Fire and Knowledge

For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable. Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless. Alone, either becomes dull. Each is the other’s discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined.

—Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wilderness” in Home Economics (1986), p. 145.

Openness emerges when two or more individuals become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence. They become willing to share their thinking and are susceptible to having their thinking influenced by one another. And … in a state of openness, they gain access to depths of understanding not accessible otherwise.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 284.

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

–Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?“

Life comes to us whole. It is only the analytic lens we impose that makes it seem as if problems can be isolated and solved. When we forget that it is “only a lens,” we lose the spirit of openness.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 283

Here is a 13 min video by Michael Shermer on why people believe strange things:

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such thing as proofs—which is nonsense.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 22.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 2.

We have become a society of wimps and complainers … because we are genuinely unhappy. The fact that our external conditions of life have improved immeasurably is irrelevant. Unhappiness is produced by internal, not external, conditions.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 46