The thing that struck me in this barely 2-page chapter was the reminder that “the object of the mind, as such, is simply and solely knowledge.” yes, yes, of course, of course, that’s the main thing I use my mind for, definitely…
How does that fit into the current way of things? Do we think of our minds having knowledge as it’s simple and sole object and live accordingly? Well, yeah, what else is a mind for? We like knowledge, we look stuff up all the time. We went to school to stock up on knowledge units, and we read articles and posts and books to get more knowledge units. I mean, 21st century Westerners are probably the knowledgeyest peoples ever, with our incredible amount of leisure time and insanely convenient access to basically an infinity of things-to-know [oh yes, we know sooo much. Just don’t make me take a 1900 8th grade final exam…]
BUT. Something still seems off to me.
Trying to think through exactly what that something off is, I remembered a very interesting course I took in grad school. I think it was called Environmental Ethics, but the first half of the semester was really a phenomenology of the body- thinking about what it is to be an incarnate creature, a soul-body-mess-of-a-thing. One of the highlights, besides the professor reaaally wanting to encourage us to not feel guilty about taking naps [never a problem for me, but I guess some personalities tend to think it a waste of time. Weird.] one of the highlights that I remember was the professor talking about beer [of course a highlight for the hobbit].
Specifically, good traditional beer versus American ‘beer’.
Traditionally, this prof argued, one was tempted to overindulge in a good thing, let the animal-pleasure-drivenness of fallen humanity take over. A man, who is definitely meant to enjoy a good ale, becomes an animal when he has too many. Today’s super-messed-up man, however, because of all kinds of post-Puritanical issues and other misguidedness and bad formation, doesn’t even make it to animal level, his sin is more machine-ish. He doesn’t overindulge in too much of a good thing, like a dog who busts open the kibbles bag– he robotically inputs x number of Natty Lites into his system to get the desired effect. There’s no enjoyment, it’s crazy disordered from the start, from the moment the ingredients of the ungodly swill are thrown together.
So I wonder if our Wikipedia rabbit-hole adventures and constant trivial looking-things-up is a legitimate respect for the knowledge-orientation of the mind, or a mechanical, desperate reaction of a half-starved and malformed faculty…
Maritain quotes the Aristo-Thomistic understanding that in knowing stuff, “the mind becomes, itself, in a way, all things.” There’s a semester’s worth of Latin argumentations and explanations and guesses as to what exactly that means, what exactly goes on in the mind knowing a thing, BUT, Medieval Epistemology, with its phantasms and intellectual vision beams, was one of the primary reasons I failed out of PhD school. I’m sorry I just can’t caaaarrreeee.
That being said, it does make sense to me that the mind, in some sense, becomes what it knows. Hence the close connection between knowledge and love…
In other news, it has been beautiful outside and for some reason, everyone who goes by wants to take a picture of the little purple flowers that have popped up in our yard. They are nice, and I’m cool with people instagraming my mystery flowers planted by the previous tenant’s sister-in-law [shout out to Sue] but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Winter wasn’t that long this year…
Oh, also, the chapter was actually about the distinction between the speculative (deals with knowledge) and the practical (deals with doing and making, i.e. action)
“Art belongs to the Practical Order. Its orientation is towards doing, not to the pure inwardness of knowledge.”
“wherever you find art you find some action or operation to be contrived, some work to be done.”
Basically, Art is practical work.
Samwise the Gρεεκ. 
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