in capturing an aesthetic experience, as with Wordsworth and Burckhardt. Or from nature itself, which I must attempt to experience while minimizing my own place in it as much as possible, as in Stephen's estimation.
Nature, man, and God are so separate for these mountain moderns. And this is the true radicality of their difference from the past. There is no room for the love of mountains here. No room for us to be made more perfect by that love. No room for the logos whose glory yet shines forth, unveiling yet veiled, and the overflowing and gratuitous beauty of the creation e made for us to see and love. But whatever walls we try to build around it, no matter what we do to try and control it, or reduce it to a comfort, or turn it into a status symbol, beauty is relentless. It is coming for us. It will find us when we least expect it.
When we pump the brakes, let go of our right lane rivalries, look up from our lives, and see it, love it, are hurt by it, and lose our heads because of it.
Weston: This was a reading of “Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck,” written and read by John Paul Heil. Now we'll get into the interview. First question, how do you define ekstasis and what does it mean to you personally and spiritually?
John-Paul: That's a great question. When I think about ekstasis, I'm treating it in the broadest sense possible. One of the things that fascinates me, among the transcendentals, is the transcendental of beauty. We hear beauty and we think, you're out in the woods or you're hiking and you see that sunset coasting over the mountains. I live in Northern Frederick County and I work at a university that's on the side of a mountain, so there's a lot of very beautiful vistas. Sometimes you're out and you see the big sky sunset, and you think: “Oh my gosh, wow.” And you, you pull out your phone and you take the thing and you upload it to Instagram and then you keep running - that's not what I'm talking about.
There's a sort of beauty that goes beyond just the “Gosh wow.” This whole piece relies very deeply on the writing of Joseph Pieper. What I talk about when I talk about ekstasis is, where you when you see something, you're seeing it not only with your physical eyes, but with your spiritual eyes. There's something about what is being presented in front of you that pierces to the core of your being and makes you more yourself. There's a sort of wounding aspect to it. You can go and you can see your sunset, you can take the photo, but that's not wounding you. I'm talking about the beauty of a lover's face. Where you see the person that you love and you're like, “Oh my gosh you're just awesome. You're beautiful. I love you. How can you be so great? Why doesn't everybody in the world see this?”
There's this dynamic interplay between, “This person is objectively beautiful,” but then there's also bound up with that, the subjective of “Oh, but you're for me.” The dynamic interplay between the two creates this inseparability of the subjective and the objective beauty tied together in an inseparable way.
Let me give you a short answer. It's a wounding beauty that is both objective and subjective. It's out there, and it doesn't need you, but it's also for you, and that I think reflects God! It finds its fullness and perfection in the eschaton, in the communion of persons that we are all called to in Beatitude.
I hope that answered the question.
Weston: Oh, absolutely, that was beautiful. I think most people can relate to that feeling of being wounded by beauty, but all the same, it's kind of interesting and a little bit counterintuitive to think that what is fundamentally a really positive experience can, not despite how lovely it is, but seemingly because of how lovely it is, wound you. And so I wanted to hone in on that word, woundedness. Why do you think, we feel wounded in particular by beauty? Why isn't it just an undiluted delight?
John-Paul: So I think it's because definitionally, when you are wounded, you are made vulnerable. We can talk about vulnerability in a very motivistic way. When I was an undergrad at college, the big thing was you got to be vulnerable with each other. You’ve got to open your heart to other people. And there's a way of treating vulnerability where it's like a relationship capital thing. Where it's, “Okay, well, I just shared with you now you have to share with me.” And again, that's not really what I'm talking about here. When I talk about vulnerability, what I'm talking about is that it is a fundamental recognition. True vulnerability is a fundamental recognition of the fact that I am not self-sufficient, that I cannot do everything for myself. Which is sort of the lie. If I had to pick out one of the lies of the modern technocratic paradigm, to use some of Pope Francis's terminology, that's a big one, right? You can do everything for yourself. You don't need anyone else.
There's this beautiful image that one of my colleagues used. Epicurus, who's one of these ancient philosophers, he had a follower Lucretius. He was the first atomist. And of course we think atoms and we think, “Oh my gosh, well, he's just like us! He's literally me for real!” But when he talks about atoms he talks about them in, among other ways, in connection to the gods. His conception of the gods is that there are these gods, they're out there and they're perfect. And they're out there hovering in space and they're perfectly spherical. And because they're perfect, they don't really need anything. They're just out there. And so maybe they make all things, but they don't need us, right? They don't need a relationship. They're just sort of out there in space, floating, humming. Just floating there ominously and existing perfectly without anything. And I feel like that's a very extreme example of maybe what many of us think we want, right? We kind of want to get to the point where we can be rich enough or successful enough or content enough emotionally that we don't need anything. We are totally the atomic selves. And I think that beauty exposes that lie, exposes that deception, more quickly than anything else.
Because when you encounter beauty, there's something sort of wild about it, right? Part of its beauty, part of the glory of it, is it's not me. I can't contain it. I couldn't have conceived of this. The whole otherness of it is part of what makes it so great. But it's an otherness that's oriented towards “me, and the other should go together.” Not only is it good that this thing is beyond me, but I need this thing that's beyond me in order, not simply to be myself in my fullness, but to be called to an even greater level of being, namely, that of communion and community.
Weston: That description of beauty being other than you and bigger than you, that reminds me, you mentioned Hans Urs von Balthasar in your article, and your response right now is making me think of Hans Urs von Balthasar's description of beauty, which is, “beauty is that which seizes you.” It doesn't just sit idly by and is taken up by it. But if anything, the directionality is the other way. Beauty takes you, it makes a demand on you. And I really got that sense that that description that Hans Urs von Balthasar provides seemed really true to life, true to your description of passing that landscape.
And even in just the shortest time, the smallest moment that beauty seized you, you didn't have to stay there for 30 minutes, even just in a glimpse of an eye, it got you.
John-Paul: Well, and Balthazar, one of his most profound passages is when he's talking about basically how we come to consciousness of our own existence. He talks about the mother's smile, that the first primordial encounter we have with our own consciousness is when, as infants, we look into the face of our mothers, and we see that she smiles back. Dawg we're babies! We do nothing but eat and sleep and poop and cry; talk about a non-contingent love right? You can do nothing as a baby. And yet, the smile of the mother's face is a complete and total affirmation of the good of your own being. And I think that we have moments like that. You were talking about the length of these moments, right? If you pay attention, they're everywhere. Not only in the things about nature, that the longer you attend to them, the more you see - there's this congruity between me and the cosmos - but you also see them in your relationships. Many of the most loving actions that have ever been done for me, the ones that I remember most, have been in the blink of an eye, right? It’s a kind word or some way of caring for me. Just a very small way. There's an extravagance to the smallness of these moments, right, that you can pack so much into so little.
Weston: So in the second half of your essay, you're giving a response to the people you call mountain moderns, people such as Francesco Petrarch, Leslie Stevens, and William Wordsworth. For those who aren't familiar with them, could you give us a sense of how mountain moderns understood mountains?
John-Paul: Well, in order to get a full answer for that, I would recommend that listeners check out the Genealogies of Modernity podcast, specifically the first episode. I think that what we see here are a number of responses. We have Petrarch, who is coming out of the Middle Ages. Petrarch is considered to be the father of Renaissance humanism, and when we think about humanism today, it's very different than how we talk about humanism in the Renaissance. This is what my academic research is on, so I will attempt to not bore you, but humanism, Renaissance humanism in a nutshell really begins, I would say… Maybe this isn't fair… But, I see it as beginning to put a wedge between man's natural telos and his supernatural telos; his natural end and his supernatural end. In the Middle Ages it is very clear, and Thomas says this, the natural end of man is supernatural by nature. We are called, and can only be fulfilled by, something that transcends us. Something that goes beyond the merely material. We are called to beatitude.
And in Aristotelian logic, beavers, in order to completely live out their beaverish life, what do they need? Well, in order for beavers to beave, they've got their big teeth, so they can cut down wood, and they've got their big tails, so they can construct dams, and they have everything they need to make little baby beavers, right? Beavers have everything they need in order to achieve their telos. Human beings cannot earn their way into heaven. Human beings, says Thomas, are the only creatures that cannot, through their own natural faculties, achieve their end, achieve their telos, because that end is supernatural, because that end is beatitude.
What we see in the Renaissance is a return to a pre-Christian way of looking at teleology, insofar as the aim of the polis, the aim of human life begins to be treated in much more imminent terms. Yes, okay, we still have this acknowledgement that we should be getting to heaven, but isn't it the case that we should be trying to build up the polis here on Earth too, right? And there's this greater and greater dichotomy that's built out, separating the kingdom of heaven from the polis, the kingdom of Earth.
What I think we see here, with Petrarch… I really don't want to throw him under the bus because he's one of the greatest intellectual and poetic thinkers of all time, so this is a little bit like a kid throwing like a rock at a skyscraper…but I think that what we have here is the seeds of a separation between man's natural and supernatural ends. So, Petrarch climbs this mountain, Mont Ventoux, and when he gets to the top, he pulls out his copy of Augustine and he looks inward.
His letter about the ascent of Mont Ventoux is beautiful, and it's about human frailty and human pride, and the sort of inward gaze he does looking at man is as spiritual, as sinner, is a great move. But at the same time, there's a sense that the material world is that which leads us away from beatitude. We need to reject the material in order to be able to follow God. Our true vocation is towards heaven, when in fact a fuller view of the picture, that we see earlier in the Middle Ages, is one that explicitly says that grace builds on nature, which is not to say that we don't need grace, right? Quite the opposite. And it's not saying that nature on its own can give us everything that we get from Revelation. Absolutely not. But what it is saying is that, well, if you look around at the world, at the cosmos, what you see is something that is oriented toward, that opens up towards heaven. So, there's not quite this separation that I think Petrarch is making. That was a very long answer. Do you still want me to talk about Wordsworth and Stevens?
Weston: No, let's stay with Petrarch for a minute. I'm glad that you brought him up because he especially stuck out to me in the article. This quotation that you had in the article where Petrarch says essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, that we shouldn't so much strive to trample mountains as to trample our earthly appetites…This kind of separation of the earthly and the spiritual, as you alluded to, has been such a motif in Christian history. And you can see how Augustine being an influence on Petrarch could lead him to think in that way. And so I'm curious, why do you think this is such a tempting move for Christians to make?
And maybe another way of asking this more specifically is… Can you help me identify the truth that's in this move? What is good and true and beautiful about it? But also what might making this move miss for us?
John-Paul: I think what’s true about it, is that concupiscence is real, and it's threefold, and it happens through the world, the flesh, and the devil. If all that is material, if you see this as your primary concern, if you are climbing a mountain to have the sort of “gosh, wow” experience of: “wow, look at that view, wow,” you're not actually fully embracing the ecstatic. Beauty wounds us to lead us to the truth of the good. There is a good to the thing in and of itself, but there's also a good that pushes beyond that, that pushes to the transcendent.
Let me summarize: So I think that what is correct about this is the fact that, if we see beauty as purely on the level of the imminent, then we reduce it to pleasure. We reduce it to mere material pleasure. Material pleasure is not a bad thing, but it's not the ultimate thing.
It is not that which will fulfill us, and it's not that which we're ultimately meant for, and it's not actually going to make us happy. When you reduce the cosmos to that, what you're reducing a mountain to is basically an aesthetic experience. I go up there and “Oh wow, oh, this is so great, oh, it's so pretty.” Which is what some of the later modern thinkers…that was an oversimplification, right? But, that's what some of the later modern thinkers see. Is that in order to be this refined cultivated person you have to be of a certain intellectual status to be able to truly see the beauty of the mountain and there's sort of snobbery…
Weston: TIPS Fedora.
John-Paul: Yes! Yes!…and true beauty is 100 percent against snobbery. We cannot have an apprehension of true beauty and not want to share it with others
Weston: Yeah, that makes me think of you writing that beauty properly elicits wonder. There's something inherently childlike about that state.
John-Paul: Yes, of course. There's two properly childlike reactions to when a child receives a gift, the gift of beauty that we experience with ekstasis, right? One move is to selfishly turn inward and to say, “This is mine. Mine, mine, mine. I want it. This is for me.” And we know, and the child eventually comes to know, that that's not actually the fullness of…again, that doesn't actually make you happy. There's something about that that hurts not only the gift, but also you. But then there's another move of, “Mom, come quick! There's a slug out in the front yard! Come see it! It's great!” There's this wonder of wanting to share, of wanting to share the world with others. And in its fullest sense, if you have a wonder that has been elicited by something that is truly beautiful, of course you want to share that, right?
Weston: So in describing your experience of the beauty of the landscape that you passed on the road in this game of chicken with the red truck, it seems to me that you were staking out an epistemology between positivism and postmodernism. I'll try to explain what I mean. So, the positivist, in seeing the same beautiful landscape, might think that in fully observing the landscape, he can fully possess the objective reality of it. There's a function working here wherein clear observation of the mountain takes away its mystery. The more veridical observation there is, the less mystery. So, you have that on the one hand.
On the other hand, the postmodernists might argue something kind of the opposite in some ways, and claim that because all knowledge is mediated through subjective experience, the object in itself is actually totally sealed off from us, and at most what we're left with is a kind of simulacrum of the mountain of the landscape - just something in our minds.
And so, in a sense, for the post-modernist, there is only mystery in this case with respect to the object itself, because it's just not available to us. You, however, seem to hold together what the positivist and postmodernist would think impossible to hold together. That is, A, you do have access to the thing itself, the mountain or the landscape, and B, far from taking away the mystery of the mountain, actually having it present to you allows you to bask in the mystery of it. And so I find this overall epistemology to be very enchanting, because the things themselves are present to you, but they're present to you in a peculiar kind of way such that they retain a kind of power unto themselves, or a mysteriousness unto themselves that you don't have control over or possess.
So that's a huge abstract wind-up to this probably too broad question… But why do you think this way? And maybe to be a little more specific, who or what influenced you to see the world in this way, as the world sort of being available to you and yet being mysterious?
John-Paul: The reason I think it’s right is because I think it's the only view that fully accords with human experience. Let's take both the positivist and the postmodernist view and apply it to you looking on the face of a person you love.
Well you're the positivist, you look at the face of the person you love, and let's say that you're maybe 30 years into marriage, you're looking at the face of this person that you've spent most of your life with. Cool! You've got full possession, baby! You've seen her in all seasons, probably you've seen her in just about every context you could. Surely you must have full possession of the beauty of this person, right? Surely you must possess this person in her entirety, right? Of course not. And I realize that might be… I hope I'm not making too much of a straw man of the positivist, but I think that human experience, especially when it comes to love, just shows how false that is. That, indeed, the longer you're in a relationship with someone, the more mysterious they become, not the less. The more you understand them, the more you realize, once again, you don't possess them in this… I don't even want to say comfortable… but in this casual way where you're able to exhaust who they are in their entirety. Because that's ultimately what happens. I love the fact that you brought up mystery here, because what a positivist would do when he encounters like a true legitimate wounding beauty is to say, “No, no, no, no, no, no...” Ultimately, and this is also connected with the modern technocratic paradigm, the positivist view that you have identified is how we get boredom as a phenomenon for the first time in human history. Boredom does not, in the sense that we're talking about it, exist in the ancient world. If you're interested more in the intellectual history of modernity, especially as it relates to boredom, I would strongly suggest reading David Foster Wallace's “The Pale King,” where he talks about this at length.
Boredom is not a natural phenomenon. It's something that we only get with the advent of modernity, and part of what boredom is, is you are taking a look at something and you are saying, “got it, I'm good, I get the point. All the mystery is gone. There's nothing about this that entertains me anymore. Let's move on.”
Contrast that with what you said about the postmodernists, right? About how we have no actual experience of the thing in and of itself, it's just this simulacrum. We're purely locked in subjectivity. This is a fun exercise for all the postmodernists that are listening to this. The next time you're out with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, try saying to them, “You're so beautiful. I think that, objectively, it's impossible to determine whether or not you are beautiful, but the simulacrum of your beauty that's presenting itself to me…I think you're beautiful, other people might not think that.” Just try that and see how long it takes before you get a slap in the face. Because once again, I think you can't exhaust the mystery of the person, but part of what love is, is again, it's a recognition on your part, subjectively, not only of the objective beauty of the other person, but also the fact that you are meant for each other. There's this interpenetration of subjectivity and objectivity
Weston: So, your article critiques modern perspectives on nature, suggesting they separate man and nature's beauty. What do you believe are the consequences of the separation for both individuals and society?
John-Paul: I think that the consequence par excellence is the dino-shaped chicken nugget. Because what you have there is a chicken that has probably never seen the sun, has probably been factory-farmed, has been fed or overfed to the point that it cannot exist without being pumped full of antibiotics. It's slaughtered and then its flesh is rearranged and fried into the shape of one of its ancestors for the sake of our being able to eat it.
What I think is at stake here is a complete loss of any understanding of nature, nature in the sense of…in order for a thing to have a nature definitionally, it means it has an internal principle of motion or rest. There is some principle within it that causes it to do that. To grow, to be, to seek after its excellence in a way that is not present for a piece of technology, something that we make in which we dictate what the end of the thing is. A hammer does not have a nature, per se, beyond that which we ascribe to it, right? A hammer is for hammering nails. And the parts of the hammer may have had at one point a nature, right? But the thing itself is dead. If you plant a hammer, it's not going to grow into a hammer tree.
If you take a modern view of nature, what you assume is that everything is a piece of technology. That you can look out in the world and you can see the chicken. What do I need the chicken to be? I need the chicken to produce maximal meat in a pleasing form so that more parents will buy chicken for their kids, so that I can make more money. So, in order to get those chickens to produce maximal meat, I have to do things to the chicken that are against its nature, that I know are bad for it, that I know are not going to make it healthy. But that doesn't matter, because I dictate what the purpose of the chicken is. The chicken now becomes a piece of technology.
Contrast that with an older and deeper view of husbandry. Where, if you want to know how to raise a chicken, you look at what a chicken eats. What does a chicken do when it's fully chickening? What does it eat when it's out in the field? What are some things that make it healthy? What are some things that make it unhealthy? You have to attend to the being of a chicken in order to be in right relationship with it. The logical extent of this; if you're seeing things that have a nature as a piece of technology that is going to translate into your relationship with other human beings.
There is no line between if you begin to treat reality as a piece of technology whose end you dictate, you will treat other people in the exact same way. That's what I think is at stake.
Weston: What practical steps can individuals take to cultivate a mindset that sees and loves nature as part of God's creation and not just as technology to be used and abused?
John-Paul: I'm going to rip off something from Joseph Pieper here. He says that one of the ways that we can cultivate a right view of reality is twofold. The first step is we've got to attend to it. We've got to actually put ourselves in front of it without any mediating - without any technological mediation.
If you want to go learn about reality, go look outside, go, be outside. Attend to a particular place. Gardening is a great way to do this - be in a particular place, and really look at it. Be there. And you can do the exact same thing with a piece of art that really touches your soul. Attend to the thing.
You can even do this in your own relationships. But cultivating an attention by being and abiding with the other is the first step to seeing reality well. You have to be with the other, and you have to listen, and then the other part of this says Pieper, is the longer we attend to the beauty of things as they are, the more by nature we will want to respond by attempting to re-present it. And what Pieper says is if you really want to see reality well, try becoming a painter or a sculptor or a poet. Because what that's going to show you is A, how much you suck at actually seeing reality, and B, the form. You really have to look at the form of the thing, and even trying to re-present that form through poetry is really, really, really difficult. You have to see a thing very well before you attempt to re-present it. Before you attempt to show, to give back, some response of what this thing has engaged with you in dialogue about,
Weston: That's really helpful also for our earlier discussion about epistemology, which could seem perhaps abstract or impractical or not very relevant to any kind of discussion about care for the environment. To think that attention, which requires a sense of knowing that the thing itself, that you actually can have some kind of communion with that, to have your attention toward in the first place.
I think it helps show that there actually are real world stakes to whatever epistemology that we have. It might inculcate a different set of responses or motions of the heart. If I don't think I actually have the landscape itself in front of me and all of its beauty and mysteriousness.
John-Paul: Yeah, because attentiveness is the first step to love, what you're drilling in on is how do we cultivate an epistemology, a way of knowing how to love? Because if you're inattentive, that is a sign that there is something here that's lacking as regards your love.
Weston: Well, thank you so much for your time and for your conversation, John Paul. This has been a real pleasure.
John-Paul: The pleasure is all mine.