Intellectual Sampler: An Appetizer of Rational Revelation

Gershom Gorenberg

Blogs, as this blogger knows painfully well, are intrinsically built for short attention spans. So how do you make a blog enjoyably intellectual, something that usually requires remaining focused for hours at a time?

The trick at  The Page 99 Test is based on a maxim by Ford Maddox Ford, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” The blog does not  follow that principle to an extreme. It allows authors to give a paragraph or three of context before presenting page 99 of their books – which makes reading the blog much more helpful than just opening a serious work to the middle while standing in a shop. (Remember shops? You can still buy books printed on paper there.)

So in a recent post, before bringing page 99 of his new book, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion, philosopher Sam Fleischacker explains that he’s dealing with how someone can be reasonable, rational and still affirm that “that one or more of the books long held to be sacred” really can teach you something:

Central to the argument of the book is the claim that religious teachings bear most strongly on the question of what, if anything, makes life worthwhile, and that that question can be suspended in the ordinary course of science and morality. Religious texts give us “telic views,” views about our telos (Greek for “purpose”), about what, overall, our lives might aim at…

And from there to a piece of page 99:

Because we have reason to try to share modes of moral argument with our neighbors, because we can minimize the differences among our moral systems by bracketing our telic beliefs, and because most of us are quite tentative about the latter in any case, and realize how difficult it is to persuade others of them, we abstract from our telic views as much as possible when making everyday moral decisions.

Sometimes that is very difficult, as when we have to consider whether it is worth trying to extend the life of a gravely ill person. Here the question, “is her life still worth living?” may seem forced on us, and it is hard to give that an answer without saying something about the question, “what makes any human being’s life worth living?” (At which point our moral differences come vividly to the fore.)

And the fact that this can happen tempts some moral theorists to suppose that a telic view must settle all moral disputes. I think that that is not true, but that telic views do hover in the background of all moral reasoning.

I think this makes it tempting to read the pages before and after 99. And it makes me understand that an intellectual blog is something like a tray of very small samples of gourmet cooking. The idea isn’t to eat them as junk food, but to choose a main course and order it.