(From, Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi, p. 20-21)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

If spatiality is a logical deduction from the concept of being, then it is a property shared equally by all beings, whether God or the cosmos. Greeks had no problem with this, their concept of God as ‘Perfect Being’, meant that the being of God was both the foundation and totality of all other beings: in a sense, God was co-extensive with the cosmos, and embraced the cosmos as part of his own being. For the Greeks, God was perfectly spatial.

The Christian God would have no truck with this. We approach our God, not from the understanding that he is Supreme Being, but as the Author of Being – The Creator. God is not the foundation or pinnacle of a chain of being that leads from greatest to least. God is not part of the chain. Of course, we believe that God is, and therefore is a Being, but his Being and our being cannot be related by forms of logical deduction or degrees of quality/quantity. This leads Christians claim two things about God that Greek philosophy has a real problem with: he is transcendent, and he is infinite. At their root, these are claims that features of created being do not apply unproblematically to God, we speak of him analogically.

This means that, in an intellectual world shaped by knowledge of the Christian God, we cannot rest the necessity of space on a necessity of being qua being. The non-negotiable nature of spatiality for our explanations of experience must rest upon features of created being, the created order. Space is necessary in that it is a fixed property of the created order spoken into existence by God. But Christians do not believe that this universal order is itself a fixed, logical, eternal property of being. Rather, in its fundamental aspect as created, it is radically contingent (i.e., it could have been otherwise or not at all). God created spatiality in freedom, just as he freely called all the other aspects of created being into existence.

Contingency opens up the question of meaning. Necessary Beings are fundamentally uninteresting from the perspective of meaning because they are impervious to the question ‘why?’ When you ask a necessary Being, ‘why?’, it just stares back at you, ’til you either blink and go away or your head explodes. But if spatiality is a created necessity, resting upon an act of freedom, then we can legitimately investigate the possibility that God created spatiality with a purpose: that in its fundamental enactment as a law of created being, space carries an intention. So here’s a thesis: Space is meaningful all the way down, it shares in the basic rationality of all creation as a work of the Spirit. Space communicates just by being the being it is. It endlessly echoes with the words that called it out of nothing. Because:

all things have been created through Him and for Him. (Colossians 1:16 HCSB)

This is a tangent, but isn’t it interesting that it is precisely this excess of signal, the sheer overwhelming amount of communication that occurs in, through, by space that makes it necessary for our brains to have sophisticated filters which constantly screen away irrelevant communication and allow us to focus on matters of interest. It’s one of my favourite non-conscious features of my brain (It’s nice to just sit back and enjoy your brain occasionally). I’m enjoying it right now while I write this in the busy atmosphere of a cafe. However, in a world whose order is distorted by the wrenching entropy of sin, our feverish minds not only filter out the particular communications occurring in space around us, we harden ourselves against the meaning of space itself.

He demonstrated |this power| in the Messiah by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens— far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. (Ephesians 1:20–23 HCSB)

image by kevindooley

There is an interesting little dynamic created within the classroom:
Everybody knows that the teacher already knows the answer, and the answer that the teacher knows is the right answer. The question (as question) is thereby subverted, transformed from an expression of relational dependence (asking for help) into an invitation to seek affirmation.

1. Even if Plato had a correct understanding of how knowledge and learning function, we are not Socrates, nor pupils of Socrates: the relationship dynamic we share between teacher and pupil is nothing like Socrates and his interlocutors. Plato is careful to present those who dialogue with Socrates as conceiving themselves as his intellectual equals, or as too frivolous to care – either way, there is no consideration of seeking affirmation in giving an answer to his questions. In our contemporary situations, the power balance has significantly shifted, creating a very different illocution (communicative act) out of a superficially similar locution (communicative form).

2. This change in the force of the question creates a whole host of resonances within the dynamics of the classroom:
students feel they are either need to have learned all the material before they come to class, or that they are a very poor students and incapable of class participation. They become involved in a very difficult attempt to already know what they are there to learn. They are placed in situations of ethical conflict within themselves, and in political conflict with each other – showing off, tall-poppy syndrome, all the rest.

At the end of the day though, what fascinates me about the Socratic Method is the way is the way in which it throws open for us the question of The Question – the way in which the kind of beings we think we are, and the kind of world we think we dwell in, resolves itself concretely into the types and lines of questions that we ask.

Socratic Pedagogy buys into an epistemology and anthropology that is incompatible with Christianity, and therefore results in classrooms that fail to be characterised by love, grace, and mutual dependence.
What difference does it make that we believe in a substantial, knowable creation – as well as an unseen eternal?
What difference does it make that we believe epistemic maturity consists in faith and dependence upon The Knower, rather than participation in It/Him?
What do we believe about the complex matrix of the teacher/student relationship? what is its goal? what is the effect of sin upon this? what is its redemption? how can it be conformed to the image of The Son?
For we have “one teacher, The Christ.” (Matt 23:10).

Having asked those questions, then what sort of questions would we ask?

The Socratic Method romances us with a vision of teacher and learner as partners in a quest for enlightenment. We are the happy few, the band of brothers standing before the walls of Harfleur or upon the field of Agincourt, ready together to storm the citadels of ignorance, to lay waste to the armies of incomprehension. The teacher is our general, our Alexander, marshalling the classroom forces for an expedition to extend the empire of The Known, even unto the Lands behind the rising of the Sun. Each probing question is a line upon our internal world-map, a trajectory for advance straight through the heart of darkness, through the twisted pictures of serpents, beyond the merely ‘uncharted’, and into the great Terra Incognita that spans the reverse of every chart.

Those Questions!

Isn’t it right that come the end, everyone stands on their desks and says, “captain, my captain”, while choking back sobs of gratitude for the privilege of taking part in such an educational experience?

[Actually, if there is anyone who could mount a challenge to Socrates as the most pervasive influence on the Imaginary of Education it would be John Keating (Robin Williams) in the film Dead Poets Society.
What teacher does not want to be loved like that? And what aspect of pedagogy is not directly affected by the need of a teacher to be loved? (There is a whole line of thought to be followed here, another time...)]

Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely something to be romantical about here. There is something wonderfully humble and wise about a teacher who asks questions. It is like a parent teaching their child to walk, gradually withdrawing support and setting greater challenges until the child is confident to progress on his or her own. In response to this skilful questioning, the students discover new dimensions and connections within their experience of the world and are helped to a greater sense of confidence in their ability to explore and learn outside the classroom. And further, the classroom becomes the site of free-flowing multiparty dialogue between the teacher and the students thus presenting opportunities for students to be challenged and provoked in their understanding, not only by the professional teacher, but also by their fellow students.
Still further, this loving questioning acknowledges something true: that there are kinds of knowing which are only given as experiences. There are no combinations of paragraphs or slides capable of communicating it.
The Question fires the imagination, and the imagination transports and orients us to the experience.
All Good. I think.

If it’s the right question.

You know when you’re in the presence of the Socratic Method when a teacher or lecturer adopts the “I’m a little tea-pot” pose (one hand bent so that dorsal side of wrist makes contact with waist, other arm extended with hand doing “eensy weensy spider” – although numerous variations have been observed). And then, while sawing the air, climbing the pipe, and summoning up a good head of steam, spouts something like:

“Who here can tell me what was the Prophet Jeffaniah’s motive for building a replica temple from toothpicks? Anyone?”

Don’t be fooled by the weird attempt to mash-up nursery rhymes, it’s a trick! They already know the answer (and if they don’t, they’ll pretend that they did anyway). Seek shelter under your desk! Stop up your ears! Look away! Just don’t answer the question.

Here’s why:
1. Socrates’ teaching method was part of his (or Plato’s) larger theory of human knowledge, which, through various exciting convolutions, derived from the belief that learning was essentially about remembering.

You see, back in the day, before our Souls became trapped in mortal flesh, we all beheld the naked truth of the Eternal Forms. Our fall from this state of perfect rational contemplation into darkness and error has caused us to forget those beautiful truths. And, because our souls are nourished by the Truth, not being able to contemplate the Forms makes us sluggish and stupid.

But all is not lost! Occasionally, we gain glimpses of the truth even through the distorted airs of this world, and these glimpses can stoke up memories of the Forms which can, in turn, nourish our souls and help us to ascend once again out of this body of flesh into the eternal, rational, world. Perhaps we should think of Socrates as a Philosopher-Evangelist who conceived of his task as liberation through remembrance.

Socrates thought that his theory could be proved by demonstrating that people could solve complex philosophical problems and come to the knowledge of the Truth simply by asking them the right series of questions. There was no need for input from a teacher or any external source of data, because your soul knew truth before you were born.
Everything you need to know about everything is already inside your head. Socrates’ particular voodoo was getting it out.

That, fellow critters, was why Socrates haunted the lane-ways of Athens, surprising unsuspecting artisans with bizarre thought experiments and generally minding everyone’s business but his own.

And this CRACKPOT is responsible for a method of PEDAGOGY!!!
I ask you…

More on the ill after-effects of the Socratic Method will be forthcoming.

photo by samantha celera

A mood makes manifest ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is faring’. In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its There. (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 173)

However, the conditions under which we all operate – our individual ways of getting through the day – tend to require that we ignore moods as best we can. They are the kind of thing that we paper over or drown out as we busy ourselves in being the kind of person that others need us to be. Heidegger was particularly interested in what lies behind such human experiences as Anxiety, and Boredom. What do these experiences mean? What do they tell us about being human, and as such, what do they tell us about Being?

I think Weariness can be an experience, a ‘Mood’, that lets us lift the veil and glimpse something real.

There is a kind of weariness that fixes us in our being. It is the ‘pushing-back’ of the world against my exertions, the ‘Something’ that properly resists me, and thereby fixes me as a being with will, and desire, and goal. How good this is! It enables us to be creatures and to create – there is no music without friction. It lets me be an individual. It lets me love – to find myself in finitude, with limited powers, and to trust, embrace, and depend upon the love of others. It is the kind of weariness that I imagine pouring through the arms of the First Man, after a day working the Garden, that led him to take pleasure in kicking his boots off and lying out full stretch in front of the fire.

But there is a kind of weariness that threatens to overwhelm. The bone-tired, aching weariness that flows from wrestling with a ‘Something’ that does not merely push back, rather it holds us in a death grip, dragging us down to Nothing, to be consumed and disintegrated.

For a while we might believe that this Weariness will not win out in the end: that it is not the truth of the world. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we only keep trying we can roll our boulder to the top of the hill, and not have it roll back down the other side. A myth.

There is no Rest here. There is no point in this world at which motion may cease. This is fundamental physics: if you do not move you will shiver, starve, be caught up, be dragged down, be eaten alive. Thou Shalt not Rest!

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.
(Genesis 3:19 NIV)

‘Fatigue’ is how Engineers describe a weakness that develops in materials through repeated variations of stress. Weariness can sometimes be like this, a similar weakness induced through conflicting forces. To be weary can be to experience in ourselves the particular ‘There’, of Being in This World. A world riven by a multitude of opposing wills, conflicting desires. moving toward multiple goals, operating under both a Curse and a Blessing.

And in which, if there was no reconciliation, no proper administration, would eventually shake itself apart.

photo (which is brilliant) by
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

The Scientist

The Solipsist is now quietly crying into his beer, so you decide to call it a night. The Scientist and The Conversationalist took off yonks ago – only you would be daft enough to try to discuss Epistemology with an epishtemogled Solipist. But don’t despair, the path to wisdom is strewn with stewed Solipsists.

The following day you call The Scientist to see if he’d be willing to chew through THE QUESTION with you. He answers the phone by pretending it’s a StarTrek Communicator. You feel deflated. You manage to get him to agree to meet you for lunch then hang up before he can say, “Live long and Prosper!” (Even the path to wisdom can only handle a limited amount of StarTrekkin’).

You meet in The Refectory at the University, The Scientist is sipping instant coffee out of the lid of a Thermos he’s brought from home. There are x+1 number of things you need to know in order survive this situation:

1. Embrace the existential shudder you will inevitably feel as you sit down at the table. The Universe is reminding you that it still exists: that in a quiet corner of reality somewhere a wildflower dances with the wind; that the smell of hot grass and eucalyptus still talks; and that you might belong to this world in subtle, unexpected ways.
If you are overcome by a sudden Whitmanesque desire to jump on the table and bellow ‘YAWP!!!’ Do it.
Don’t expect anyone to care.

2. The Scientist is suspiciously like the mirror image of The Solipsist (could it be that this scenario is just a little too neat?). Whereas the Solipsist begins from the good intuition that all our knowledge of the world takes place from within our unique standpoint (place, time, experiences, faculties), the Scientist is fascinated by the insight that if our knowledge is to be genuinely of the world, then doesn’t just consist in stating the contents of our heads.
Sounds right, doesn’t it?

3. The problem arises when the Scientist gets carried away by the objectivity of knowledge and starts to claim that knowledge only consists in those things which exist independently of the person knowing them.

4. This claim immediately presents us with a problem: how do we sort out real Knowledge (i.e., that which exists independently of the person knowing) from mere Opinion (i.e., claims that have far too much to do with what the knower is drinking)?

5. Solipsists don’t have this problem because ultimately they don’t really believe in a difference between knowledge and opinion. But because Solipsists only rarely pop into existence the majority of the history of Epistemology is devoted to working on this problem.
(not the non-existence of solipsists, the other problem (see point 4))

6. The kind of Scientist that you are likely to be meeting in the Refec, will probably solve this problem by giving a strictly empirical definition of knowledge: i.e., he will claim that ‘knowledge’ only occurs when a particular claim can be backed up with a particular kind of evidence (experimental), and for which this evidence can be independently verified (or more properly, falsified), and most importantly, for which general rules can be framed that will be observable by others in relevantly similar situations.
(Yes, that was one long sentence…)

7. You be a lunatic to deny the power of this definition when applied in the context of scientific method.
But what is it power to do?
Largely, it is power to make accurate predictions about the future behaviour of material features of the world based on accurate observation of past patterns. It is about framing rules that explain causes.
And boy does it work!

8. But if we get too swept away with the Scientist’s strictly empirical definition of knowledge, then we end up thinking we only genuinely know two kinds of things: first, the immediate impressions of the world we get through our senses; secondly, the rules of causation which we arrive at when we have properly applied empirical methodology.

9. This restriction is difficult to swallow:
First, it’s very hard to point to anything that seems even remotely like ‘an immediate impression’, or ‘a pure observation’ of the world. Everything that we see, hear, feel, whatever other sense you might possess, has already worked its way through a cognitive process that has irretrievably synthesised these naked impressions into a larger experience. So, when Bruce the Bagman comes and sits down next to me at the bar, I don’t have a naked impression of Bruce’s smell which I can describe independent of my feelings of like or dislike, or the memories it evokes, or even the cultural vocabulary by which smells are described. Bruce’s eau, is definitely and irretrievably du toilet…
Of course, we can describe the mechanisms by which this might work, electrical impulses, the different centres of the brain, but that isn’t actually the same as actually experiencing the naked impression. There is really no way to get ‘behind-the-scenes’ in your mind, and see the ‘world-as-it-is-in-itself.’

Secondly, if we are sceptical about ‘pure observation’, then its also very difficult to accept that ‘rules of causal behaviour’ is a category significantly broad enough to cover the sorts of things we mean when we use the word ‘knowledge’. For example, it doesn’t seem like a satisfactory account of what it means for me to say, “I know Bruce.” Most of us would accept that “I know Bruce” is more than a claim to possess a great deal of empirical evidence about Bruce and that I can accurately form causal predictions about his future behaviour on the basis of my past observations (not for a minute denying that this is a valid and humorous activity in which to pass the hours).
If you asked me to back up my claim that I know Bruce, I would point to the kinds of things that Bruce and I have shared together, not merely the quality of the observations I have made of him.

Furthermore, things like ‘rules of causation’ have had a very hard time gaining purchase when it comes to the study of causally complex things like humans. And it gets even harder the smaller the population of people you are seeking to deal with. In fact, it is nonsensical to speak of general rules that would describe every aspect of an individual human life. Rules stated at that level of specificity are not rules at all, they are people.

10. I’ve rabbited on long enough…
Here’s the conclusion of the matter for now:
I’ve been in enough debates down the Pub to know that most of what we discuss in that August Hall of Disputation revolves around whether particular claims to knowledge, are in fact, objectively true.
It usually goes like this:
Dave: “It is, in fact, the case that Bruce here, is a dead-set legend, and once drank a schooner of horse tranquilliser and still walked home.
(some murmurs of approval, a few mutters of disagreement… someone throws a chair.)
Trevor: “What are your warrants for that claim, Dave?”
(Trevor, Dave, Bruce, and Others, proceed to cite evidence and question the logic for and against the position. This may or may not include arm-wrestling.)
My point is simply this: the claim that knowledge is (in some sense) ‘objective’, is important for our belief that we can actually live with, work, drink, and persuade each other. Debating Solipsists is a recipe for Mental Illness. However, our claims for objectivity in knowledge can’t be made in such a way that we ‘depersonalise’ the character of all our knowledge.

What do we do?
How do we keep an eye on Scylla, while surfing Charybdis?

Generally, I’d say that mega-churches exist for the same reasons that people exist: for transcendence. The dominant intellectual story that we’ve been telling ourselves in Western societies is pretty thin stuff when it comes to spirituality. And frankly, people can’t exist without believing in something bigger than themselves. Even hard-core reductionist-materialist-Atheists become quasi-religious about their position given opportunity. Anything, or anyone, who can offer and deliver an experience that lifts us beyond the limits of the normal, and particularly any thing that challenges the dominant materialism of our cultural discourse will be a winner.
Mega-churches are winners because they have generally offered either Big Sound, Big Gestures, or Big Words – but most important: a Big Narrative.
Of course, the decline of Church, has been paralleled by the rise of alternative places to get these experiences. Mega-churches exist (partially at least) because they need to compete in a more densely contested marketplace. There are far more people at the Cinema and the Sports Stadium on any given weekend than in churches (and more than ever if you can unite a Big Sporting contest with a Big Narrative like that provided by Anzac Day).

I think you’d be misreading our culture though, if you think that mega-churches are really where everything is heading. The genius of modern Western societies has been to embrace pluralism in a way never seen before. Particularly in areas like subjectivity and transcendence, the presentation of plural forms and opportunities to find satisfaction prevents the overall architecture of the system from ever facing genuine radical challenge.
So it should be no surprise that just as many people are on the lookout for Small when it comes to transcendence: small community, unique, unrepeatable experience, hand-made, organic, natural fibre.
The photographs of the empty mega-churches, with all the wires, pulleys, cameras and leads exposed, are an attempt by Small to subvert and expose Big. It’s a classic move, it’s like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when they pull back the curtain and show that the Big Wizard is just a little man playing tricks.

These photographs are a move in the endless power play by which our society exists. There are lots of teams, lots of games, but there’s probably only one Game, and most importantly, if that game ended nobody would have won – we would find ourselves in a reinvented world.
That might seem all a bit esoteric but there are two important points for Christians who are thinking about Church:
1. Don’t be too quick to hitch your wagon to someone else’s team: don’t forget that eco-villages are just as much a part of the cultural landscape as mega-churches.
2. More interestingly, Joe Johnson’s photographs makes use of the absolute silver bullet argument for our culture. If everything is experience, if transcendence is a form of The Good that exists in plurality, then the Ultimate Critique is ‘authenticity’.
Whatever you do in Church, it better not be fake or feel fake. If you are fake you will die.

I wonder what sorts of practices and beliefs would actually challenge The Game, if possible?

pic by flickmor

1. Epistemology is NOT the Science of what happens when you’ve had too much to Drink. (Don’t worry, it’s a easy mistake…)

2. Epistemology is the Science of Knowledge, in particular what makes something KNOWLEDGE, as opposed to mere opinion, unsubstantiated rumour, or Drunken Ranting. As you can immediately see, it is an immensely useful skill to have at your disposal while drinking at the Pub.

3. The other people in your conversation are likely to be one of three types: The Solipsist, The Scientist, or The Conversationalist.

4. I don’t actually think The Solipsist exists…
But occasionally you come across A TURKEY who is willing to have a go.
Basically, The Solipsist thinks that ‘knowing things’ is really an illusion because everything that we appear to know is actually the product of our own minds. The only encounter we have with ‘THE WORLD’ are the series of experiences we have of it: being hot, cold, thirsty, drinking something slightly bitter and yellow, needing to pee, etc. The problem is that we can’t really be sure that these experiences really come from ‘OUT THERE’. Mightn’t it all be a grand production of our own minds? After all we can also have experiences like this when we dream, and we don’t think that our dreams are real experiences of things ‘OUT THERE’, do we now?
(NB, The correct answer is ‘No we don’t!’ regardless of what some of the more giddy patrons might think)

Of course, the problem for The Solipsist is that ‘the world produced by our minds’ appears to follow sets of rules that are deeply inconvenient, but which I don’t appear able to do anything about. Like for example, the fact that after having several Quiet Ales, I invariably need to visit the MEN’S ROOM, which is a nuisance, but no matter how hard I try to convince myself that I can hold on a bit longer, eventually THE FACT becomes rather INESCAPABLE. This is quite unlike the movie, The Matrix, where nobody ever has to go to the toilet, because it’s all in their heads…

The Solipsist is right about one thing however, whatever we do know about the world, we only know it from our own standpoint. We only know it through our own experiences, in the light of our own memories, hopes, desires, relationships, and so on. We can’t get outside our own heads and have a pure encounter with the world-as-it-is-without-me.

So, when The Solipsist says, ‘What’s true for me, isn’t what’s true for you.’ You can see what he’s getting at: we don’t both encounter the world from the same standpoint. The problem is that to arrive at his commendable insight, he’s had to abolish The Universe, The Pub, You, Your Beer, and the Conversation.
A HEFTY TOLL, to say the least.
And it leaves the poor sod with a disturbing suspicion that he’s talking to himself, and also, why wasn’t he able to imagine a better world to start with, or at least a nicer pub?

STAY TUNED FOR: Things You should know about Knowing. Part 2: The Scientist

HOMEWORK: Find a Solipsist. Ask if they are married. If they are, ask if you can meet his wife. Give me a call when you go along to meet them. Seriously… I’d love to know how a couple gets along if one of them believes the other is a creation of his own imagination. At the very least you’d hope, for his sake, that she is seriously good looking or something…

Whence spring those “fables and endless genealogies,” and “unprofitable questions,” and “words which spread like a cancer?” From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says, “See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost.” He had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, while it only corrupts it, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies, by the variety of its mutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from “the porch of Solomon,” who had himself taught that “the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart.” Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.

Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics