Thursday, June 2, 2011

Death and Thinking, part 2

Last year I was thinking a lot about distance and thinking. It seemed so clear to me that to think about something is to remove yourself from it, abstract away the beating heart of the world to consider the colorless ghost of its idea. For this reason philosophers were in danger of removing themselves from life, and becoming cold, calculating robots. Thus graduate students should be rightly afraid, because a life of pure thought is a life tainted with death.

I still think there are dangers to thought, but I realize I've been taking the wrong angle. Instead of asking how thinking makes us distant from the world, I should have asked: what is the most human way to encounter the world?

It is certainly not to try to step out of the world and view it from a disembodied Cartesian way - even if we do view systems at times in such a theoretical way, that's not really the best expression of the "most human" approach to the world. (There is a reason we don't place mathematics under the "humanities".) Nor then again does a human encounter require us to plunge headfirst into immanence, mute our reason, and live like an animal. When we do this, we are also distant from the world, because even if our bodies are immersed in it, our minds aren't really there in their truest capacities - the only way we can even do this is to repress our deepest faculties.

So it seems that some kind of thought is necessary to live in the world in a human way. But what kind of thought? Or maybe we should be careful about the word "thought", because we don't want any Cartesian connotations sneaking in - we still haven't talked about what "thought" means.

Four small paragraphs and I'm already in over my head. I'm not really going to solve anything, just propose an idea. Perhaps the most human way to encounter things is not to know individual things or isolated systems of properties, but to recognize their real value. By recognizing an object in the way that it is good, we can't just strip it down to properties in a system. The good isn't just a concept in our minds we can consider or ignore without consequence, but a powerful, living force that draws us - it is our deepest desire. By seeing the the good in whatever we study - numbers, cave paintings, acids, the theory of theories, or even God - we don't have to be so alienated and distant from it. When we recognize the good, we are naturally drawn into love, and I believe this is the most human - and most divine - way of encountering the world.

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