A Smogasbord of My Thoughts

Just a few things to present for further thoughts:

First, I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy, particularly the chapter "The Maniac." In this chapter, Chesterton attacks the self-centered ideology of materialism (and its eventual effect, fatalism). He does this by comparing the enslaving rationalism of materialism with the binding logic of the insane man. Here are his key points:

"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

IE: The poet is free to dream, the logician is not. The pure logician must become a materialist, because his reason causes him to disbelieve anything beyond his own perceptions.

"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch f the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay,the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane."

IE: The sane man (which Chesterton makes synonymous with the Christian man) has the clarity of vision and soundness of mind for introspection. He is free to come to terms with the evil, the benign, the logical, and the mad. The materialist rejects all but one of these, and thus makes this one the full spectrum of his worldview. Logic is his system, and if nothing else can fit into the system of his logic, then it must be anathematized. In doing so, he comes to terms with the others only by means of his logic, and there his logic breaks. Madness makes no room for sanity, logic makes no room for the supernatural.

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand."

This is the culmination of Chesterton's argument. That in using the paradox of madness, of the flippant, the asinine or the paradoxical, we can find the proper place for reasoning.


This is a brief, incomplete, and in all honesty, bad summary of the argument. I just wanted to get some thoughts down for later refinement. If anything, I am synchronizing Chesterton's arguments with the hypothesis I have been mulling over in my mind lately: That the empiricism of our ethos is broken.

Beyond this, I found this youtube video. I know its a little late, the election is over, and now we move on as a nation living with the consequences of our choices (whether these be beneficial or malicious, we shall see), but this video has caused me to rethink the way I voted, as well as my philosophy on how to approach the next four years:



Also, I want to read and examine this article later. I like John Piper's work.

One of my former profs mentioned the above to items in his web-log, which makes me think they are both worth further investigation and discussion.