Events
Wednesday February 29th, 2012.
Robert Rowland Smith will give a lecture entitled 'Endarkenment.'
6pm, Seminar Room 1 in the Institute of Psychiatry.
Dr Smith was for seven years a Prize Fellow at All Souls College Oxford. He is a writer and lecturer on Philosophy, Literature and Psychoanalysis.
His he provided the following abstract for the talk:
So what is endarkenment?
Consider Adam Smith, such a key Enlightenment figure. But his famous 'invisible hand of the market' is only as illuminating as it is mystifying. It explains how markets work, but does so by recourse to the mystery of an invisible hand. By insisting on the invisible element as he accounts for free trade, he keeps us partially blind in doing so. This means the 'explanation' is more a displacing of our understanding into a new frame than a complete illumination. The darkness is a necessary part of that understanding.
Or Einstein's theory of relativity. Again we have an explanatory system, but the explanation itself maintains the fundamental mystery of space-time. There's a black hole at the centre of the science by which the theory of relativity is as unthinkable as it is helpful. His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, discovered a similar black hole in the form of the unconscious. While the unconscious accounts for much of human behaviour, it's intrinsically incapable of yielding up all its secrets. It's the heart of darkness inside us that we'll never know, even if we now know what it is that we'll never know. Turning to Leonardo, we find a similar paradox applies in art. His portraits help us to see into the human soul, but also to see a dark limit to our vision.
Taken together, these examples show that the best thinking is not that of the bright light of enlightenment, but a kind of twilight through which we understand best when we know only half of what there is to know.
He has provided this link to an article that provides further context.