Epilogue: an inconclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2023
Summary
My finitude is not something I can escape. All I can do is to (try to) master the art of being finite.
Adrian MooreWhat I do take issue with is the assumption (typically implicit) that the scientific method has exhausted our ways of apprehending and knowing reality. Render to science what belongs to science, but we should not surrender all of reality too hastily lest we fail to encounter vast mysteries not accommodated by its unique set of assumptions and methodologies.
Stan KleinWhen it comes to personal reality, the language of philosophy is possibly the only way to speak well of who we are and what our humanity is like.
Rowan WilliamsSeeing Ourselves has been motivated by the hope that philosophy might do justice to our human nature and by the possibility that it might one day open up a way of thought that matches the profundity of religion. A particularly inspiring example in western philosophy is Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who seems to have been poised on the cusp between religious and secular thought. He did not separate God from Nature, and denied that the deity was a transcendent, providential agent who intervened in history. Consequently, he has been accused of being both an atheist and a pantheist, as both godless and (to use the German Romantic poet Novalis’ phrase) “God-intoxicated”. He was expelled from his Jewish community for “abominable heresies”.
There is a deeply moving passage at the beginning of his unfinished Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding:
After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them, I determined at last to inquire whether there might be anything which might be truly good and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things: I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and acquire the faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continuing supreme happiness. (emphasis added).
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- Information
- Seeing OurselvesReclaiming Humanity from God and Science, pp. 377 - 382Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2019