Vita Contemplativa: A Life in Part

Abstract

Life, art and science are irremediably intertwined: how, where and with whom one shares the brief moments of existence necessarily affect what one thinks, how one writes, and what one will address. Being a scholar is a vocation, as Weber knew only too well, in which science, ethics and art blend; sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not. None who live an intellectual and public life are immune to the normal glosses of the sociology of knowledge and this paper provides glimpses, through a personal lens, of what such a gloss might see. It is a glimpse of a life still living and lived; an artist still at work, an agenda still being developed, frozen like a snapshot of an instant - and just as representative. Can a snapshot capture an essence? Sometimes. Whether this does is left to others to judge.