What and How We Think

June 10, 2005

Clifton at Cruciform Axis is beginning a dissertation on Aristotle. His erudition far outstrips ours, but we understand just enough to find his/Aristotle's allusion to the ultimate form or means of happiness provocative:

Thinking the divine thoughts [is] the highest end of human happiness.

Is that what it comes down to? Training or submitting the neurology to the thinking of divine thoughts? One suspects "thinking" is not a disembodied matter of linear ratiocination: If A then B. B is not C.

The sidebar hints at full-contact sport.

Do not trust your mind too much; thinking must be refined by suffering, or it will not stand the test of these cruel times.
--Letters from Father Seraphim (Rose) of Platina

Suffering. Distinct from masochism.

Defined: To undergo or sustain (something painful, injurious, or unpleasant); to experience, undergo; to endure or bear, stand [for]; to permit, allow.
From Latin sub- + ferre, to carry, ultimately Indo-european bher: To carry; also to bear children. Derivatives include birth, fertile, suffer, furtive, and metaphor.

Engagement with reality, not all of which seems pleasant to one's superficial hedonistic reflexes. Deriving, becoming, a living fruitful metaphor-in-motion, a simile by which to see the world, and call it good.

[The wise person is] willing to go to school to the facts provided all the facts are included. Ideally he would not willingly fall short of the Apostolic maxim to "fall in love with reality." --Frank Gavin, writing on The Oxford Movement

Via Titusonenine.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Excellent post, lots of food for thought -- thank you. I'm reminded of an old Hannah Arendt book about the ancient Greeks (unfortunately I don't know the title -- I read it serialized in the New Yorker in the late 60s or 70s) in which she hypothesizes that for people like Socrates and Plato the aim of philosophy was not to arrive at a system, a conclusion, a proposition -- those were all evanescent -- but to stand in "the wind of thought," to live a life of heightened intellectual sensitivity. This united Western philosophical thought with Eastern meditation.

[dilys]

Thanks for the comment, Richard.

My continuing thought on this is to remember that Jacob Needleman in The Heart of Philosophy wrestled with the requirement that true philosophy affect one's living toward achieving unfeigned virtue. And that Eastern Orthodoxy maintains that learning and articulation of doctrine does not make a theologian, without evidence of an observably mystically-transformed life.

Big, rewarding issues. Interspersed here with intermittent furtive giggling triviality...