Total Depra-...Stupidity
To pick up where I left off in Mystics: God made us stupid with reason.
I'll reiterate that I hate being told I cannot know something; even the struggle against stupidity should have a prize worth winning. At the same time as I recognize that it's the side-effects and not the prize (the temporal realization of Truth) that the goal of the pursuit, realizing that precisely the opposite is true is less than satisfying.
In the same "philosophy/theology/general Christian studies" class that sparked the debate on Mysticism, we've begun covering the Enlightenment and Rationalism. And with Rationalism came the Skeptics, Anselm, and Descartes.
I like Descartes. You may be familiar with the Coffee Shop joke. A Borders employee told it to me once when I absolutely wasn't expecting him to say something funny, so I'd guess it's a good deal more hilarious to me than to anyone else. In any case, I admire his pursuit.
Only, he's a Skeptic. "We can know nothing."
If you think about it, that's what I've been arguing all along. The concept sits very well with me. It's little that I accept philosophies without a struggle, and it was no reluctant matter to embrace this one. If we are dumb, flawed, and imperfect in nature, we can be sure of nothing in its entirety. What assurance do we have that our perception, which is flawed in one area, is not flawed in another? Especially in those areas we can't use an ad populum to affirm that what we think is true, it seems valid that there is no way we could possibly know. (It'd be lame if we could.) As I said in Timelines, the pitiful amount of knowledge we can contain will always be some number over infinity. There may be some technical difference between 1/∞ and 100/∞, but they're both relatively nothing. Nothing.
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Clichéd though the quote may be, it is so because it's meaningful:
At youth group on Wednesday, I was talking to Dan (I believe I've mentioned him before, he's my youth pastor) about an analogy he'd used earlier that night. Its itch with me was a certain simplicity that I felt led to dangerous implications: namely, that God makes us happy. (My favorite.) He explained that though he understood my discomfort, perfect analogies are imposible, and it's unlikely that what I noticed would get in the way for the average high schooler. Simple as it may be, and as imperfect as the analogy must be, it serves its purpose to illustrate an understandable, applicable truth, where the teenager can meet it.
Isn't there something truer than this simplistic explanation, though? I asked. Aren't there different levels of understanding to go up in? Of course, was his answer. But won't there always be?
Over and over again, this one truth is preached to the Church. Over and over, its simplicity nullifies "complicated" theories, the milk we think is meat. It doesn't matter how big we think our understanding of God is: its denominator is always infinity.
What use is there, then, in the pursuit of human reason? Is it struggle? Perhaps relationship? Must a lifetime's worth of reasoning be this vain struggle? Aren't there more relevant ways to go at, if like this, Truth's unachievable?
I'll reiterate that I hate being told I cannot know something; even the struggle against stupidity should have a prize worth winning. At the same time as I recognize that it's the side-effects and not the prize (the temporal realization of Truth) that the goal of the pursuit, realizing that precisely the opposite is true is less than satisfying.
In the same "philosophy/theology/general Christian studies" class that sparked the debate on Mysticism, we've begun covering the Enlightenment and Rationalism. And with Rationalism came the Skeptics, Anselm, and Descartes.
I like Descartes. You may be familiar with the Coffee Shop joke. A Borders employee told it to me once when I absolutely wasn't expecting him to say something funny, so I'd guess it's a good deal more hilarious to me than to anyone else. In any case, I admire his pursuit.
Only, he's a Skeptic. "We can know nothing."
If you think about it, that's what I've been arguing all along. The concept sits very well with me. It's little that I accept philosophies without a struggle, and it was no reluctant matter to embrace this one. If we are dumb, flawed, and imperfect in nature, we can be sure of nothing in its entirety. What assurance do we have that our perception, which is flawed in one area, is not flawed in another? Especially in those areas we can't use an ad populum to affirm that what we think is true, it seems valid that there is no way we could possibly know. (It'd be lame if we could.) As I said in Timelines, the pitiful amount of knowledge we can contain will always be some number over infinity. There may be some technical difference between 1/∞ and 100/∞, but they're both relatively nothing. Nothing.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Clichéd though the quote may be, it is so because it's meaningful:
Meaningless! Meaningless!________________________________________________________________________________________
Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.
-Ecclesiastes 1:2
At youth group on Wednesday, I was talking to Dan (I believe I've mentioned him before, he's my youth pastor) about an analogy he'd used earlier that night. Its itch with me was a certain simplicity that I felt led to dangerous implications: namely, that God makes us happy. (My favorite.) He explained that though he understood my discomfort, perfect analogies are imposible, and it's unlikely that what I noticed would get in the way for the average high schooler. Simple as it may be, and as imperfect as the analogy must be, it serves its purpose to illustrate an understandable, applicable truth, where the teenager can meet it.
Isn't there something truer than this simplistic explanation, though? I asked. Aren't there different levels of understanding to go up in? Of course, was his answer. But won't there always be?
Over and over again, this one truth is preached to the Church. Over and over, its simplicity nullifies "complicated" theories, the milk we think is meat. It doesn't matter how big we think our understanding of God is: its denominator is always infinity.
What use is there, then, in the pursuit of human reason? Is it struggle? Perhaps relationship? Must a lifetime's worth of reasoning be this vain struggle? Aren't there more relevant ways to go at, if like this, Truth's unachievable?
You should read Borges' essays on the nature of time and truth....
ReplyDelete(I'm sorry if I'm incoherent or failing at English; I've gotten 4 hours of sleep two nights in a row.)
ReplyDeleteToday, in English class, the teacher was talking about analyzing books, and how the question he gets every year is: "but how do we know if we're RIGHT? How do we know if James Joyce really *wanted* to put all this in the story?"
He proceeded to give the first satisfactory answer I have EVER heard to that question.
Hebasically says it's not something we CAN know; James Joyce (or Nathaniel Hawthorne, or whoever it might be) isn't exactly around for the asking. The point isn't to establish this absolute truth about the work; it's to interpret it and understand it as WE see it, and any argument is valid if we can back it up - there's no "wrong" interpretation.
Anyways, I think a very similar thing applies here. The point isn't to know absolutes - we can't know absolutes. The point is in the trying, in the learning, in knowing a little bit more even if we can't know everything. And I don't think a "simple" truth - my wholehearted faith as a child that God was carrying me through surgery, or Marcelo talking about heaven today - is any less valid, or any less...true, if there's more complex truths surrounding it or adding to it. 2+2=4, and Marcelo's knowledge of that isn't any less valid because I know the quadratic equation.