I often hear how ‘useless’ the humanities are from people who consider themselves as ‘practical’ and ‘realistic.’ If you ask these people the right questions you will see they hold many value judgments and philosophical ideas which have no scientific or practical validity whatsoever. Also, if you explain to them that there may be better arguments for alternative value judgments, they tend to get very angry. I’ve noticed, for a topic that “doesn’t matter,” it sure upsets a lot of people. But people are waking up to the fact that scientific materialism is a woefully inadequate worldview that doesn’t incorporate or explain the full spectrum of human experience. As Pascal once said “do you love someone scientifically?” We bring as much to reality as it imposes on us. It is our responsibility to create meaning from experiences which aren’t reducible to scientific analysis. This isn’t a flight from reality. It’s what it means to be human. We impose value, create meaning. It’s why the Bible says we are made in the image of God.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
Beautiful comment. Agree and thank you!
@Thurnishaley69697 ай бұрын
It's ironic cause now science is pointing back in the direct of idealism; it's the mind that makes reality. So this reddit atheist materialist attitude is gonna die off when people start realizing it doesn't answer anything fundamental about human nature or reality
@natbrownizzle13872 ай бұрын
" I’ve noticed, for a topic that “doesn’t matter,” it sure upsets a lot of people." I can't stand this statement, just because someone gets angry, when claiming something, that does not make the claim important. If someone wants to tell me that race is important and I say no, because race does not matter and that person keeps on pushing and I get angry, that does not mean that that person who is claiming that race is important, somehow makes a point. It's funny when people speak of the importance of the humanities, yet never question their own values and views and just think "I fell therefore it must be true" is somehow correct. The Humanities have lost the faith of the public, because in the last decades it was taken over by Leftists and made a mockery out of it. natural sciences is still the last thing standing against Leftist fanatics promoting to give children hormone blockers because they feel a "certain way". Science of the Humanities is very much important, there is no doubt in my mind that it is, but as long as the science of the humanities department does not shake and or bites of the shakles of the Leftist tyrannts, it will not be taken serious and the same goes for Right Wingers who try to take over the department. Science does not have a poltical membership card, not the STEM fields and not the Humanities.
@m.b.crawford54642 ай бұрын
@@natbrownizzle1387 you’re projecting some things into my comment that aren’t there. I do agree that the humanities are not being taught in the classical sense and that it would be more beneficial to return to that model. I guess I could have stated that originally, but it’s a KZfaq comment, not an essay.
@MicahMicahelАй бұрын
Literature and art are wonderful and should be a part of all of our minds. the 'humanities' seem to be an indoctrination mill nowadays. They promote smaller minds. anyone that desires intellectual safe spaces is anti thought. That's our current humanities. art and literature hold every thug the humanities does, The most artless people take sociology and classes like that. One philosopher teacher friend of mine said the reason he doesn't read fiction novels is because he would just want to take to the part where the 'meaning' is relayed so he goes straight to philosophy and sociology. This takes away the reality from all of their ideas. Fiction is the thought experiment we rest all ideas on. This is why their thoughts don't key in with practical reality maybe.
@SmithMrCorona7 ай бұрын
Once you're famous and old enough, everything is 'dead'. Cinema is dead, literature is dead, cooking is dead, video games are dead, comedy is dead, the internet is dead, the dead are dead.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
"The only good thing about getting old is dying" Cormac
@deanodog36677 ай бұрын
Lolololol
@tompurcell92873 ай бұрын
When you lose all interest in every aspect of life, then you are dead or ready to be.
@goodnightvienna85112 ай бұрын
You’re dead right buddy
@natbrownizzle13872 ай бұрын
You don't have to be famous, you will see, once you will be old, you will see how many things you cherrished and loved are going to be "dead" and you won't have any connection anymore to the times you are still living in, you might make fun of your own future here.
@NOPE.S.P.7 ай бұрын
Werner Herzog's perspective on the difference between facts and truth comes to mind. In general, science is more focused on the factual aspects of what amounts to an accountant's view of the world, while art and literature are more interested in the human aspects of truth which involve an ecstasy of illumination. Both aspects shape the world we live in, and in a strictly logical sense (especially given McCarthy's pessimistic assessments), it's easy to assert that the facts will remain even if our humanity erodes and our species goes into extinction. However, to discount the essence of what it means to us to live as human beings, even in our biased and often delusional ways would be to negate those aspects of reality which allow us to transcend the dull norms of fact-based existence and live in ways which no other animal or machine seems capable of even convincingly replicating or simulating. The integration of facts and truth, and the skill of determining when to abandon one for the other might be considered the essence of wisdom. But, if it ever becomes possible to reduce wisdom to an algorithm of objective optimization, doing so would essentially negate the essence of our humanity and render any human aspects of our consciousness as counterproductive and inefficient. My fear has never been for a decline in humanity's ability to gather facts, but a decline in our ability to act in accordance with our greater capacity for wisdom with respect to those truths which do not translate into simple scientific and mathematical forms. For instance, the very concept of justice in human terms does not reduce itself into any universal concept of something that "is" or exists in some purely definable way, but remains within our aspirations as an abstract ideal of some elusive "ought" which we strive to elevate the essence of our very souls towards like moths circling unto the higher light of greater suns. With all that rather ineloquently stated, my sense is that Cormac tailored his writing to focus more on the human aspects of truth with respect to the facts as he knew them, and shifted his perspective in interviews to focus more on the facts with respect to truth. I would speculate that the reason for this shift had to do with considerations of what approach would best suit the audience at a given time and complement those things he'd already expressed in various ways previously. I could easily be wrong, but I've always had a sense that McCarthy was one of those artists who was always building on what he'd already done and trying to get closer to those things which forever elude us all. Hope someone finds something illuminating in all this rambling, or is wise enough to ignore it outright. Love the channel, and hope you continue to put out interesting videos like these.
@flame852467 ай бұрын
Well said
@brennancarter77217 ай бұрын
Very well said. Your writing flows very smoothly.
@darthmoduh7 ай бұрын
Love these vids especially the Mccarthy and blood meridian content! As an aspiring writer who is looking to be published soon I greatly appreciate the work here. Happy new year!
@stantonsullivan-readdelillo7 ай бұрын
Krauss seems to not get The Passenger or Stella Maris. He’s always so smug. And McCarthy in the interview is obviously very tired and very ill and not in the mood to argue much with Krauss but does what he can.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
Yes!
@B-RollBooks7 ай бұрын
That videographer who filmed Mr Krauss interviewing Mr McCarthy did perhaps the worst job anyone has ever done at filming an interview. I'm not a stickler for perfect exposure, but WOW! Perhaps the worst videography in the history of world. Every competent videographer in the world would have gladly done that for free. Who hired the idiot?
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
Agreed!
@marsrock3167 ай бұрын
It may be a perennial human trait to say something is dead when losing interest in it. If literature is storytelling, then no, literature is not dead and will never die. Humans will always tell stories, even though the form and format will change. McCarthy was also particularly bleak and doomsaying, so consider the source...
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
Agreed!
@RaHeadD103 ай бұрын
McCarthy reading Spengler is based. For anyone who hasn’t read or looked into him he’s a interesting thinker and seems to be returning very much into the zeitgeist.
@scottboyd38382 ай бұрын
Burroughs got all the Beats into Spengler, if it meant anything.
@MicahMicahelАй бұрын
@@scottboyd3838 Burroughs hated the politically correct new name for homosexuals, "gay." we never really remark about how they just took sth word for happy and made it replace queer, then the french took queer and made it mean 'parents having relations with their naughty and very young children....," We just call them happy people. weird propganda. Imagine if we called straight people 'good' people? are you happy? Burroughs would get mad when people called him gay.
@eglspl4252 ай бұрын
This is another thing McCarthy said that makes me think he was always taking the piss when answering these questions, acting the curmudgeon and the contrarian. He was writing literature basically up until the moment his heart stopped. He knew he was never going to see much return on The Passenger and Stella Maris but he dedicated his final years to those works. These are not the actions of a man who views literature as a lesser pursuit!
@AJPzaworld7 ай бұрын
Mainländer called it the “will-to-death” when it came to our spiritual and active pursuit of definition against the inevitable fate of death and entropy. We seek to understand everything against Death’s crawl, seek to break free and become as something grander, our own individual divine essence, and that is what makes science both a grand and very harrowing pursuit. When We Cease to Understand the World explains that quite beautifully, the line between madnesses and intelligence. War enthralls us, death commands us, and fear makes of us grander things Basically: we’re all going to die, synecdoche.
@petercheney831612 күн бұрын
"there are particles and quantum mechanic and whatnot, existing and working all around me without my consent" ? settle down there, Holden.
@jefffudesco93647 ай бұрын
I remember this faddish argument in philosophy thru the 1980s at the university. Philosophy was killed then by science too. Then a philosopher came along and said something interesting.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
it's back!
@JeffRebornNow7 ай бұрын
I've never read Cormac McCarthy. He's one of the modern novelists I've yet to get to. I must say, however, that this video did not inspire me to hop on Amazon and order his books. The wizened little gnome on the sofa (not Krauss, the other gnome) says nothing at all profound in this clip. And Krauss's statements border on ludicrous. What does this mean: "The results of science silence poetry for a thousand years"? Poetry and science have entirely different aims, and entirely different ways of achieving those aims. One is not in conflict with the other. When a physicist says to a novelist, "You've said that science is more interesting than literature," and the novelist says "Yes," one's only response should be, "Great. Go work on science and leave the literature to someone else." I'm having a hard time trying to even understand what Krauss is getting at. Some of the things he says are -- well, let's just say they're unintentionally funny: "I'm a huge fan of Shakespeare, don't get me wrong; but it's hard to think that it competes ultimately with the edifice of the standard model of particle physics." LMAO That's because Shakespeare doesn't compete with physics, ultimately or otherwise. [I'm sorry, Write Conscious, I found nothing profound in your video, and quite a bit in it that makes little sense.]
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
No worries Jeff. Lots of other good authors.
@JeffRebornNow6 ай бұрын
@@guyburgwin5675 I love Capote. Have you read "The Muses Are Heard"? That's my favorite of his books. But I reject your analogy. I'm not going to not read McCarthy because of this video; I just found what he and Krauss said to be absurd. Maybe McCarthy was just humoring Krauss? I found his interview of Woody Allen really unenlightening. He should stick to physics.
@ryanthomas71196 ай бұрын
How dense are you? They are referring to beauty... DUHHHH!!!! Throughout history art (poetry, plays, paintings, etc) has been maybe the main source of profundity and beauty for people to meditate on and appreciate but now science is starting to rival or even surpass art in that respect and that is what is being argued. That's what you don't understand, Jeff
@ryanthomas71196 ай бұрын
@@JeffRebornNowYou are such a hipster. That book is not your favorite Capote book.. Obviously In cold blood is his best book.
@goodnightvienna85112 ай бұрын
I think McCarthy is just being grumpy here . Look at the amount of audiobook channels on KZfaq. You may not be reading per se… yet we are actually going back to the most ancient form of story telling- sitting in the dark and listening to a voice delivering a story- also take note of the most popular type of content- Cosmic Horror, Lovecraft et al. Everyone now at least has an idea who or what Cthulhu is . My point is that everything is cyclical, to borrow a worn phrase, Time is a flat Circle. Storytelling will never die, the method of the stories’ transfer from source to receiver may change. Science fiction fulfils a purpose. This is a great time to be a listener, simply have an idea or book pop into your head and it’s here-We just pick our own genre. Look at the amount of people who have listened to the Blood Meridian audiobook on KZfaq or…The Man in the High Castle…or The Wasteland…or M. R. James…or Stephen King . Often people watch a film, read comments as to how the book is better- The Shining is a great example- and they go straight to KZfaq. Listening to a voice narration for story telling is the oldest yet ironically presently the most popular method of brain pictures caused by structural word- play
@teebeedahbowАй бұрын
On your deathbed, will, you have an equation from particle physics on your mind, or the words of a character from Shakespeare?
@personanongrata9877 ай бұрын
Good storytelling is as fundamental to science as it is to literature. --
@spiritualpolitics82052 ай бұрын
Krauss is fairly obtuse about running Shakespeare against the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The former (largely a single human being, even if minor parts of the plays were added later by others, and even if you hold S wasn't S) created the greatest art corpus in the history of the world, in terms of humanity understanding itself. QM and Relativity are beautiful and deep and extraordinary, but they do not compete with Hamlet or Lear.
@danielcompton34927 ай бұрын
I thought this was an excellent video. I recently have been introduced to Martin Buber's idea of an I-Thou and an I-it relationship. I think these two ways of interacting with the world are very relevant to your video. Another thought I had was the following. It probably has a few holes in the logic, but whatever. 1) The scientific method is necessarily a reductive method. 2) A person who uses only a reductive method to understand and interact in the world sees everything as mere objects. 3) The value of a mere object comes from its use only and is not intrinsic to the object itself. 4) Therefore, the scientific worldview sees people as mere objects that have no intrinsic value. I guess the question is, are we alright with everyone seeing each other as mere objects. I'm not, the idea makes me super uncomfortable. I think I'll keep reading the Hobbit to my kids in the mean time.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
Great thoughts! Don't worry about holes in logic. Only logic bros who see you as an object care about them lol
@jefffudesco93647 ай бұрын
Science is more important than literature. No doubt. But you cant have science without language, which is the 1st technology that leads to everything else. So language established our communal, cooperative life. Then after centuries of kings and priests building their authority on specialized language systems and spells language becomes increasingly specialized and sophisticated, say in the enlightenment period with newton. This specialized language splits off and becomes science, of physics and economics and alchemy/chemistry. But Im not gonna listen to some geezer like Cormac tell me i shud readSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN in my time after work and b4 bed instead of DR NO by percieval everett! Science vs The Novel is a bullshit argument. Sure, classic sci fi from heinlein to start wars is pretty stupid once you realize it take years to get to mars. But it dont mean i shud stop reading top shelf fiction cuz non-polluting energy is really really important to mankinds future whereas another PORTRAIT OF A LADY is only really morally deep and intellectually invigorating. Fuck Cormac.
@doclime47927 ай бұрын
In a lot of ways science is just another industry and people are just there to get their paycheck and it's what they chose to major in in college. Don't tell me "science is more important" and start rattling off about Wittgenstein and the atomic bomb. Writers are nutty though. I love you Cormac.
@bardamu32426 ай бұрын
It took 13 billion years for us to realize it’s 13 billion years old
@flame852467 ай бұрын
Great video. Absolutely nail on the head for STEM nerds. I also Appreciated the breakdown of the false binary between the Humanities and Science
@Thurnishaley69697 ай бұрын
@@donjindra You people have just made things worse. Has constant internet access, advanced military/ surveillance tech, data harvesting socials, etc done anything to alleviate people's suffering, loneliness, and inadequate material conditions? No, we're on the brink of self annihilation. We tried to change the world before we fully understood it.
@ExpatRiot797 ай бұрын
Interesting. I pretty sure literature is a human emotion. As long as humans exist there will be art and literature. If we "have science after everything else is gone," that means humans will be no more, and the thing doing the science will be our A.I. descendants. Science is not a thing, it is a process. An argument, I think, can be made in his books that science is a religious act, or has some proximity to God. For example, the sextant in The Road could be a holy artifact, similar to paper with the equations. **looking for connection** In The Passenger the sister is deified, just as the boy is deified in The Road.
@jovanjanjic90297 ай бұрын
Great insight and great quote from Stella Maris!
@christianvchacon7 ай бұрын
I adore Stella Maris.
@brennancarter77217 ай бұрын
I found Alicia beautifully alluring, interesting, and tragic. I don’t know that most who read have the patience to understand the depth of CM’s writing in his final work. She has a level of intelligence that is more of a curse than a blessing.
@mimimalignant7 ай бұрын
A Different World S4 Ep. 16 "A Word In Edgewise"
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
?
@mimimalignant7 ай бұрын
@@WriteConscious It dealt with the importance of art in our lives.
@tonedefer7 ай бұрын
Get an sm-58 and put a pop filter on it. Compress your voice or limiter it down 10 db and we can all hear you better. Good content, bad audio. You need a producer.
@WriteConscious7 ай бұрын
thanks for the tips!
@tompurcell92873 ай бұрын
Good tips. Audio sounds busy and overwhelms the microphone leading to strained listening and loss of message. Which is unfortunate, because the message and channel are very good. Think of Cormac and Hemingway who both mastered the art of the unspoken word, less is more, and letting the reader complete the thought or sentence. Bring that to the audio or podcast world and you will have something great, IMHO.
@randywaldron27157 ай бұрын
In the earliest days of humankind, religion, song, story, art and epistemology were all one. Now religion is in retreat, pushed into a corner by science and reason. Art and music have been transformed. Each of these things, once united as one practice, have spiralled off on divergent trajectories. Yet, we still make sense of our world through stories and narrative. Even a science project begins with an hypothesis which is only a scientist imagining a particular narrative.