[Industrialblog,
March 16, 2007]
Good summary of epistemology
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.
**********
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?
*********
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.
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.
**********
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?
*********
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.
There's an interesting section in the very beginning of the Summa Theologica (which I've finally bought and started reading) that says that there must be direct revelation from God making theological work unnecessary for some people, because so many people lack the time to be do theology.
Basically, I would be careful not to say that grace always works directly, and never indirectly.
When I decided to tackle it, I chose to approach the subject fictionally. But no doubt there are other approaches.