[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: Scribe1865@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 14:53:05 EDT

In a message dated 4/9/2004 1:57:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
*Mathematics, architecture, astronomy, medicine etc.
would hardly qualify as 'sunstroke religion.' As to
metaphysics, it is not obvious that the Greek use of
the rationalist method there enabled them to arrive at
a better understanding of ultimate reality than is
expounded, say, in the Bible or in the Kuran.
Granted we're maybe all too soaked in myth to rise above it for long. 
Yet you seem to have arrived at precisely the point of contention here, To 
take the Bible, the Koran, or any other book as a guide to ultimate reality is 
to cede to another authority without question or honest inquiry that which is a 
specifically individual experience. 

To paraphrase Emerson in Self-Reliance, if you listen to a minister pretend 
to examine the articles of his faith, you know he will do no such thing, but 
merely act as a retained attorney for the cause he pretends to doubt.

Instead one gets a circular situation where something is judged to be 
such-and-such because so-and-so says it is judged, and you (frail human, 
arrogant 
beanpole) have no right to question it. The Greeks, it seems, actually tried to 
step outside that blinkered situation and presume to be able to ask the 
universe about itself directly, without relying on a book some muckety-muck 
advances 
as authoritative. 

Has it yielded better results? I think so, where it is applied, but where it 
is applied is no longer (if it ever was) a question of cultures and 
religio-ethnicities but a question of attitudes toward the universe.


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