pawning oppositional affect

Hey all, I wrote this at home and then saw Alex's post. Looks like we wrote about similar things :). Oh well!
In Chapter 6, Darwin really brings out the big, contentious guns of his theory, even as he is dealing with others’ arguments against it, and his own conceptual difficulties and possibilities for refutation. What is most interesting to me in this chapter, and indeed as a continuation of what went on previously, is Darwin’s attempts to dispel essential assumptions about the centrality and legitimacy of humans and more specifically, human perceptions of time, cause and effect, and significance in the universe. This is evidenced by the many uses words of referring to human ‘imagination’ and visual forms of observation, creatures ‘as we [humans] see them’ in the world around us, but also in a few larger thematic areas: that of human perception dealing with and surrounding the idea of a divine ‘Creator,’ of causality, and finally, concerning perfection or meaning. I’m just going to deal with human perception of a divine Creator in this blog post, though I’d love to talk about the other areas in class and have specific passages underlined that address the other areas.

Quite obviously, if this is Darwin’s chapter that addresses rival theories or disbelief in his own, then of course it’s no surprise that he should speak to those readers that discount his theory because of their belief in a biblical, Creator-based ideology. He deals with this particular opposition through several different methods. At first, he caters to emotion and a sense of personal accuracy, when he suggests that “he who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.” Come now, he seems to say, every human being has felt, when marveling at the wondrous creation around us, that some habits and structures of animals seem to not fit a ‘purpose’ or ‘plan’ of a Creator, and we can’t understand why they look the way they do and yet their actions defy their appearance, or vice versa. The appeal to human bewilderment, a humble and Creator-friendly feeling (not haughty), opens a space to insert reason where ideology and a throwing up of the hands to a higher power has previously taken hold. Then, he takes a sort of quicker and cheaper shot, when he suggests that a Creationist attributing one creature replacing another to the will and pleasure of a divine Creator, instead of to the process of Natural Selection, is just “restating the fact in dignified language.” But his most interesting strategy is the one he employs when discussing the structure of the eye and its man-made counterpart, the telescope. This time, I think he hits the mark because he uses the language and structures of feeling propagated by the ideology he seeks to dispel. If we agree that the telescope and the eye are essentially similar structures, Darwin says, and we’re unsure of how the eye formed, but are certain that the telescope was created and modified to its current advanced state through “long-continued efforts of the human intellect,” then it is possible to see that some kind of comparable process formed the ‘perfect’ organ of the eye as we know it today. Here’s where Darwin pulls out a huge surprise: “But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” and later, “may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?” Here, in the service of producing a certain guilty, humble affect in his readers that ascribe to a divine Creator, Darwin throws aside his own language of trying to work out the correct emphasis of natural selection that will not seem like an agent or in terms of contingent human perspective, to instead employ his opposition’s sense that God is greater than man, and that man’s powers of perception and intellect, though they create marvelous inventions, come up woefully short. This at first seems to go against his entire project, since it implies that the works of creation, in the latter quote, are indeed a Creator’s, and far above the puny works of humans and beyond human comprehension. But far from doing that it produces the desired affect: “How could we possibly think we’ve done anything spectacular with the telescope or anything else, in light of God’s genius, which we can never grasp or begin to understand?” at the same time that it makes possible the condition for Natural Selection’s process of forming the eye, which clearly goes against the ‘rules’ of the ideology in question as it dethrones both any Creator but also the human perception of one, even as it characterizes that perception in terms of and inferior to Godlike perception! Again, it’s amazing how Darwin, through careful use of language, can maintain and reinforce the affect produced and structured by the opposing ideology, and use it to his own argument, even as his logic refutes that ideology.