Yes. Or you conceive reason more broadly. Plato-style: the eros-driven journey towards the Good. (Or God, in fact). Reason does not end with the third segment of the divided line. That would be the Kantian mistake.
Wow, you really put that beautifully, Alin. It seems as though Lindsay detaches reason from the good, making it just a logic-chopping tool for evidence-based inference instead of a faculty leading us towards the form of Goodness itself.
I couldn't agree more (though I am, perhaps, a bit biased as a literature guy). Rationalistm/materialism--even if it is anti-Marxist--will not succeed in defeating Marxism, which errs first and foremost in its rationalist/materialist view of the world and human society. As Dostoevsky dramatizes in "Crime and Punishment," the first error of the socialists is that they are too mathematical, too mechanistic--they leave out the human soul, which cannot be quantified and cannot be made happy by mere "systems," whether of economics, or government, or mathematics, or anything else. The human being longs for the transcendent, and to reduce a human being to a mere machine or to reduce the universe to a set of impersonal laws that reason can completely map out is to repeat the dangerous error of the Enlightenment rationalists who actually paved the way for the Marxists.
Well said, Walker. I hadn't thought of "Crime and Punishment" in this context before. I read it a long time ago, and I remember it primarily as an inquiry into utilitarian ethics, i.e. can we sacrifice one person or a minority for the greater good of the whole? I'll have to read it again, to find insights about the dangers of rationalism, an epistemology which identifies reason as the sole arbiter of truth.
Yes. Or you conceive reason more broadly. Plato-style: the eros-driven journey towards the Good. (Or God, in fact). Reason does not end with the third segment of the divided line. That would be the Kantian mistake.
Wow, you really put that beautifully, Alin. It seems as though Lindsay detaches reason from the good, making it just a logic-chopping tool for evidence-based inference instead of a faculty leading us towards the form of Goodness itself.
You got that exactly right. Remarkable. Not many understand that vision of reason.
I couldn't agree more (though I am, perhaps, a bit biased as a literature guy). Rationalistm/materialism--even if it is anti-Marxist--will not succeed in defeating Marxism, which errs first and foremost in its rationalist/materialist view of the world and human society. As Dostoevsky dramatizes in "Crime and Punishment," the first error of the socialists is that they are too mathematical, too mechanistic--they leave out the human soul, which cannot be quantified and cannot be made happy by mere "systems," whether of economics, or government, or mathematics, or anything else. The human being longs for the transcendent, and to reduce a human being to a mere machine or to reduce the universe to a set of impersonal laws that reason can completely map out is to repeat the dangerous error of the Enlightenment rationalists who actually paved the way for the Marxists.
Well said, Walker. I hadn't thought of "Crime and Punishment" in this context before. I read it a long time ago, and I remember it primarily as an inquiry into utilitarian ethics, i.e. can we sacrifice one person or a minority for the greater good of the whole? I'll have to read it again, to find insights about the dangers of rationalism, an epistemology which identifies reason as the sole arbiter of truth.