A
READER COMMENTS ON EXCERPT
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
June 20, 2017
A READER WRITES:
Jim.
By golly-wolly!
I recently was alerted
(again?) to "In Praise of Folly" (re: excerpt from “The Ten Creative States to Confident Thinking”) and observe
how this clown (President Donald J. Trump) and his entourage manifests himself
in today's dominant circles.
Less so in the clergy,
perhaps, but strongly in the political upper class. Five and a half centuries
have gone by. History repeats itself because of the constancy of human nature.
But the repeating is not circular, but spiral because of the uplifting effect
of developing insights. Repetition and progress operating together to create
that spiral. In effect, this appears to me a duplicating of the spiral of the
evolution of the species: the same basic raw materials generating ever complex
organisms.
Irrelevant to this
discussion, but something that strikes me is the parallel between Erasmus's
goddess Folly and Boethius' goddess Philosophy. Isn't it amazing how so many
ancients, without TV and other modern tools managed to gather so much deep
knowledge and synthesize it for good use?
Best,
Henry
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
My dear professor
friend,
I hope summer has come
to Canada and that the breeze of comfort is your anodyne in these stormy times.
You touch on a theme
here that I was just reflecting on last night with my wife, Betty, and that is
how comfortable I am with those who have lived so long ago.
Not being a historian,
but appreciating history; not being a politician but appreciating that combat
zone; not being a theologian but appreciating theologians, especially Thomas
Aquinas and Augustan of Hippo; but being very much a philosopher without
traditional credentials, I savor your remarks.
We are in an age that
celebrates Folly as our god in technology with all the fall out that you might
expect.
There are no more giants
anymore, only billionaires; no Copernicus, Kepler, or Galileo, not even an
Einstein.
When we think of
Einstein, we forget he sat in his patent office with no laboratory dreaming of
riding a light beam. What seems to be missing in the last hundred
years or so is imagination.
I claim in my writing
that this is because we are consumed with chronological time and critical
thinking which deals only with that arbitrary standard of time of man, and
thinking only in terms of what is already known instead of psychological time
and creative thinking, which is in the moment and of what is not known but can
be found out.
When you think in terms
of one-step-at-a-time, you seldom get off the dime.
The irony and paradox is
that we have electronic social media which is designed to bring us closer
together but actually separates us at a greater distance by some electronic
contraction.
We are obsessed with wars on
everything from poverty to drugs to ideologies which only seem to spawn greater
division and, of course, ever widening the gap between "what is" and
what is sought.
Being reared strict Irish Roman
Catholic, it is not hard for me to imagine Martin Luther and Thomas More taking
their stands while I keep reading books on Erasmus but remain ambivalent about
him. I can see men of the present being very much like Erasmus, not like
them.
I'm reading a "Book of the
Letters of Kurt Vonnegut" compiled by Dan Wakefield and just completed
reading the excellent biography of George Kennan (An American Life) by John
Lewis Gaddis.
Vonnegut and Kennan are both
Midwestern Americans of whom I have a partiality, as I don't think the rest of
the country matches our timber of candor. Vonnegut was a free thinker;
Kennan the consummate diplomat; both with imagination, something I find missing
in current American lexicon. It is not a happy time.
Entomologist E.O Wilson in his
autobiography said, "I have had a great life in a terrible century."
I can relate to that.
As always, it is good to hear from
you.
Jim
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