.Objectivity .Duck and cover Suppose someone gets angry and throws The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at me? What am I to make of this? If I don’t duck, I am liable to get a bruis’n.
But that is not the question. Is it the book that causes the bruise or the idea of the book? I suggest it is the latter. The bruise is psychosomatic, even if I were comatose at the time, and the book had fallen off a bookshelf. But suppose the book missed my comatose body and ripped apart when it hit the floor. Is that psychosomatic? Of course. Walk through a forest and notice all the fallen trees. Imagine a forest without dead trees and dead leaves. What a joke.
But why bother with idealism? Why not stick with the idea of gravity and wind acting on decaying wood? But that is just the idea. We can never get away from ideas so why pretend otherwise? We pretend otherwise only when it serves our purpose to do so. When it does not, we should not. We can become overburdened with ideas, as well as with things. We also have the spiritual resources to renew the world and ourselves. That should be a very scary prospect, but only in prospect. That is an idea that we cannot and will not duck.
- | Contents |
rev. 1/28/99