Wyatt's Portfolio

        Fire. Roaring, blazing, and quick as with the sly turn of a flame. Broken down, one can think of a fire as consisting of three parts: the base, the middle, and the outer flames. Together, the layers work to create something that has provided humanity with warmth for millennia, offering shelter from the cold and health from the sustenance it warms. The ideas from the summer reading work in much the same way. The base consists of the ideas from which both the middle and outer thoughts arise. These concepts from the readings are ones that have accompanied humanity throughout time and which still perplex scholars and young high school students alike. How might they all connect?
        The first layer of the fire, the wood, consists of four logs—questioning, imagination, curiosity, and storytelling and teaching—which together constitute the foundation of the higher layers. Questioning was discussed in-depth during A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. Without asking questions, we would never grow, never discover what we do not know, never reach beyond our current state of mind and into the middle flame. Imagination, the second log, was touched on in Better Living Through Criticism by A. O. Scott but more deeply investigated in both “A Stop-Motion Love Letter to the Power of Curiosity” and “Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the Imagination and Its Seductive Power in Human Relationships,” each written by Maria Popova. This piece of the foundation can almost be thought of as preceding questioning. As Berger elucidates, “the asking of a question also indicates that … there are various possible answers” (41). It must first be imagined that there could be a different solution, something unknown. The third log, curiosity, came up during A More Beautiful Question as well, and also in another of Popova’s pieces, “Descartes on Wonderment.” Curiosity is the fuel for imagination: one would never care to imagine if they were not curious. The last log, storytelling and teaching, is only brought up in Popova’s article “Ursula K. Le Guin on Redeeming the Imagination from the Commodification of Creativity and How Storytelling Teaches Us to Assemble Ourselves.” In her article, Popova beautifully summarizes one of Le Guin’s main points: “storytelling … is the sandbox in which we learn to use the imagination.” Clearly, these foundational elements do not live separately from one another. They are intricately woven in and around each other, and without them there would be no fuel to encourage the blaze.
        The second layer of the map is the center of the fire, in orange. These are the ideas of the reading that are centered around the human experience: epistemology, taste, the purpose of art, and social and cultural constructs. Each of these ideas relates to the relationship humans have with themselves, not with their place in any broader context. Epistemology is discussed mostly in Better Living Through Criticism and “Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World and What Gives Lasting Meaning to Our Lives.” Knowing, and knowing how and what is known, is integral to understanding how humans synthesize the stimulus around them into grander understanding of a higher layer. The subject of taste, which can be thought of as what one likes and dislikes, is nearly the entirety of Better Living Through Criticism. I can like many things, but what I like can also change; my taste “can be refined, corrected, outgrown, or lost” (Scott 45). But ultimately, why do humans like and dislike what they do?

 

Incredible Question 

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        Whatever the reason is, we seem to enjoy things nonetheless. One such thing is art: a creation of man since the days of prehistory. But why create art? Understanding that question requires a broader view which can only be found in the outer layer of the fire. Lastly, social and cultural constructs are the subject of who we are, who the human collective is. I like what I like, you like what you like, but what do we like? This topic of social and cultural constructs is discussed from a multitude of angles in all of the following works: Renaissance Self-Fashioning, “Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World and What Gives Lasting Meaning to Our Lives,” “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality,” and “Ursula K. Le Guin on Redeeming the Imagination from the Commodification of Creativity and How Storytelling Teaches Us to Assemble Ourselves.”
        The third, and last, layer of the map is the outer fire, in red. The ideas found here deal with understanding the connection between humans and the non-relative, absolute world: about the control humans have over not only what happens around them but over themselves. The four concepts of this layer are subjective vs. objective taste, subjective vs. objective perception, creating culture, and determinism vs. autonomy and self-fashioning. The first, subjective vs. objective taste, takes the idea of taste found in the middle layer one step further into contemplating “better” and “worse” taste. This topic is discussed in detail in Better Living Through Criticism and ultimately leads to an understanding of subjective universality by Kant. The second concept, subjective vs. objective perception, has to do with how humans see the world and whether or not it aligns with how the world actually is. These ideas are discussed in “Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World and What Gives Lasting Meaning to Our Lives.” Uncovering the bridge between our experience and the physical world is possibly the greatest conundrum humanity faces. Lightman, as quoted in Popova’s article, says, “our yearning for absolutes and, at the same time, our commitment to the physical world reflect a necessary tension in how we relate to the cosmos and relate to ourselves.” Once humans believe they have established those relations, they begin creating culture, the next idea in the red flame. Creating culture is about internalizing observation and experience of the world and reflecting the understanding back onto the universe. In her article “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality,” Popova quotes Nietzsche’s writing on this idea: “at bottom, what the investigator of [anthropomorphic] truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man…. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.”  Lastly, the fourth concept, determinism vs. autonomy and self-fashioning, ponders what role the universe plays in shaping the decisions humans make and how much power they really have over what they do. This idea, discussed in Better Living Through Criticism and Renaissance Self-Fashioning, is central to humans’ understanding of themselves. Think about it. What if you are not in control of what you do? You would have no choice in the decisions you make; you are going to do what you will do whether you want to or not. But then again, wanting to or not wanting would be determined too, right?
       Like in a fire, each layer of concepts in my map has certain characteristics and functions. The ideas of the first layer serve as the foundation and fuel that all other ideas are built on, the wood for the fire. The ideas of the second layer are questions that are simple to ask and ponder. They are steady, full, and clear, just as the center of a flame, and they act as a smooth transition into the last layer. The ideas of this layer ask questions about the connection between humans and the universe, questions about our very existence and the asking of why we think things are a certain way. Like the tongues of a flame, they are elusive, quick, and scolding hot. They grow and spread to those around me, burning down everything I thought I knew before