Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, quoted by Enormous Air (who provides more bibliographic detail). It reminded me tangentially of one of Kundera’s theses, which he explores regularly; as he puts it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything…it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask…

I don’t distantly approach an authoritative familiarity with antiquity, so I’ll defer to Bloom, Enormous Air, Tragos, Superfluidity, and others on the question of whether pre-modern peoples interiorized ‘fundamental’ tensions without being tempted dialectically to resolve them. Bloom’s use of the word ‘fundamental’ suggests that he considers such a perspective -which I associate strongly with Eastern religion- the right one. That is: he thinks such tensions are irresolvable, and therefore our efforts to be at best quixotic and at worst a kind of ignorance.

If the modernist sense that the world and its problems -which are just those aspects of the world which we wish to change- must be soluble is flawed, we must regard modernity as tragically flawed in the original sense: from this reductive epistemological certainty, that questions can be answered, analyses perfected, tensions resolved, comes all of modernity’s spectacular achievements. If from that too come its defects -a restlessness, a compulsive anxiety to move forward, attack what should be left obscure, driving out naturally knotted matters of the heart like an obsessive-compulsive driving out anything organic- it’s a sort of civilizational hamartia.

Do you think we consider too much soluble? Do you think there are are ‘fundamental tensions’ which are permanent? Are relentless scientism, reductive, systematic thought, and compulsive, twitchy dialectical rationality a tolerable price to pay for the incredible technological, medical, and political progress of our civilization? Is art our only means for experiencing the simultaneous pull of irresolvable ideas in tension?

(via mills)

Now this isn’t to say the search for solutions are futile and tension cannot be resolved.  There certainly seem to be physical limits that we know of but regardless there is always the tension between life and death and it could be a mistake to get caught up in scientific resolution.  Has the cost become too great?

This summer I’ve signed up for a couple of college courses. The first being Asian philosophy, and the second Anthropology of Globalization.  I was hoping for a french class or math class but scheduling got in the way.  I’m somewhat excited for both classes (which will be taken online increasing my summer flexibility) especially Asian philosphy.  Perhaps the land of the rising sun will shed some light on the western world.