This Iris Murdoch quote from Alan Jacobs is crucial:

The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused. 

It’s also—like most good things—very, very old.

St. Augustine:

And so, every love that belongs to a studious soul which wants to know what it does not know is not a love of what it does not know but rather of what it does know. It is because of what it does know that it wants to know what it does not know. But someone so curious as to be carried away by nothing other than a love of knowing the unknown, and not because of something already known, should be distinguished from the studious and called curious. But even the curious do not love the unknown. It is more accurate to say that they hate the unknown because they want everything to become known and thus nothing to remain unknown.

From a class journal essay on the history of genocide and reconciliation:

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Without in any way diminishing the importance of the truth or the policies that support it, the challenge is often in finding ways to seek this goal of healing not just as a result of the first two but in the process of pursuing them. This third goal can, thankfully, exist even in the midst of disagreement and unjust laws. This is, I think, because this goal has a life of its own. The truth is not (merely) something we seek for the sake of community, nor is community (merely) something we seek for the sake of truth—community is itself a form of truth. Truth and justice matter, but sometimes our efforts to define the truth, just as our efforts to find justice, can do as much to get in the way of community and healing as they can to champion it. This reality, probably more than any other, points at the difficulty—but also the profound possibility—of reconciliation.

“Sitting Around Your Table”

Sitting around your table

as we did, able

to laugh, argue, share

bread and wine and companionship, care

about what someone else was saying, even

if we disagreed passionately: Heaven,

we’re told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial,

eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium

partakes—for me, at least—of sacrament.

(Whereas the devil, ever intent

on competition, invented the cocktail party where

one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare

we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free?

Yes! Around your table we

knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless

the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest.

~ Madeleine L’Engle ~

Taylor Dotson at The New Atlantis (contra some scientist dingbat with an iconic/ironic voice for storytelling):

Like Popper’s philosophy of science, this vision of democracy emphasizes the tentativeness of political truths and the inherent cognitive limitations of any given citizen, even an expert. If political outcomes ever approximate what seems “objectively” most desirable, it is through a healthy process of negotiation in which “subjective” individuals challenge each other, rather than through assent to the superior understanding of an expert class.

But The Open Society was a product of its time. Because Popper did not anticipate threats to open societies outside of grand historical narratives, he did not imagine that the source of fanatical certitude would one day be individuals, who would fashion it out of a veritable flood of discordant facts and suspicions. Americans have increasingly come to see themselves as capable of sifting through all the available evidence to discover unerring truths that their political opponents are too biased, ignorant, or corrupt to see. Although some citizens still coalesce around shared visions of the ultimate makeup of society (such as that of white nationalists), the more significant drivers of polarized, intransigent politics are the twin afflictions of scientism and conspiracism. […]

Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world. […]

Let’s call this fact-ist politics. Under its influence, citizens no longer debate or deliberate but dedicate themselves to aligning the evidence to shore up cherished beliefs and interests. And they end up even more intransigent as a result, because they can tell themselves that their own ideas are unassailably rational and objective. […]

This diagnostic political style is both unfair and condescending. It eventually renders all disagreement into a cognitive disease — one to which the diagnostician just so happens to be immune. The diagnostic style reinforces the idea that the only legitimate grounds for participating in politics is having “evidence-based” opinions. Evidence matters greatly, but it isn’t the whole game. When we believe that it is, we shove aside our underlying value disagreements, thereby undermining our capacity to deliberate as our disagreements become ever more devoid of moral and practical complexity. […]

Democratic theorists have long recognized the dangers of rationalistic politics. As historian Sofia Rosenfeld writes, describing the thought of Hannah Arendt: “What individuals require is the return to a kind of public life that forces them to constantly weigh and consider things from the perspective of other people.” Political theorist Benjamin Barber has defined “strong democratic talk” as incorporating “listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting.” And theorists such as Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom — associated with a political theory called “pluralism” — have emphasized the need for democracies to foster mutual learning and accept the inescapability of disagreement. […]

We must learn how to see agreement as the end of politics more than the beginning — and, even then, as partial, tentative, and contingent. By abandoning the idea that consensus on the facts must precede politics, we can promote a style of governance that aspires to gradually earn trust by publicly testing new policies.

James K.A. Smith:

The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.

It is this necessary cultivation for surprise that is undermined by the cliché. The arts in the vicinity of faith seem especially prone to give us what we already love, to keep returning to tropes that are familiar, hence comforting. This is how to make the world smaller, shrinking it to the size of what I’ve come looking for, what I’ve come to expect. The comfort of the cliché is a buffer against surprise. …

A life hungry for aesthetic surprise does not settle for daily doses of predictably poignant comfort; instead, I need to expose my palate to strange, maybe even unsavory tastes as a way of making myself available for the sublime. While we can’t manufacture the surprise, we can learn to make ourselves available. …

Granted, there’s an objective force to works of art that can do this. It’s no accident that Bach and Cézanne hook so many. The mystery is what it takes for them to hook me. What did I have to go through for the epiphany to dawn, for the artwork to arrest me, unsettle me?

To Ross Douthat’s recent (less-than-helpful) pieces here and here—neither of which are worth rereading—I can hear Nadezhda Mandelstam responding to some who “find comfort in the doctrine of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”:

They hope they may last out till a new “synthesis” which will allow them to come into their own again with a vengeance. …

For my part, knowing that permanent ideas are formed in youth and are rarely revised later in life, I can only watch with hope and bated breath as more and more people read poetry—and the “Fourth Prose.” Between people like myself and those who stand on the other side, there is a clear division: we are thesis and antithesis. I do not expect to see a synthesis, but I would love to know whom the future belongs to.

Hope Against Hope (246)

Laura Miller on Angus Fletcher’s ability to read without seeing shit.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, literature is made of culture, not neurons, and any given literary work can’t be fully appreciated if separated from the thousands of cultural, social, political, economic, and historical factors that affected its making. . . In place of the rich and often fascinating cultural contexts that fostered these works, the reader of Wonderworks is served lukewarm potted neuroscience.

Jerry Fodor, on Steven Pinker’s similar treatment of reading:

And here Pinker is on why we like to read fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.

Fletcher’s treatment of literature seems worthy of every ounce of that same thick, enjoyable sarcasm.

C.S. Lewis, however, would go a little further in analyzing the problem:

Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.

Allan Gurganus:

It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical. Novelists face danger, spending their lives imagining adult temptation and corruptibility. Holding on to the great “What if?” requires a willingness to live wide-eyed. A readiness—­even an eagerness—to go on being surprised. When I’m writing from a child’s point of view, I sometimes find it helpful to literally get down on my knees and walk around the house. I’m once again a creature four feet tall. You can see the undersides of tables. Electrical outlets near the baseboards become fascinating again.

“What is the purpose of interreligious dialogue?” asks Abraham Joshua Heschel:

It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help one another, to share insight and learning, to cooperate in academic ventures on the highest scholarly level and, what is even more important, to search in the wilderness for wellsprings of devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive the divine sparks in our souls; to nurture openness to the spirit of the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and faithfulness to the Living God.

Sara Hendren:

If a loud restaurant overwhelms you, the sound of pots and pans crashing send you into a rage, or you find a roller coaster at breakneck speed to be oddly relaxing, then perhaps you recognize yourself on some spectrum or another. The sensory world is a weird mix of human bodies, each of us moving around in a singular flesh envelope. We traverse the rooms and streets we like and we hate, turning the little knobs of the world’s sensation by our choices of what to wear, how to walk, what to include and what to shut out. Augmented by headphones or a hat pulled low, decked in seamless socks or technical Lycra or fuzzy sheepskin, wrapped tightly or loosely, rocking or fidgeting or chewing our nails—each body makes a stream of conscious and unconscious choices, knitting together a habitable personal universe minute by minute by minute by minute. When I see Stephen mapping the world in lines, breaking its space to tame it, all I can think is how perceptively he’s externalized an invisible but fundamentally human need: to build bridges that temporarily edit the shapes, or sounds, or sights of the world. And I wonder: Who else is looking for lines, a little lost in space? Who else is seeking a way?