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April 24, 2006
Thinking Through Disbelief (Teleology -- 3)
In To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf plays with the notion that human thought can be measured on a scale like the letters in the alphabet -- that some get to P or Q but few if any make it all the way to Z. Were there such a scale, it might be possible to say that Dostoyevsky in Karamazov, with his post-God nihilistic nightmare, is one letter behind Woolf's ruler-less universe, where "we perished each alone" and "loneliness" often seems "the truth about things," but where there is no shortage of love, art and even kindness.
What might take us to the next letter?
Posted by Mitchell Stephens at April 24, 2006 11:40 PM
Comments
Two things. Look beyond seeming. And no buts. So your last sentence reads "'we perished each alone'... [and] there is no shortage of love, art and ... kindness." The first statement is the truth, and (as the Buddha reminded us--I had to get that in) we have to remember that every day. That remembering permits us to see the wonderfulness of love, art and kindness and, I believe, encourages us to fill our short and lonely lives with those.
Posted by: Richard Blumberg at April 25, 2006 9:15 AM
Woolf doesn't play with this notion -- rather, she mocks it.
Posted by: mark shulgasser at April 25, 2006 10:08 PM
Da Budda, da myth. I had to get that in.
Consciousness is built on the faith it represents reality. There is no way to remove faith from consciousness. We can intellectually explore that construct, but there seems no way to internalize it without destroying the ability to act.
Posted by: Jay Saul at April 26, 2006 1:08 PM
Some may eliminate external Gods from their minds, but the internal God that creates one's own universe is part of nature. Do you believe you are reading these words? I suspect you do.
You have created a world they exist in, even if they don't really exist at all.
Posted by: Jay Saul at April 26, 2006 1:12 PM
