I was on holiday in Oslo recently.
As I was hoping to get some reading and coffee/beer tasting done, I only visited one museum: The Munch Museum.
The Munch Museum, featuring works by the painter Edvard Munch, is actually located right next to the Olso’s Natural History Museum. The Munch Museum is most well-known for having Munch’s popular painting, The Scream; and, the Natural History is probably most well-known for having the (apparently world-famous) Darwinius masillae fossil ‘Ida’, a primate from Eocene — I don’t exactly know what this means, but apparently it is ‘the earliest and least human-like of all known primates’.
Having not done any touristy research on what to see in Oslo, I found to my surprise that, as part of their current ‘Through Nature’ (Gjennom naturen) exhibition, the fossil ‘Ida’ had been moved to the Munch Museum, on display next to The Scream!
I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the painting/fossil, but here are the two exhibits (images of which I found on the internet):
Of course, many may think ‘why on earth are these two things put together’.
Well, here’s a picture of the curator’s blurb:
I actually found this in a way quite moving.
I had never been the biggest fan of The Scream (think Munch has some better works, but that’s for another time!), but I think I may have appreciated it more this time.
As the curator says further on the website:
Interpretations [of The Scream] often highlight “the anxiety of modern man”. But the question the work poses about humankind becomes even more acute when we ponder it in relation to Ida and the inconceivable dimension of time she opens up. Both The Scream and Ida provide a perspective to human existence and vulnerability and put each other in relief.
Say, if we believe in evolution (and ‘Ida‘ is really related to the human lineage), that there is a 47 million-year gap between the fossil Ida and Munch’s depiction of the existentially anxious modern man, does it not lead us to question, what is this ‘gap’ between the two? What do we make of it?
Of course this raises some religious questions, I guess namely (at least for me) how can we even understand what does it mean to be ‘human’ anymore? What is the imago Dei?
My thought is that perhaps the answer is somehow already included/presupposed in the posing of the question. That, the questioning of ‘what does it mean to be “human”’ could precisely be an answer: That this consideration of meaning is what it means to be human.[1]
The 47-million-year gap, to me, seems just this: Humanity has become ‘meaning-ful’, aware of meaning, searching for meaning. Unlike a simple living creature — like Ida, after 47 million years, we now have this thing called humanity, seeking ‘meaning’.
And perhaps, we may even further say that this gap includes some centuries of modern thought which has ended up with this ‘angst of the modern man’ — which we see expressed in the Scream — humanity desperate looking for meaning.
(Cf. Charles Taylor’s remark that ‘the existential predicament in which one fears, above all, meaningless, perhaps defines our age.’[2])
But how — how did ‘meaning’ come about?
This may just almost sound fideistic (though not in its proper definition), but it seems to me, as a Christian, science does not really (try to) account of the causation of meaning (at least not in terms of teleology). It does not (seek to) answer to how did ‘meaning-fullness’ come about over this 47 million year gap of ‘evolution’, nor to give an account of ‘what is meaning’. How do we account for the ‘emergence’ of life? Or, indeed, of meaning?
I wonder how else may we try to answer to ‘why is there meaning’, aside from thinking of God or some kind of metaphysical providence.
I hate to advocate something like a ‘God-of-the-gaps’ line of thought — which I think is probably what I’m probably doing here, but perhaps this little 47 million-year gap between the fossil Ida and Munch’s world-famous painting may just be something that can lead us to ponder some kind of teleological providence or indeed transcendent causation that is beyond what natural science by definition studies.
The exhibition ‘Through Nature’ continues until 4 January 2015.
[1] This is pretty much what Charles Taylor has been arguing for like half a century, probably most concisely presented in his ‘Self-Interpreting Animals,’ in his Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language (CUP, 1985).
[2] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), 18.
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