The Philosophical Optimist

Or, Of Bruce Wayne, Batman, Buffy, & Redemptive Violence [1]             Poetry lurks everywhere, if you know how to find it.   Recently, over a long weekend, I came across an example of this in my reading of the fourth book of the Deluxe Edition of the recent adventures of Batman. [2]   There, in a scene set in a jury deliberation room, Bruce Wayne spoke two sentences which serve to encapsulate the difference between Batman, whom he feared some in Gotham were in danger of giving a sort of divine deference, and the only One to whom such deference truly belongs.   What struck me about those two sentences was that they rhymed; and that, and their rhythm, made me realize that Mr. Wayne, in his impassioned eloquence, had risen to the level of poetry in striving to get his point across.   The resulting couplet, I thought, deserved to be given a title, and its own separate presentation outside of the d...

            For the last few centuries, there has been a strong movement to reduce things to the formal and logical; in mathematics (Frege, Russell, Hilbert, Gödel); in physics (QCD, string theory); in chemistry (cf. Linus Pauling’s claim to have reduced the science to quantum physics in his book The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals ); and in the study of language (analytic philosophy in general).               In recent decades, a counter-movement has emphasized the importance of figuration, narrative, imagination, and myth.   Literary scholars like Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke insisted that “Figures of speech are not the ornaments of language, but the elements of both language and thought” (Frye “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” The Stubborn Structure 94); now cognitive scientists show us how imagination shap...