Flyboy articulated my earlier point much better than I did--so thanks, Flyboy, and apologies to Quantum, because my post did come across as reductionist, which wasn't my intent. I'm an academic, so I of course share a belief in working to articulate and support one's viewpoint, and impose that belief on my students. But, having worked my way through virtually all of the hoops academe has to offer, I'm also prone to question the intellectual work ethic that undergirds the system. (Hence my spending far too much time playing around on Barbelith when I should be padding my vita with academic research . . . !)
I read a scholarly article about a year ago called "Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?" that contrasts Eastern (specifically Chinese) Wisdom paths, which tend to focus on ethics, with the Western philosophical tradition, which has tended to center on Truth. I'm concerned that the almost exclusive focus on "truth" that I too learned in the Western tradition does cause serious problems, particularly a hubristic tendency within our culture to believe we've grasped the complexity of "reality" and that we understand cause/effect completely. That's not science's fault, and is even perhaps less true within the scientific community, which tends to be extremely careful about making broad claims, perhaps, but it's certainly true of many individual academics I've met and I believe it's true to the way this thought process is brought to bear within many Western political cultures, particularly during empire-building phases.
One of the gifts my own religious background gave me--along with a lot of pain and frustration and guilt and other nasty things I've had to work through with a series of qualified psychiatric professionals!--is a wariness of idolatry, which at its best warns cultures to be very careful when they reject the God of our ancestors, because once the concept of "faith" has developed in us, it's hard not to set up something else in the god-spot.
Our culture valorizes individualism and, therefore, requires an ideally arduous, process of reconsidering the beliefs of one's parents and one's community. We tend to see people who do not undergo that process as "lazy." However, while I have certainly benefited from that process of intellectual separation, and love the openess that has given me, at the same time, I can see the costs of that extreme individualism, and I wonder if, given the damage _my_ culture wreaks on the world as we know it, whether it is the best path?
I just don't think the humility of "I don't know for sure" is always, in fact, "laziness," as some have said of agnosticism. And, beyond that, I'm not sure that the "click" of recognition that occurs when an idea about the world seems "right" is a fully intellectual, or intellectualizable, moment. And I'm also, finally, interested in questioning the degree to which spiritual life is accessible through hard intellectual labor AND the degree to which it is antithetical to it. I THINK, my gut instincts tell me, that spiritual labor--doing meditation, etc.--is different in some way from intellectual labor. |
