Being and Self: Disclosed Not By Instrumental Reason but Poetry, Music ..Art

Another fascinating post at Jack's After the Future blog.  It is titled "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses." The theses could easily generate a book length commentary.  Among the very many things that could be discussed, the first to jump out at me is a snippet from his second comment to his post which is below, (I chose to bold).  

"............... Language and culture provide a kind of raft on which the self floats on the abyss. Language and culture filter the reality of Being as well as disclose it. Some language is more disclosive some more rigid in its filtering. Poetry, music, and other artistic forms are more disclosive, and abstract instrumental reason more controlling and rigidly filtering. 

Modernity especially in the period after the Industrial Revolution has become dominated by an ethos of instrumental reason that has created a group mind for which the depths of Being have been largely filtered out. Even religious language and poetry has lost its capability to disclose depths of the Being of the World that were accessible to our ancestors. Most poets and religious thinkers don't even try to disclose it because it has become so inaccessible. The ones who do go unread because nobody knows (or cares about) what they're talking about. 

This is a theme that Jack often expresses.  It is that the modern project is coming to an end.  In the late modern era as he says, we have lost our ability to express and perceive the depths of being.  Instrumental reason has overcome and bulldozed all in its path.  In its place it is a good thing in my opinion.  (Ironically, I say this as a Fellow of a technical society with the former title of the Instrumentation Society of America.)  I wrestled with this for many years until the postmodernists, as crazy as they sometimes are and write, were able to explain to me that the age of Enlightenment was not all encompassing and the final explanation for everything.  The age of print brought about the Reformation, the rise of Science, Capitalism, and the Industrial Age.  In my lifetime we've gone from the age of print to the age of Radio and Television broadcast, to the Digital Age.  The Visual is or will overcome the flatland of dry linear flatland Enlightenment.  Beauty, Music, Art, and Poetry with digital help should aid us for the next step.  The visual proves the error of the logical, sometimes.

What do the images in this post mean?  It is difficult for me to express but someting attracted me to them..

John Caputo Quote

Postmodernism...is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close reading, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences.  The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God. 

John Caputo

quoted from the epigraph of Tony Jones' book The New Christians:  Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. 

Next thing to do is find out where Tony got the quote.

Reality Isn't What It Used To Be

Reality Isn't What It Used To Be by Walter Truet Anderson has been on my list for many years.  One reason I had not read it sooner was because it dates way back to 1992.  So I thought it might be out of date.  Well, it pretty much was not out of date but described well the last twenty years, in my opinion.  The main theme is that we humans socially construct reality, have always done so, but in the postmodern era we are now in, we recognize that fact (or it seems to me we should).  

One habit that I have acquired with using my Kindle is to highlight various passages that jump out at me.  It commonly takes two or three weeks for me to read some of the Kindle books.  So I do not remember what all I've underscored.  Then, when I get the chance, I upload to my computer and read them all.  There were quite a few such passages in this book.  Here is my favourite.

But religions are living entities, and they live in human minds. And they change as the times change and as human consciousness changes. There is little similarity between the worldview of the fourth-century Nicene Fathers and that of the twentieth-century conservatives who try to keep their faith intact by using the Nicene Creed—no more than there is between the California Indians of a thousand years ago and the people who play the Carlos Castaneda game in the Big Sur mountains. Some kinds of religious change are visible and easily documented, others relatively invisible. We know that Christianity has gone through tumultuous events in recent centuries—the Reformation, the increased power of secular constructors of social reality, the institutionalization of freedom to choose other religions or none at all—and such changes inevitably bring modifications in the actual beliefs of those who still keep the faith. The ancient faith that is advancing into the postmodern world is not quite the faith of our fathers.

I believe there is value in renewal and restoration.  In fact my religious heritage identifies itself as part of the Restoration Movement.  But, Christianity and religion should grow, adapt, and change.  It always has and it always will.