RE: Book reports
October 22, 2019 at 7:20 am
(This post was last modified: October 22, 2019 at 7:21 am by Belacqua.)
And to report back about the book on Plotinus I'm reading now -- since at heart I'm much more of a Platonist than an Aristotelian.....
Plotinus has expanded on Plato's idea that the passion of Eros is the only thing that can guide us to the truth. This is fascinating to me because it goes so clearly against our modern ideas.
For us, emotion is always what clouds reason. Science is true because it removes passion.
Yet, as Blake made so clear, science is abstraction. We say it's empirical -- based in the senses -- but the truth of science once you've got to it is not sensory but abstract. To understand mass and energy, you have to understand Einstein's famous formula, which is numbers -- abstractions. I was surprised to learn, back when I was translating for brain researchers, that all the research papers about fMRI results present abstractions from the real results. The pretty pictures of activated brain regions are averages combined, after the outliers have been discarded, and it may well be that not a single individual was exactly like the "true picture" offered.
Plotinus seems to reject this kind of thing nearly as much as Blake. Our emotional and personal reaction to the world is what is real, while the quantified abstraction is a copy.
So here I made a connection I wasn't expecting: my novel-reading group is reading The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch. She was a Platonist, too, and much of her fiction is about irrational passions among people. She argues that, paradoxically, only those who are in love with someone can see that person clearly. This, again, is so against the grain that it seems just crazy at first. Love is blind and smoke gets in your eyes, etc. But it's precisely the irrational valuing of someone -- who to everyone else seems disposable or interchangeable -- which pushes us to see the true worth and character of the person.
Whether we want to say that the centering of passion is religion or not I guess is something people could debate. It isn't science. But it may be that religion has been the structure through which this irrational valuing has expressed itself in Europe. Blake, though affecting to despise Plato, was an early critic of the scientizing of all values, and he did it from a Christian framework.
Plotinus has expanded on Plato's idea that the passion of Eros is the only thing that can guide us to the truth. This is fascinating to me because it goes so clearly against our modern ideas.
For us, emotion is always what clouds reason. Science is true because it removes passion.
Yet, as Blake made so clear, science is abstraction. We say it's empirical -- based in the senses -- but the truth of science once you've got to it is not sensory but abstract. To understand mass and energy, you have to understand Einstein's famous formula, which is numbers -- abstractions. I was surprised to learn, back when I was translating for brain researchers, that all the research papers about fMRI results present abstractions from the real results. The pretty pictures of activated brain regions are averages combined, after the outliers have been discarded, and it may well be that not a single individual was exactly like the "true picture" offered.
Plotinus seems to reject this kind of thing nearly as much as Blake. Our emotional and personal reaction to the world is what is real, while the quantified abstraction is a copy.
So here I made a connection I wasn't expecting: my novel-reading group is reading The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch. She was a Platonist, too, and much of her fiction is about irrational passions among people. She argues that, paradoxically, only those who are in love with someone can see that person clearly. This, again, is so against the grain that it seems just crazy at first. Love is blind and smoke gets in your eyes, etc. But it's precisely the irrational valuing of someone -- who to everyone else seems disposable or interchangeable -- which pushes us to see the true worth and character of the person.
Whether we want to say that the centering of passion is religion or not I guess is something people could debate. It isn't science. But it may be that religion has been the structure through which this irrational valuing has expressed itself in Europe. Blake, though affecting to despise Plato, was an early critic of the scientizing of all values, and he did it from a Christian framework.
