January 26, 2007
Biography
Ellen Goodman is one of my favorite columnists.
She wrote a piece once about how one’s biography affects one’s opinions, either as ballast or as barrier or perhaps both. She had the U S Supreme Court in mind and how peculiarly this notion works there among the justices.
She wrote that, for a long time, people believed that the best opinions on every subject were the products of a “detached intellect,” what philosopher Thomas Nagel described as the “view from nowhere.”
Now, I’m impressionable. I’ve been accused of believing only the last thing I’ve read or heard. There may be some truth in that, but if so, it’s not altogether comforting. For example, is the name Out of Nowhere simply a humble stab at objectivity or some latter-day ex nihilo, junior-grade, a prideful try at preëmpting God?
Frankly, I never know what my subconscious is up to when I write (or most any other time for that matter). But I do remember an assignment in seminary to review the great William Temple’s Gifford Lectures, “Nature, Man, and God.” I took issue with something the bishop had said and more or less apologized for doing so. My professor wrote in the margin of my paper, “Denson, on you, humility is unbecoming.”
That said, I may as well admit that Out of Nowhere is always out of somewhere, most often from my heavy-handed biographical bias, and thus, grossly misnamed… something like when we speak of The Faith, as if there were no other, or of Holy Orders for us clerics, as if the plain old Baptismal Covenant were some sort of pagan enterprise that doesn’t really matter all that much.
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