I like how this essay illustrates a way of seeing that gives stories a central place in consciousness. Without stories, how can we ever become whole persons, body and mind, while analytic science divides us into an assembly of parts provisionally joined? This abstraction of materialist thinking, by dividing body from mind, seems to deny us the physical basis for a sympathy that could join us more intimately to one another. We see the destructiveness of this mental frame everywhere. Yeats warns against such extreme mentalization of thought in his poem "A Prayer for Old Age": "God protect me from the thoughts men think/ In the mind alone."
Great quotation. Reminds me of something Ian McGilchrist said in conversation with Freddie Sayers not that long ago:
"A lot of the really stupid things we now seem to believe, the sort of mass delusion, would never have come about if we’d used our intuition. But intuition can be fallible. Absolutely. Reason can be fallible. One way of describing schizophrenia is—and this has been said more than once by people who didn’t know that they’d said this—that the madman is not someone who’s lost his reason. It’s the person who’s lost everything but his reason." (42:55-43:31)
I like how this essay illustrates a way of seeing that gives stories a central place in consciousness. Without stories, how can we ever become whole persons, body and mind, while analytic science divides us into an assembly of parts provisionally joined? This abstraction of materialist thinking, by dividing body from mind, seems to deny us the physical basis for a sympathy that could join us more intimately to one another. We see the destructiveness of this mental frame everywhere. Yeats warns against such extreme mentalization of thought in his poem "A Prayer for Old Age": "God protect me from the thoughts men think/ In the mind alone."
Great quotation. Reminds me of something Ian McGilchrist said in conversation with Freddie Sayers not that long ago:
"A lot of the really stupid things we now seem to believe, the sort of mass delusion, would never have come about if we’d used our intuition. But intuition can be fallible. Absolutely. Reason can be fallible. One way of describing schizophrenia is—and this has been said more than once by people who didn’t know that they’d said this—that the madman is not someone who’s lost his reason. It’s the person who’s lost everything but his reason." (42:55-43:31)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY