What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and motion how express and admirable. In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…
For those who don’t know, that was a short passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It may include a few errors or deviations from the original text, though, because I typed it up from memory. You see a while back I thought ‘You know, I really like Shakespeare. Maybe it’d be worth it to study and learn some of his stuff.’ Not really for any reason. I wasn’t in a play or anything, and I’m still not sure how one can practically use information like this. But sometimes that’s alright. There are certain things that are just worth it…
I was asked this week to read Chapter 2 of Clifford Williams’ The Life of the Mind, which is entitles Is Thinking Good for Its Own Sake? And I must say I absolutely LOVED it. This is my kind of book. Actually I’d really like to read the rest of it just for the sake of it. And that is exactly what the chapter addressed; doing things for the sake of it.
As I said before, there are certain things that are simply worth it. They’re not worth it for any specific purpose, they just are. In my mind memorizing passages I like is among these, but I’ll get to that later. The real question is: If it’s not for any specific purpose then why is it worth it? This is where we run into an interesting clash of terms. You see a lot of people have fallen into the trap of equating purpose and reason when it comes to value. A lot of the time something’s purpose is also its reason for value: A broom, for instance, would have no value if it had no purpose, as the reason we have brooms is for the purpose of sweeping the floor. But there are other things in which this is not the case. A scenic view of a mountain range, for instance, has value, but maybe not purpose. Nevertheless it does have a reason for this value that we ascribe to it: value is not some arbitrary, absurd, unreasonable thing that we cannot define or discover. There is no “what for” when it comes to mountains, but there is a “why”.
The Christian worldview claims that in this case the “why” is because God made them. In fact, that is the case for a lot of things. And this is the interesting thing about value and reason and purpose. Without God, there is none. Sure, without God brooms might still be brooms, but what about mountains? Why should we care about them?
Another interesting thing about this notion is that we as human beings are the only ones who seem to see it. A monkey may see the use in a tool or utensil in the same way we would, but he would not see mountains in the same way. As C. S. Lewis said in his book God in the Dock, “Men look to the starry heavens in reverence: Monkeys do not.” So in effect only humans see value and reason for things that have no purpose, and in fact I believe that it is among the staple aspect of human nature that we seek out this type of meaning: we need purpose, but we need more than just utility. Anyone can see utility, but it takes a uniquely human mind to see reason for value beyond simple purpose. Turning to Lewis’ book again, this is because “We are inveterate poets. Our imaginations are awake Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality–the sublime. Unless this were so, the merely arithmetical greatness of the galaxy would be no more impressive than the figures in a telephone directory... To a mind which did not share our emotions, and lacked imaginative energies, [such]… size would be sheerly meaningless.” The question then becomes why do we have this ability? The Christian worldview claims that it is because we as humans are made in the image of God.
Christian thought has now brought us twice to the same answer: God. He is the basis of all power, goodness, reason, purpose, value, and hope. We find mountains beautiful because they are God’s handiwork, and because He has granted us the ability to perceive that. In short, everything can and must be derived and defined by God. It’s part of His nature.
Mountains are good because God made them good, seeing as He is good and they reflect that. The stars are likewise. Mankind is likewise. This is what we call ‘intrinsic good’. But it’s not just things like this that are intrinsically good; our response to them based upon this intrinsic goodness can be called intrinsically good as well. As Williams sates, admiring the beauty we find in the mountains does not really serve us any purpose; it does not just help us survive. But humans weren’t made merely to survive. We were made to glorify God.
Perhaps that is a good definition of intrinsic good: Something that is good even if it has no other purpose than to glorify God.
In the end, then, I suppose that everything, even seeing the beauty of the mountains, has a purpose: the purpose of glorifying God. The only thing left to answer is what is the purpose of glorifying God? – THAT is where we truly run into the most intrinsically good of all intrinsically good things. The only reason that man’s glorifying God is good is because it is. Because God is worth it, and man was made to glorify Him. And interestingly enough through other things that we call intrinsically good, we can even fulfill some part of the purpose without knowing it. A non-Christian can still find beauty in the mountains, even if he doesn’t know why.
I’ll re-state it like this: Once upon a time there lived a woman who fell in love with a man. She was fortunate enough to have this man’s love in return. This man was an author or many books, and the woman loved to read his books for the simple sake of reading them because he had written them. Other people read the books, too, and they liked them, but it was a very different kind of liking that they had for the author than that of the woman. Perhaps she had grown to love his books and then got to meet him, perhaps she met him and then began to read, it doesn’t really matter (because this is not a perfect metaphor; nothing ever is.) but do you see the point? She reads his books simply because they are his. We adore this world simply because it is God’s. And that’s good.
Now just like the reading of books because of their authorship can also be beneficial if the books are good and insightful, the worship of God can also help us in more practical ways, but the point is that it does not have to. To quote Williams, “It is, in fact, a characteristic of an intrinsic good that it has good effect. It would be odd if it did not. Although an activity that is intrinsically good would be worth pursuing even if it did not cause good effects, it is good for its effects too.”
I really am rambling now, so I suppose I should get back to the point. According to my prompt, I am supposed to be listing 20 things not mentioned in the text that are intrinsically good. Wow, there are a lot, but the book covers a LOT in very broad topics… In fact, excluding what the book says (Praising God, finding beauty in nature, respecting nature, and thinking/learning) I’m not sure what all I can and cannot list. As I said “praising God” is quite universal when it comes to intrinsic good. So is finding beauty in nature. And learning. In fact, how important is it that I follow these prompts?
Hmm… Here’s one: Creativity. God gave us this amazing ability to create and to appreciate the creations of others. Both reading and writing fiction have value, even if they are not utilitarian. The imagination of fantasy and fantastical worlds, the imagination of musical melodies that have never been thought of before, the creation or beautiful strings of words, colors, textures, tastes, sounds, smells, movements, all kinds of creative energies: dance, writing, singing, playing, cooking, painting, sculpting, IMAGINGING all have their place among the intrinsically good. And so does the enjoyment of all of these things. Reading, watching, tasting, seeing, hearing, ENJOYING, all of these are of God. However all of this must be taken with a grain of salt: obviously all of these things can be used in ways that are intrinsically good, that is with no other purpose than to glorify God, but they can also be used for evil. Because man is fallen, so are all of his works.
I have said an AWFUL lot in these paragraphs, and I’m sure it was one of the least concise and clear things you’ve ever read. Maybe one day I’ll come back and make more sense of this post, all the same I think this is a VERY interesting topic, it you can’t tell. Hmm… there’s something. Is the pursuit of intrinsic good itself an intrinsic good? I think it is.
Kel
P.S. This is another point that Williams mentioned: there are some things within the realm of the intrinsically good that are not as good as others. He called these the “trivial” and the “perverse”. In my mind the perverse are the much more easily set apart: God Himself makes many distinctions of what is right and wrong in our action, for instance in our creation and observation of artwork. Some things even though they were created by a being created in the image of God who has the intrinsically good gift of creativity, are in fact harmful. That is easy enough to see, but sometimes hard to avoid in the real world.
The “trivial”, I think, is another matter. For who are we to say that something God has made is trivial? What if the scientist thought that something as small as an atom was trivial? At the same time, God does not want us to be so focused on the details that we forget that this is really all about Him. Williams claims that one purpose of mankind in considering things it so link them all together in one understanding of the world. This, I think, is what needs to be done to the “trivial” to make it “non-trivial”. For instance, I mentioned earlier that I had memorized certain passages from Shakespeare because I felt like it, even if I had no need to do so. Was that trivial? Would it have been trivial if they had been Bible passages instead? (I shall leave the Secular-Spiritual debate for another post). I’ve also memorized the naval phonetic alphabet, just because I found it interesting, even if it’s not very useful to me. Was that trivial? Who is to say? At the same time, I would never think less of anyone if THEY did not know the phonetic alphabet. I might think a little less of them if they were unfamiliar with Shakespeare and even more so if they were unfamiliar with Scripture, but that is all personal preference. Or is it? Are some things more trivial than others?
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