But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”
I think she is saying he laughed because he realized something about the whole of who/what we are. Following soon after the stanza in Leaves of Grass about our sharing all our atoms he writes
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
The way I read it he doesn’t so much reject death and with it life as he comes to see it as a whole stretching back through ancestors and on through progeny and through every sort of creature forever. There is no where to go. Day, night. Life, death. The world and our place in it goes on, only that which most sets us apart one from the other comes to an end. If we identify only with these eyes, these finger prints and the biographical features of this lifetime, then indeed we go into oblivion when we die. But I think he realized we are the world and have no where else to go … or somthing like that.
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Here is a quote from the final, book length chapter of McGilchrist’s newest book which may help to explain why I am now content to use the word God to describe the something more so many experience.
That awe and wonder are the end as well as the beginning of philosophy is one reason why God may be a better name than just ‘the ground of Being’ for this creative mystery. A phrase like ‘the ground of Being’, too, may have its conventional cultural baggage - in this case its presumed dullness. …
So, providing we remain appropriately skeptical about language, we not only can use a term other than ground of Being, but, it seems to me, we must. Metaphysical argument can take us some of the way, but it deals only with the what, not the how. Even the rather abstract question ‘why should there be anything at all? Is not, after all, just an intellectual puzzle. It is a fundamental question - the fundamental question - for human beings; and we miss the point if we suppose it is a matter for abstract reasoning alone.
In a wonderful passage Schelling writes about how we should prepare ourselves for an understanding of any subject:
First and foremost, any explanation should do justice to what is to be explained, not devalue it, explain it ‘away’, diminish it or mutilate it, simply so as to make it easier to grasp. The question is not ‘what view must we adopt so as to explain the appearances in a way that accords neatly with some philosophy?’, but precisely the opposite: ‘what philosophy do we need if we are to measure up to our object, and be on a par with it?’ It is not how the phenomenon must be turned, twisted, skewed or stunted, if need be, so as to be explicable according to principles which we have already resolved never to go beyond. The question is ‘in what way must we broaden our thinking so as to get a hold on the phenomenon?’
…But he who refuses, for whatever reason, to broaden his thinking in this way should at least be honest enough to count the phenomenon amongst those things (which, when all is said and done, are for all of us plenty enough) that he does not understand; rather than drag it down and degrade it to the level of his own conceptions; and, if he is incapable of raising himself up to the level of the phenomenon, at least to stop short of holding forth about it in wholly inadequate terms.
I am only at the stage of trying to broaden my thinking sufficiently to do justice to the subject. And choosing a traditional term seems more likely to serve than some carefully constructed description that stays within the confines of what I know and understand.
Not sure who originally said this. May just be some random person online but it gets shared around often last several months.
“You cannot be bothered to care for the lives of the small, yet you still curse your own gods when they grant you injustices of similar apathy?”
Basically highlighting humans who just mindlessly kill life like mice or insects because they are considered so far below us yet they get mad when God who we are so far below does not help us.
The problem with words, isn’t it. Even terms like “ground of being” that are intentionally neutral, that attempt to be factually accurate, have picked up significance along the way that don’t communicate what we mean or intend to communicate.
I think what you’ve always talked about here sounds more like “god” or “God” in a very broad sense than any other term or phrase you have used. But in using the term “God” you will also usually be misunderstood to some degree. The problem with words.
At its core, Schelling’s approach (as well as IM’s) to describing phenomena strikes me rather more like worship than philosophy. Obviously, for me, worship is a desirable category to spend time and to use language in. And the experience of working within that category is entirely different from philosophy or theology - or apologetics for that matter. Trying to get to the accurate, neutral, precise understanding of something or someone or something is not at all like connecting with them or it.
(Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. i had begun a reply almost a week ago and lost track of it and time. In spite of my distractedness, I appreciate your insights!)
Looking back I think reading something so densely precise and often bewildering which makes you read and reread, is a good way to force your fast thinking brain to stand down and leave room for better insight to show up.
I don’t see it that way. IM I see as making the general point that the nature of our attention greatly influences what we find or can accept. If you start off certain that energy and material come first you will never be able to understand what God denotes. You cannot fill a cup that is already full. But IM is saying God is not the kind of thing you can hold at arms length and examine critically, though he does take a long apophatic look at what God denotes. There is much more to the chapter but in the end it comes to look as though the apprehension of God is something that can only exist where a person recognizes truths about the limitations of their own deliberations. Reason alone cannot take you there and so analytic philosophy alone is insufficient.
So the nature of God is tied up with our own nature. God cannot exist for us unless we are receptive enough and we could not exist in our fullness or fully appreciate the lives we have without God. But there are no causal chains leading from God to that perception. It is just a potentiality.
The model offers a number of testable predictions. First, we conclude that intelligent life is exceptionally rare and that we may possibly be the only intelligent civilization within the observable universe, so long as we assume that intelligent life elsewhere requires similar evolutionary transitions.
(quote altered by me)
This sounds like how I feel reading Kierkegaard. Or poetry! Which is worth it.
I see what you mean.
I think I was hasty.
For me the idea of awe and wonder, though, are tied to worship. Not directed at the thing itself but toward God for making that thing possible for allowing me to witness it or be a part of it. But I see that that is not what IM was talking about, and I actually failed at what Schelling was describing.
I have been reading a few threads here lately, where the problem Schelling describes have been powerfully demonstrated:
However, in the cases I have in mind the analytical, empirical was being cajoled to conform with the metaphysical. This in spite of experts in the field patiently, doggedly, repeatedly explaining in clear language, which was then rejected as unclear, or the wrong word (although the technical term was used properly), or a terrible way of describing something (because it was precise enough to exclude the required imprecision needed to change the meaning of what was said).
To which IM’s advice fits, even if he didn’t intend it to apply. Broadly, it’s about intellectual honesty and understanding oneks limits.
I had the same thought. You know there is something to what Kierkegaard was writing but it isn’t and couldn’t be stated simply and explicitly and still communicate what matters most. The reader is required to enter and carry the thought over the finish line or else he is left on the outside looking into what he doesn’t understand.
Yes but to what end, right? This is simplifying or distorting what matters most so that all can say the words and feel like they have it but miss the opportunity to actually acquire it. Nothing ventured nothing gained. Faith needs to be more participatory than that.
A friend was just explaining to me that “religion takes the metaphor of taking an old rope to support a sapling, which as it grows breaks the rope”. But that many modern writers connect the word religion with religare “to bind fast.” If religion is functioning optimally people really get transformed. Like the sapling bound by the rope but not restricted by it, people need to grow and not content themselves with children’s tales their whole lives fortified by mangled metaphysics. Better that the simpler formulation melt away and be replaced by a more perfect understanding even if that cannot satisfactorily be made explicit.
That makes sense to me and I think IM would agree. How about Kierkegaard?
Just in case anyone needs an example of AI incompetence …
So I was curious this morning and asked Google a question, and here was the AI top response; I’ll share the snapshot of the screen below. Look at how the AI contradicts itself in its own results. I share this, just in case anyone had any doubts about the trustworthiness of AI responses.
[Here’s a speculation … I wonder if the AI read its own top result of Gold’s hardness as being a quantity to calculate instead of the range, as in: 2.5 minus 3 which it would take as -0.5. And from that it erroneously concluded that gold must be softer since -0.5 < +1.5]
Thanks! I’m still confused about AI. Is it sort of like asking Alexa or Wikipedia? I remember reading an obviously corrupted blurb in Wikipedia that flatly contradicted itself, in the same paragraph.
Thanks.
Well - Wikipedia has been traditionally crowd-sourced / crowd-policed and edited. How much AI contribution may have crept into it in recent years I don’t know. But by and large, Wikipedia has blown out of the water every other encyclopedia that has ever existed! Not perfect or infallible by a long-shot of course - but a goto staple for information to at least help one begin one’s research.
AI in contrast (or at least some of those) is drawing on the internet at large. Some have been trained with a few dozen thousands of books deemed to be from note-worthy authors. So your mileage will vary considerably with those - and there is also some skill in knowing how to prompt them toward maximum usefulness. But over all, it might be fair to say that using AI is like looking into the mirror of humanity - or at least internet-using humanity. Whether it’s looking at the ‘best’ of humanity or not is the big question; and how was ‘best’ defined with regard to information on any given topic? Those would be questions of interest.
No, it’s like asking all the opinions on the internet and mixing them together.
I forget what year it was that Wikipedia surpassed Britannica in dependability, but do remember reading that and being delighted!
Getting closer, all the time, though. I like the new restriction on editing content in some areas to people who know what they’re talking about.
Good way to put it.
I heard a suggestion that there should be an AI that only gets input from material produced by people with advanced degrees, and the riposte from a guy with a double PhD pointing out that people with advanced degrees spout a lot of nonsense, too, they just do it in a more sophisticated manner.
Yeah - even the Stack Exchanges, which do quite well by letting the community at large vote some answers up and others down, will not be able to fully escape potential vulnerability to populist mentality. But they probably come closest. The question of who gets to police or selectively reject the offerings of others is always a fraught question - especially once somebody has given a definite answer to it that is anything short of being totally egalitarian. But … I really do hope that any doctor I ever depend on has a few letters behind her or his name! Give me the “elites”. In the world of politics too. Please!
Well, that’s true in some cases, but certainly we’d want to avoid folks who step outside their area of expertise. Also, as you know, Harrison’s and other texts, as well as high level journals, rely on peer review. My “Principle of Internal Medicine” text relies on Fauci and others, with really good bibliography; and other resources like Cochrane sift through the evidence and post only excellent ones, or note the lack of evidence.
As a family doc, there is so much I don’t know. I constantly have to say, “I will have to look that up.” I choose to look it up with those experts who know their stuff–not Dr Oz or Dr Gundry, both of whom are cardiothoracic surgeons, for medicine or vaccines, for example. I know you value expertise, too.
Regarding Wikipedia vs AI, thanks. Correct me if I misunderstood, but it sounds like AI takes a poll of the Internet–which is sort of what I get from Alexa. Wikipedia’s article was about religion in a country that initially discussed that it was becoming more and more divided between 2 major religions, and the animists were shrinking. Someone inserted, “But animism is growing rapidly.” So, that’s two divided opinions, and we have no reassurance of the background or expertise of either one; similar to AI and Alexa, I guess.
It’s not easy, I guess. I’m learning. Thanks for teaching. From your notes, your entire family sounds brilliant.
In the ones where I participate it’s more difficult to vote down than to vote up.
I was doing minor edits on a Wikipedia article a month or so back and noticed that major edits had to be approved by at least three trusted people on the article. It was one that had been ravaged by editing wars (to which I had once contributed by deleting half the latest edition of the article with the note on my edit that it was just trash), and a policy of slamming the gate shut on articles where that happens had been put in place.
FWIW, I also noticed a policy on a different article forbidding use of AI to write material! – although there was a section that had been re-written using an AI; that section had been rendered a real mess by people good at adding information but terrible at weaving it in. Someone copied the whole thing to an AI and asked for a re-write to make it flow without changing any information, accomplishing in two minutes something I’ve struggled with for hours on some articles!
I’m all for requiring (a) a university degree and (b) at least four years of public service (military, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, etc.) in order to stand for office, though I do admire the Chinese CCP policy (however badly implemented) that requires (successful) business experience, successful administrative experience, and honorable military service in order to qualify for higher office – that may not put “a few letters behind her or his name” but it does make for an “elite” with proven competence (the system apparently has been corrupted substantially under China’s current emper-- , um, chairman.
I’ve pulled a few instances like that with the note “Documentation needed!” though a couple of times the specifics were what I was actually looking for, so I spent another couple of hours tracking down valid sources online so I could rewrite that part and give sources.
In terms of the animism issue, I came across one with such a contradiction and found it rested on statistics: in proportion to the whole, X was shrinking, while in absolute numbers X was growing.
Though even then Wikipedia has an advantage: if you’re not convinced some statement is accurate, you can insert a “Documentation needed” flag, the presence of which does two things: (1) warns readers that the information may not be sound; and (2) frequently stimulates people interested in the topic and knowledgeable to do research and find documentation (I exchanged messages one day with a guy who read articles looking for that very flag; he just enjoyed doing research).
Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.”
We have been listening to the entire series of “Anne” by L M Montgomery. I am enjoying some wonderful quotes.
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive–it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
