The Four Ages of Man and Woman. In the era of "belief" there is more unity between the intellect and the senses, faith and reason. Belief here does not refer to any particular orthodox doctrine but the realization in experience of values (aesthetic, spiritual, human).In a prosaic age there is fragmentation or a lack of cohesion and reason is taken to be the whole of the truth.
Is there a time when it all comes together, when hand, heart and eye are in sync?
'Clocks struck widely different hours'.
In an age of belief there is a balance between what a human being is and what they can do. In a prosaic age specific excellences, a hypertrophy of the mind, or technical brilliance, can go hand in hand with major flaws in one's character. Everything can develop on its own lines without any telos, without any need to refer to 'nature' or first principles. In any case, there isn't really any more an idea of what a human being "is" since that reeks of 'realism' or metaphysics and we've been sold on nominalism. This is as good as it gets and nothing worries us more than an unrealistic idealism (which can very quickly turn into fascism).
On the other hand, we rarely give much thought to the other side of the coin, the part that Simmone failed to mention: beware a reality that doesn't touch or isn't informed by any ideals.
In what sense is a civilisation that is based on technology, science and an abstract, mathematical-analytical approach to reality-designating all that doesn't quite fit into that narrow framework a 'secondary quality'- closer to an understanding of what it really is to be a human being?(Let's not mention the materialism.
What image remains, today, of the human being? I don't think anyone can really raise this question without being accused of being a nihilist or anti-something or the other. And yet one only needs to mention one word to dispel all of those allegations: Auschwitz.
(A new book on the camps is out. Last month I had written: has a history of the camps really been penned down? It looks as if this book could be the answer).
The flow of time depends on one's perceptions, on one's existence. The whole world is a set of clocks wound to a different speed. We look at each landscape, each segment of life and reduce it down to our own, creating a timeless, static image of it. ---After E. Bishop.
Large parts of this were from Heller's Disinherited Mind.
He continues...
"A soul rich with intuition" can reach beyond the heights of reason. I've often felt that is true. Poetry, religion and wisdom-full of colour- always offer fresh insights, whereas a knowledge based on 'pure' abstract reason tends to fail to excite or hold most people's interests for very long.
Abstraction, "the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will." the "emancipation of reason from the totality of the person."
A balanced vision vs the one-sidedness of the moderns (and extremists must be included in the latter category).
A proper relation to the world, one that sees it as a home, requires "attending with spontaneous care to the duty of the day, examining the purity of your heart, the balance of your mind."
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