Monday, September 7, 2015

The Melancholy of Anatomy: Summary and Response

In his essay, The Melancholy Anatomy, essayist Wendell Berry argues that only a small portion of the small amount of information that humans have uncovered can be held as knowledge in an individual. Berry begins by discussing the difference between believing and knowing, saying that people know by evidence and believe by what they feel is true , what they are able to create images of in their mind, what they feel in their hearts, and stories they hear.  HE furthers this discussion by questioning whether there are things that cannot be known without belief, giving the example of religion.  Berry then explains that determining something’s value by the market, having a hatred of highly spiritualized religion, and thinking that it is harmless to miss things is proving to be destructive.  He continues by arguing that in order to preserve integrity we always need to have opposites for each other:  makers for the anatomists (an analogy used throughout the essay) who cut things apart, poets for analysts, arts for sciences, etc.  Berry then discusses people who are considered smart in our world and how they either analyze by breaking things into smaller parts or synthesizer by breaking things apart and then force them together. He then criticizes people for not seeing the complexity and connections that are present in our world.  Berry concludes by expressing that we, as people, have more and more information, but still the same capacity for knowledge, so as certain things enter our knowledge, other things escape our knowledge.

When Berry states, “We have accumulated a massive collection of ‘information’ to which we may have ‘access.’ But this information does not become knowledge by being accessible,” he is trying to say that information is not knowledge (14). By saying this Berry means that just because we have access to certain information does not necessarily mean we know that information. Berry suggests that knowledge is created once a person is able to remember and use information, not just when a person is able to read something and then forget it. The value of this knowledge, Berry suggested, is determined by its value on the market, by what is desired by consumers, and research is done based on the discoveries that will be the most profitable most of the time.  Research in the sciences is based on discovering things for revenge in the military-industrial complex, research here capitalizes on deprivarity.  Science research has moderately constrained our pursuit of knowledge by only pursuing those cases where the advantages outweigh the consequences, by doing that they can ignore other topics and fail to research them further. Additionally, science research mainly capitalizes on people’s fear, weakness, and financial situation.  By the conclusion of his essay, Berry advocates for general criticism, which he argues, will improve the integrity and health of the world.

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