Wisdom, knowledge, information...

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T.S. Eliot, The Rock

The whole is bigger than the parts. We have heard that many times, but sometimes it is hard to accept it. However, it must be true. And the steps chosen by T.S. Eliot seem very relevant. There is a big leap to be taken between information and knowledge, and maybe even a bigger one between knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps a leap of faith...

State of the Union

This is a really good video by David Ford:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qv4QBRS-U50

I hope you enjoy it. I did...

Real freedom

One particularly telling representation of the fundamental relation between man and freedom is offered in the biblical myth of man's expulsion from paradise.

The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it. Man and woman live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is peace and no necessity to work; there is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either. Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command, he breaks through the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God's orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. In the myth the sin in its formal aspect is the acting against God's command; in its material aspect it is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. The myth speaks of other consequences of the first act of freedom. The original harmony between man and nature is broken. God proclaims war between man and woman, and war between nature and man. Man has become separate from nature, he has taken the first step towards becoming an 'individual'. He has committed the first act of freedom. The myth emphasizes the suffering resulting from this act. To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality[...]

There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all me and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom

I knew a church long ago in which one of the funcions of the authority was trying to control our thoughts and actions. Some people would call it a sect, but since it doesn't appear in the introductory books about sects, then it escapes the name. I remember the fear to think for myself, to question, to criticize what I thought was going wrong with these people: in fact the fear to even think that something was going wrong. Any question, any doubt, any criticism was sin, sin against the leaders of the church, and therefore sin against God. The myth of creation works and continues working today in the minds of many Christians.

However, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Jews of the first century held together many different myths about creation, not only the one in Genesis 1-2. In another book, 1 Enoch, the myth of creation and the fall is not related to acquiring knowledge, as if knowing and thinking was in itself a sin. Rather, knowledge in itself is good, and what is bad is its misuse. This fits better with what I think... I wonder why these other texts and myths haven't continued being read along with all the other 'inspired' books of the canon. I wonder if the leaders of the church had anything to do with that... Hmm...

Models and truth

It would... be subtly misleading to say, 'The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it... There is no question here of the old Model's being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p.221

This may be true in some sense - science doesn't provide as clear-cut answers to our problems as we would like. However, it surely cannot be completely true that the change from one worldview to another depends only on the fact that our minds are simply changing and that we need another model different from the one we had. Surely we must be getting closer to the truth, even though we may still be very far away from that final Model or theory of everything. Or are we not?

Sermons don't dialogue

The Christian discourse has some degree of involvement in doubt, the sermon operates absolutely, solely with authority: scriptural, or of the apostles. In a sermon, then, it is absolute heresy to get involved with doubts, however well one knows how to handle them[...] A sermon presupposes a priest (ordination); the Christian discourse[r] can be an ordinary person.

Soren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals

I would rather have a proper dialogue than a hundred wonderful sermons. Unfortunately both are as complicated to find.

Hitchens - McGrath

If you enjoyed the debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, then you probably will enjoy this one:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6851159367044940771&hl=en

Pretty interesting... Let me know what you think...

Pride

"I did that", says my memory. "I could not have done that", says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - the memory yields.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

It seems to me that everyone, be that christian or atheist, believer or unbeliever, as long as we are dealing with human beings, falls prey to this truth that Nietzsche, to whom some people regarded as crazy, tells us.

Blessed are the crazy, because they'll see what others cannot, and they'll say what they see despite the attacks of the blind.

An unimportant moment

He was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once when mounting a stepladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, he made a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruised place was painful but the pain soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and well just then. He wrote: 'I feel fifteen years younger'. He thought he would have everything ready by September, but it dragged on till mid-October. But the result was charming not only in his eyes but to everyone who saw it.

Leo Tolstoy, The death of Ivan Ilych

That was the moment that changed his whole life...

I was thinking of Ivan Ilych today. How easy for us to become imbued by the world around us and forget to look inside ourselves and even ask a couple of risky and life-threatening questions! I am very busy these days. And I am scared I will lose the capacity to stop and ask myself some of those important questions now and again. I don't want to be like Ivan, and wait until I am dying to remember who I am, or what I am.

I think I love this character, and also hate him. I love his humanity, his similarities with everyone else and with me. I love his need to find something else and his incapacity to find it. But I hate his apparent inability to realize all those things I've just said, his self-deception, his blindness. Are we all that blind?