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Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

A READER COMMENTS ON EXCERPT


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 20, 2017




A READER WRITES:


Jim.


By golly-wolly!


I recently was alerted (again?) to "In Praise of Folly" (re: excerpt from “The Ten Creative States to Confident Thinking”) and observe how this clown (President Donald J. Trump) and his entourage manifests himself in today's dominant circles.


Less so in the clergy, perhaps, but strongly in the political upper class. Five and a half centuries have gone by. History repeats itself because of the constancy of human nature. But the repeating is not circular, but spiral because of the uplifting effect of developing insights. Repetition and progress operating together to create that spiral. In effect, this appears to me a duplicating of the spiral of the evolution of the species: the same basic raw materials generating ever complex organisms.


Irrelevant to this discussion, but something that strikes me is the parallel between Erasmus's goddess Folly and Boethius' goddess Philosophy. Isn't it amazing how so many ancients, without TV and other modern tools managed to gather so much deep knowledge and synthesize it for good use?


Best,


Henry


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:


My dear professor friend,

I hope summer has come to Canada and that the breeze of comfort is your anodyne in these stormy times.


You touch on a theme here that I was just reflecting on last night with my wife, Betty, and that is how comfortable I am with those who have lived so long ago.  


Not being a historian, but appreciating history; not being a politician but appreciating that combat zone; not being a theologian but appreciating theologians, especially Thomas Aquinas and Augustan of Hippo; but being very much a philosopher without traditional credentials, I savor your remarks.


We are in an age that celebrates Folly as our god in technology with all the fall out that you might expect. 


There are no more giants anymore, only billionaires; no Copernicus, Kepler, or Galileo, not even an Einstein.  


When we think of Einstein, we forget he sat in his patent office with no laboratory dreaming of riding a light beam.  What seems to be missing in the  last hundred years or so is imagination.  


I claim in my writing that this is because we are consumed with chronological time and critical thinking which deals only with that arbitrary standard of time of man, and thinking only in terms of what is already known instead of psychological time and creative thinking, which is in the moment and of what is not known but can be found out.

When you think in terms of one-step-at-a-time, you seldom get off the dime.


The irony and paradox is that we have electronic social media which is designed to bring us closer together but actually separates us at a greater distance by some electronic contraction.   


We are obsessed with wars on everything from poverty to drugs to ideologies which only seem to spawn greater division and, of course, ever widening the gap between "what is" and what is sought.


Being reared strict Irish Roman Catholic, it is not hard for me to imagine Martin Luther and Thomas More taking their stands while I keep reading books on Erasmus but remain ambivalent about him.  I can see men of the present being very much like Erasmus, not like them.   


I'm reading a "Book of the Letters of Kurt Vonnegut" compiled by Dan Wakefield and just completed reading the excellent biography of George Kennan (An American Life) by John Lewis Gaddis.  


Vonnegut and Kennan are both Midwestern Americans of whom I have a partiality, as I don't think the rest of the country matches our timber of candor.  Vonnegut was a free thinker; Kennan the consummate diplomat; both with imagination, something I find missing in current American lexicon.  It is not a happy time.


Entomologist E.O Wilson in his autobiography said, "I have had a great life in a terrible century."  I can relate to that.


As always, it is good to hear from you.


Jim   

  


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