Thinking together.

Herbert McCabe writes with great simplicity (like Thomas Merton), which suggests to me that he's actually lived a religious (Christian) life. There's an arresting line in one of his books: the social is spiritual (more or less). Goes against the grain of modern thought which holds that the private or individual realm is what distinguishes us a thinking and spiritual beings. But what of Blake's: "He who sees ratio sees only himself"? 

I don't know if I'll get round to reading his book on Aquinas (but this is, perhaps, what I should have been reading in an alternative life). That sounds all wrong, too modern, because there's something to be said for accepting the life that has been dealt out to one (I say that not as a generalization because I know people have gone through terrible things; merely stating my own case and why I have so many grounds to be grateful).

What is true is true and not true because the individual mind thinks it. The individual mind can "latch on to" what is true: the meeting of subjectivity with objectivity. 

Stokowski once said-and I really like this line- a musical score is just a "text"; it only becomes music once the human hand gets involved.

For some academics, perhaps a large number, abstract models or theory, the text ripped out of its context is the thing itself. How does it make contact with life? At one level it's all very clever but it is often really just a form of idiocy.