Comments on: Samuel Johnson and the End of Certainty http://www.thecultureclub.net/2009/02/15/samuel-johnson-and-the-end-of-certainty/ literature, music, art, culture Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:44:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: ttucker23 http://www.thecultureclub.net/2009/02/15/samuel-johnson-and-the-end-of-certainty/comment-page-1/#comment-361 ttucker23 Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:28:16 +0000 http://thecultureclub.wordpress.com/?p=263#comment-361 Culture Club member Ian Smith asked me to post this comment to the post above: As usual I’m grateful for the direction the Blog entries give me in my musings on the various topics we endeavour to cover at our meetings, even if the usual steer is away from certain of my colleague’s views, but Tim is spot on with this. I’m reminded particularly of the conclusions of the hermit in Rasselas, to the surprise of the Prince and his travel companions that “... I employed my hours in examining the plants which grow in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks. But that inquiry has now grown tasteless and irksome. I have been for some time unsettled and distracted: my mind is disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt...” I wonder, in particular, whether Johnson was remembering his years working on the Dictionary and alluding to the almost exile of that time and the frustration it slowly brought out in him as he admits in the Preface. It seems easy to draw a direct parallel between the original joy Johnson envisaged in taking the dictionary on and the disappointment and compromise the actual task forced upon him and the ensuing words of the hermit: “ My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I lament that I have lost so much, and have gained so little. In solitude, if I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the good... The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.” The Prince and his companions (including the former hermit) then fall in with a talking circle in Cairo where a philosopher, who appears unnassailed by any of the doubts evident in Rasselas and his companions, tells the gathering with certainty that happiness lies in living according to nature. When challenged about what this actually means he replies: “To live according to nature is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.” This nonsense causes Rasselas to cease the conversation which brings me to Boswell’s illustration about Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry and Johnson’s wonderful refutation. Reality impinges on philosophies and enlightened people are now aware of this. Pre-enlightenment there was, perhaps, certainty in such exhortations as that in Matthew 6:26 “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” but during the enlightenment the willingness to take this sort of exhortation at face value was rapidly diminishing, hence Rasselas does not agree with the philosopher, but chooses not to continue the discussion because it is going nowhere. The lesson in this for the Culture Club is that when I, or anyone else, is silent at the end of a point made with certainty by a colleague, it does not imply agreement – in fact, it should often be taken as the opposite. Culture Club member Ian Smith asked me to post this comment to the post above:

As usual I’m grateful for the direction the Blog entries give me in my musings on the various topics we endeavour to cover at our meetings, even if the usual steer is away from certain of my colleague’s views, but Tim is spot on with this. I’m reminded particularly of the conclusions of the hermit in Rasselas, to the surprise of the Prince and his travel companions that “… I employed my hours in examining the plants which grow in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks. But that inquiry has now grown tasteless and irksome. I have been for some time unsettled and distracted: my mind is disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt…”

I wonder, in particular, whether Johnson was remembering his years working on the Dictionary and alluding to the almost exile of that time and the frustration it slowly brought out in him as he admits in the Preface. It seems easy to draw a direct parallel between the original joy Johnson envisaged in taking the dictionary on and the disappointment and compromise the actual task forced upon him and the ensuing words of the hermit: “ My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I lament that I have lost so much, and have gained so little. In solitude, if I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the good… The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.”
The Prince and his companions (including the former hermit) then fall in with a talking circle in Cairo where a philosopher, who appears unnassailed by any of the doubts evident in Rasselas and his companions, tells the gathering with certainty that happiness lies in living according to nature. When challenged about what this actually means he replies: “To live according to nature is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.” This nonsense causes Rasselas to cease the conversation which brings me to Boswell’s illustration about Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry and Johnson’s wonderful refutation. Reality impinges on philosophies and enlightened people are now aware of this. Pre-enlightenment there was, perhaps, certainty in such exhortations as that in Matthew 6:26 “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” but during the enlightenment the willingness to take this sort of exhortation at face value was rapidly diminishing, hence Rasselas does not agree with the philosopher, but chooses not to continue the discussion because it is going nowhere.

The lesson in this for the Culture Club is that when I, or anyone else, is silent at the end of a point made with certainty by a colleague, it does not imply agreement – in fact, it should often be taken as the opposite.

]]> By: Thomas Osborne http://www.thecultureclub.net/2009/02/15/samuel-johnson-and-the-end-of-certainty/comment-page-1/#comment-362 Thomas Osborne Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:33:07 +0000 http://thecultureclub.wordpress.com/?p=263#comment-362 I think the argument about Johnson being the embodiment of this antinomy between certainty and doubt is absolutely right and very characteristic of the Enlightenment which is usually convicted simply of a proselytising rationalism. Of course the tension was lived out by Johnson in a highly stressful way; the certainty was there because of course he was overrun with doubts himself, as his prayers and diaries show. I wonder if this doubt/certainty divide was what exercised him so much about the genre of biography which he regarded as a very high art and of which he was a master practitioner; to write a life was not to write simply about the travails through which a character necessarily passed and how well or badly that character lived up to them; rather, biography is about showing how different personae negotiated this human tension between having to live in the world and questioning it. Savage fascinated Johnson no doubt precisely because of his frailties but also the way in which he blagged his way through life - certainty, for him, was like a confidence trick. The art of conversation, too, might be seen as the medium for demonstrating one's skill at combining certitude with questioning; a good conversationalist isn't someone who simply knows a lot of stuff, but someone who can question things and keep things open for the provocation of interlocutors... I don't know, but I do think this doubt/certainty thing is interesting. For once, we agree! I think the argument about Johnson being the embodiment of this antinomy between certainty and doubt is absolutely right and very characteristic of the Enlightenment which is usually convicted simply of a proselytising rationalism. Of course the tension was lived out by Johnson in a highly stressful way; the certainty was there because of course he was overrun with doubts himself, as his prayers and diaries show. I wonder if this doubt/certainty divide was what exercised him so much about the genre of biography which he regarded as a very high art and of which he was a master practitioner; to write a life was not to write simply about the travails through which a character necessarily passed and how well or badly that character lived up to them; rather, biography is about showing how different personae negotiated this human tension between having to live in the world and questioning it. Savage fascinated Johnson no doubt precisely because of his frailties but also the way in which he blagged his way through life – certainty, for him, was like a confidence trick. The art of conversation, too, might be seen as the medium for demonstrating one’s skill at combining certitude with questioning; a good conversationalist isn’t someone who simply knows a lot of stuff, but someone who can question things and keep things open for the provocation of interlocutors… I don’t know, but I do think this doubt/certainty thing is interesting. For once, we agree!

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