"Brave thinking about truth"

Jennifer Hecht says "brave thinking about the truth" was the secret to happiness, for the old Greeks. They thought contemplation would "transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence."


“Transcendence” is a $4 word best approached in hyphenated stages-- trans-end-dance-- meaning simply, on Peter Ackroyd’s reading of the "Plato Papers," 

the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. 

So the Greeks tried to think bravely about life and death, and to make the best of things in the interval. My favorites are Aristotle and Epicurus. 

nature sings

Well written, Mr. Lipps! (And thanks for the link, Dean.)


Re “Heaven and Nature,” by Ross Douthat (column, Dec. 21):

Mr. Douthat tells readers that in the absence of an “escape upward” from heartless Nature into the arms of a God willing to “take on flesh and come among us,” human existence is a tragedy. He further says that we are “beasts with self-consciousness” who “stand half inside the natural world and half outside it.”

Really, now. There’s more to Nature than the “suffering and death” that Mr. Douthat assigns to it. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is a cliché outmoded for generations. Birth, growth, healing and nurturance are all parts of the natural order, too, even among “beasts.”

Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world. That much is necessary for survival. But “numinous experience” is not a requirement. At the risk of being a Christmas killjoy, let me suggest it can actually be a liability, by encouraging people to reject reason for divine revelation.

And let me suggest: "numinous" experience takes many forms, and is often mistaken for pedestrian ordinariness. Mysteries abound, transcendence is just a step away. Don't short-change the possibilities inherent in the everyday.

"Darwin's God"

From Sunday's NYT Magazine, "Darwin's God" (I'm just catching up, having been precoccupied with my own transcendental pursuits here in Florida)--

Call it God; call it superstition; call it... “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science...

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists [meaning Dawkins, Dennett, & Sam Harris -- though none of them is "neo" in this regard] is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.
Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?

I'm not sure that's 's quite the right question, but I incline to James's observation as the beginning of an answer: the impulse to transcendence is not about God, it's about life. People reach for religious and other magic because they want a more intense and satisfying experience of mortal life (and the quest for immortality is satisfying for them). Transcendence is a natural phenomenon, and the invocation of transcendent entities, powers, potentialities, etc., is natural too. This is what I've called "global naturalism."

More on this later, I have miles to go and one more stop on my baseball junket.