At 12:27 30-3-99 -0600, Clay Stinson/The Mystic Fool wrote:
>The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will:  In Response to F.L.A.T. and other
>Inanity
>(Part I)
>
> Caveat for ALL Enlightenment Rationalists:

        especially for those that firmly found their opinions on some
fundamentalistic interpretation of God's revelation in history as reported
in the bible, I would say:

>I *knew* that something like F.L.A.T. (incipient signs of the cognitive and
>cultural Balkanization and tribilization of the USA) was going to happen.
>However, the details of "Precisely how?" were missing. That is, I myself,
>could not supply them – for I am not ANY kind of historian, but a
>philosopher, mathematician, and physicist.
>
>Intrinsic to this discussion is the brilliant and seminal work Einstein,
>History, and Other Passions: The Revolt Against Science at the End of the
>Twentieth Century,  by Gerald Holton, Addison Wesley, 1997.
>
>One of Holton's most basic theses is that the threefold central core of
>Enlightenment Rationality and Enlightenment Science, viz.,:
>
>(i)   To all genuine Questions, there exists one true answer, the others
>being false,

        The problem is to ask those "genuine Questions" that lead to true answers.
I do believe this statement is true, but I don't believe there are any
short-cuts to the true answers, neither in the bible nor in nature or the
sciences. All mankind is from ancient times on and in all cultures asking
"Questions" and imagening "true answers" while experiencing (experimenting
in) the real world, the universe using reported history of eye-witnesses of
past real events and of the imaginations of our fore-fathers trying to
evaluate their truth-value. In Western culture our thinking is founded on
the tradition of Greec philosophers from the pre-platonici and onwards, and
on the Hebrew (Jewish/Christian) origins of our (secularized) religious
attitudes starting with the history of Abraham and his offspring.
Rationalism and Romanticism are just variations of themes given with
(invented, "imagined" by) old Greec philosophy, sometimes with some
fundamentalistic "images" extracted from "holy scriptures" added. For a
very fine and thorough analysis of contemporary thought and it's roots I
refer to J.Stellingwerff's recent book "Insight into Virtual Reality, a
media-philosophy as a guide in the landscape of the mind" (unfortunately
not yet translated from Dutch into English, see also H.Dooyeweerd, A New
Critique of Theoretical Thought, 1953, 4 volumes).
 
>(ii)  The true answers to such questions are knowable,

 They certainly are, but the true questions and answers will not be really
known before "the end of time" - we are on our way creating ("imagining")
all kinds of questions and answers many of which being already proven to be
incorrect, others that still seen quite plausible. Our problem is to find
our way in this "landscape of mind". 

>(iii) The true answers must form a harmonious whole

        "must"? I believe they do form a "harmonious whole" and -in my opinion-
the philosophy of Dooyeweerd shows a fine view on this whole and all it's
aspects without reduction of reality and culture in a too simple
rationalistic or romantic way.

>is being displaced and effaced by (The Apotheosis of ) the doctrines of
>Romanticism which got its start two centuries ago. Berlin, with the help of
>the sagacious Holton, admonishes us to recall our history of ideas: The
>Enlightenment Rationality picture of our world was "precisely what was
>rejected in a revolt by a two-centuries-old countermovement that has been
>termed Romanticism or the 'Romantic Rebellion.' From its start in the German
>*Strum un Drang* moment of the end of the eighteenth century, it grew
>rapidly in Western civilization, vowing to replace the ideals of the
>optimistic program based on rationality and objectively true ends, by
>'enthronement of the will of individuals or classes, [with] the rejection of
>reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit.' [1]

        I think we have to go back in history much further to understand current
thinking, we can't deny our Grecian and Hebrew roots form the pre-platonici
and Abraham up to the Jesus and early christianity and up to Aristotelian
scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages. In many ways they are the
framework in which we see our modern scientific achievements.

Arie

>Notes
>[1]  Einstein, History, and Other Passions:  The Rebellion Against Science
>at the End of the Twentieth Century, Addison Wesley, 1997, page 27.
>
>
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When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the
apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person
could have written them."  T. S. Kuhn,  The Essential Tension (1977).
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