Bill's Notes

Here Dr. Sanity has an excellent summary of the key epistemological questions of the age.

My own sense is that her empiricism/rationalism complementarity (both of which I added in earlier posts here in the broader category of "reason") lack the emotional and mystical components essential to epistemology.

Mortimer Adler criticized modern philosophers (a misnomer, he means folks since Locke and Kant) for failing to build upon the ancient philosophers. Plato, for starters, was a mystic. Aristotle, his student, approached philosophy with a rigorous logical methodology. Both were incorporated heavily into Christian thought, so much so that it's all but impossible to unfuse the two.

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One thing I've been meaning to talk about is this triad of reason, emotion (or psychological life) and mysticism is how important it is to discern among them. An essential part of maturity, it seems to me, is skill in this discernment.

For example, sometimes powerful psychological experiences can seem like mystical experiences, but they're not. In fact, one of the easiest ways to get into BIG BIG trouble is to mistake a psychological experience for a mystical one. That's why I have considerable trepidation about making too much of mysticism on this blog. Mystical experiences tends to convince you you're right. If you're think you're right not because you've heard from God or the universe, but because you're fulfilling some psychological need, well, you can cause no end of damage. (There's also elements of spiritual deception in mystical experiences, which is another topic.)

This need for discernment is also true about rationalism, too. That's why folks like Stalin and Lenin, who had no beliefs but reason, turned into murderous monsters. They refused to accept the limitations of reason, they pursued reason far out of its realm, and they never tempered their rationalism with empiricism, or frankly, a heart (that is, an emotional reaction).

But back to the mystical/emotional angle. One thing I determined during my own Catholic conversion, for example, is that I was responding not only mystically to my RCIA experience, but psychologically to it. I seemed to have a deep psychological need to become Roman Catholic. I recognized, however, that this didsn't cancel out any mystical experience, as secularists or skeptics would normally claim. But it does require me to investigate the dividing line between what I believe to be a mystical experience and what I believe is a psychological one. And there were both.

One more thing, sorry about this rambling: When discussing this kind of thinking, people tend to do a lot of either/or thinking. That is, they'll dismiss the mystical as psychological, or the rational as emotion, and fail to recognize that there may be a lot of elements in play with human thinking.

Often you'll see it in over-reactions. People may be 80% right in their emotional reaction, and 20% wrong. And someone else will dismiss the whole 100% because of the 20%. If you follow. Or with a mystical discernment. Maybe it's 10% mystical, 90% psychological, and people will dismiss the mystical angle because of the 90% psychological angle.

Does this make sense?

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One thing this post has done is begged the question — what are the distinguishing characteristics of a mystical experience as opposed to a psychological one?

But that's a post for another day.

A few years ago, down in Florida, I saw this guy on television that just went on and on about the sovereignty of God and the doctrine of election. I could never really figure out what he was getting at -- he always seemed to be about to make a point, but never quite got there. Got bored, turned him off.

Then, last night, I saw the same guy. He's a white guy, looks in his 40s, and he was speaking in front of a church and sometimes on the beach. He was droning on and on again -- he claims to be neither a Calvinist nor an Arminianist, and he agrees with something called the "Westminster Confession" or something or other. As a former Methodist, I should probably know this, but I don't.

Anyway, this guy says essentially God just picks the saved and damned for his own reasons, and nothing anyone does has any role in God's decision. Then the guy keeps talking about what a blessing this teaching is.

Anyone know who he is, is he considered serious in protestant circles, and why this doctrine of election is so important? On first glance, the doctrine of election smacks of mind-reading God. YMMV.

Here.

The French can still see the obvious.

Mostly that's because there's not much else to say. I'm on deadline, which means I'm wasting time doing this.

I get it. Never mind. Don't comment.

For some reason, I want to ask this person of everyone. Are you the king of anything? It's what Dustin Hoffman asks Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction. When Ferrell doesn't know what Hoffman is talking about, Hoffman explains:

Mr. HOFFMAN: Anything. King of the lanes at the local bowling alley.

Mr. FERRELL: King of the lanes?

Mr. HOFFMAN: King of the lanes, king of the trolls. ...

Mr. FERRELL: King of the trolls?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Yes, a clandestine land found underneath your floorboards.

Mr. FERRELL: No.

Mr. HOFFMAN: Huh?

Mr. FERRELL: No.

So go ahead and comment, are you the king of everything? We won't laugh.

Two of my favorite books are Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. In the former, an Irish writer (who is a character) ends up personally impregnating one of his characters, other of his characters drug him and run amok. In the latter novel, the reader is a character in the book. Both play with the relationship between author and character, and I usually like that stuff very much.

As far as movies, I enjoyed Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation as well. Adaptation concerns an individual asked to adapt an unadaptable book to the big screen -- however, the book (the Orchid Thief) is a New Yorker-style meditation on various shit, and Kaufman realizes it's impossible to take that book and meet the requirements of a movie, as explained by screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The result is a closely run thing -- it's a little like watching five drunken blind midgets run across the grand canyon on a tight rope -- and you think at some point, wow, they're actually gonna make it. So much so that it doesn't bother you so much when the whole thing goes up in flames.

Zach Helm's Stranger than Fiction seemed something along these lines, and so I rented the movie with considerable enthusiasm.

And wasn't disappointed. It's brilliant. One particular moment of genius: The lead character realizes at a certain point that he's a character in a novel. He gets no help from a psychologist -- so he turns for help to a professor of literature. The professor asks him a series of questions to get a sense of what kind of work he's in. ["Are you the king of anything?" "Has anyone left anything outside your door?" "Did any part of you used to be part of someone else?" "Do you have any magical powers?"]

Every character in this movie is smart. No cheap gimmicks, no cheap gags, just smart the whole way through.

Of course, I'm a literary geek, and most of the humor is literary in nature. Thus, your mileage may vary. But I loved it and give it 72 stars!

This is a good sign.

Feeling a bit under the weather, donc, staying home.

Thanks for checking back and hope you're all doing well.