Philosophy Lecture

1. Thought and Feeling
The Great Divide

2. Binary Oppositions

8. Once upon a time, people were certain that they had a
soul that belonged to God and went back to him when
their bodies died. The Enlightenment brought a new
view: individuals started to look at themselves, to ask
the question: ‘Who am I?’ With that question, the
certainty of the soul was transformed into the
uncertainty of the self.
This mental shift, from the mystical to the rational, the
spiritual to the material, was the foundation of the
modern world. Now, though, we are locked into a
strange contradiction. The mind, as we see it today, is
both a powerful means of understanding the world but
it is also an object of our investigation.

9. Mystical
Spiritual
Rational
Material
Art Science
MathematicalMetaphorical
Organic Unities Mechanisms
Particulars Generalities

10. There is a good description of two different modes of reading in Karen
Armstrong’s The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity
and Islam (2001). Armstrong is eloquent on the difference between mythos
and logos, fundamentally different ways of apprehending the reality of the
world. Mythos deals with meaning, with the timeless and constant, with the
intuitive, with what can only be fully expressed in art or music or ritual.
Logos, by contrast, is the rational, the scientific, the practical; that
which can be taken apart and put together again; that which is
susceptible to logical explanation.
Both are necessary, both are to be cherished. However, they engage with
different aspects of the world, and these days, says Armstrong, they are not
equally valued. Her argument is that in modern times, because of the
astonishing progress of science and technology, people in the western world
“began to think that logos was the only means to truth, and began to
discount mythos as false and superstitious”. This resulted in the
phenomenon of fundamentalism, which, despite its own claims to be a return
to the old true ways of understanding the holy book, is not a return of any
kind but something entirely new: “Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible
in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical,
allegorical approach of pre-modern spirituality.”