How to select which supernatural to believe?

[Belacqua]

Yeah, I think we're probably talking about different things here. What I was mainly thinking of was that for any subject, beit psychology or anything else, there can be multiple schools of thought, and not any of them in particular is necessarily the definitive, objective truth, but collectively or individually they may still represent some partial truth, an approximation of the truth, or even just a useful personal truth.

Ah, I see what you mean. 

Yes, I don't think that psychology or the arts find truths, the way math or science do. Like knowing what atoms make a particular molecule is something that can be demonstrated by multiple people in multiple ways -- objective, repeatable, empirical, etc. 

But the various schools and approaches of the more aesthetic methods are, as you say, not definitive or objective. 

It might make sense to say that the objective sciences discover truths, while the arts and the talking-cure types of psychology build useful structures. Like if you've put together a narrative that makes sense of how you got to be the way you are, it can serve as a solid place to stand while you think about your future. Cynics might say it doesn't even matter if it's historically true, as long as it works. 

But clearly you're talking about something else. I have to admit I often find it quite confusing exactly what you're trying to get at with your talk of symbolism etc, but ultimately I think that comes down to the difference between our personalities... you seem to describe a very rich inner world of seeking experience for the sake of experience... of basically mindful experience. For example, when I was younger I used to write obsessively and religiously, journalling basically, but always with a view of analysis, so I'd analyze my experiences and my mind and that's where I then and now mostly found/find my joy. Whether any of those theories was a definitive, objective truth, or even partial truth, is anybody's guess, but what they certainly were were useful personal truths, formative... part of the journey.

But of all that writing, the proportion dedicated to experience for experience's sake...ie literally or figuratively stopping and smelling the roses... was very small. In fact all I can really remember on that score was writing about a Blackbird that I happened to observe once. Whereas for you I'm guessing you spend a lot of time smelling the roses, immersing yourself in experience for experience's sake, no questions asked, no analysis undertaken. That seems to be the main difference between us.

This is a really interesting analysis for me to read, and I'm grateful that you took the time to write it. 

It's true that my whole life has been about the experience of beauty. All my training is in the arts, and what little I know of religion or philosophy has come about by trying to understand the arts better. And if my study of the intellectual subjects is lacking, it's because I tend to approach them also as aesthetic experience. 

I do a certain kind of analysis on these experiences, but you're right that it's not generally aimed at finding some kind of truth that I can restate in a conceptual way. (With the exception of some stuff I wrote about one artist's historical development, which was supposed to be accurate history.) 

The model for me here, I guess, is what Socrates says in the Phaedrus about Greek myths. His companion asks him if he thinks the myths are true, and Socrates says he doesn't care about that -- he only reads the myths for what they can tell him about himself. All the Greats are this way, and that's why we read them, I think. Trash literature acts like psychoanalysis in reverse, and hides us from ourselves. But the Greats reveal.