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oh no just perhaps that everyone else had … no I want to do this but thought perhaps I had said too much about myself …
and had not heard anything lately … sort of going to a party and no one showed up but then I suspect it was because I came a few weeks earlywell Shawn … perhaps it may be hard to have a discussion about beliefs … sometimes priests can’t risk such a discussion nor can scholars …while engineers and neurologists can … we have nothing really riding on it.. if no interest perhaps you could delete my part …but let me know first before you do…. anyways sometimes such things are hard to put into words…. again I think belief is a personal thing and it requires a bit of suffering for it and there may not be a way to really find it… on paper…or in words…a good start is to spend some time perhaps with some nursing home pts and let them become your friend…they have tremendous insight to how life is changing and what is important…. truth also sometimes means going into depression and stupidity …and seeing the darkness in our desires which we take as soul I would recommend finding a book on Stephen Crane’s poetry … in these poems he discusses our dilemma … take care
DrewI posted another semi-introduction and a link between the pasts of great men in the past as well as great men in recent times, in my view …
I will now pause and see what the other men have to say… I often can get carried away as well as write away …. I find it helps me think about things …
look forward to meeting the others …I speak of Sen Mansfield for I remember how my father said he was so respectful of people from both sides of the aisle … he was a gentleman …and listened to others a simple humble man in action …how we miss him in our government today!Again it might be helpful to keep what we say about ourselves…out of the real dialogue … I said what I said to give people an idea who I am, and what interests me, where I came from etc … perhaps if you then have topics we can give short thoughts to, separate from who we are …
oh and Shawn
it is Ok to call me Andrew for the monologue but otherwise call me Dr McCarthy….just kidding … no one at work even calls me that!!! … everyone just calls me Drewsounds good …I wait to hear what theyhave to say and feel free to delete something that gets off base …My introduction is just that…. you actually can perhaps pick a topic to discuss and then have short answers to it… just a thought… I will stay short
I agree with you Shawn. Still we shouldn’t be too hard on Aristotle. Think what he did! In so many fields! Without the help of really anyone other than his teachers.
I have read much of his Ethics and also read a book about him, written by Mortimer Adler, who recently died. My reading of his Ethics and with Adler’s help in interpreting all his works- one cannot help to be nothing but stunned!
His logic, his interpretation of the human character with positive attributes and negative attributes gives one a sense that humans are capable of good and evil, his understanding of the need for purpose in our actions, his ability to see that all things have form, long before we knew atomic structure. He knew that there was no such thing as formless matter- everything had form.
Sometimes we look at people’s work and find fault yet the fault you find is miniscule compared to the overall work. I am not sure that our world has ever seen such a man with the right sense of direction. But take my words within my own limitations-I truly have not done any scholarly work on him. Still I really admire him!
And I think he knew what he was doing when he declared man as rational- in order to learn subject matter. But he knew that man had a dark side to him and he wished to work to eliminate it. His ethics is wonderfully written and I took a number of notes a few years ago. I was struck by his ability to see that a functioning society needed purpose and if everyone could give of themselves to the greater good then they themselves were improved. I believe his understanding of ‘happiness’ was in a sense a balance between the heart and the mind. One gave up base pleasures as well as searched for positive intellectual pursuits to achieve a sense of balance. His theme of the mean is simply amazing.I have always thought that humans use ideas to suit their selfish purpose. In our present world, in America as well as other places we have lost the meaning of Aristotle’s society whereby an individual is not selfish. I grew up in a time where the leaders in the US, especially in our Senate and House were more often than not… truly looking out for the interests of others. My father was close to Senator Mansfield and was always amazed by is honesty and love for country. There was never any marketing to gain riches for himself. People barely knew who he was yet he ran the Senate for years and was deeply respected on both sides of the aisle.
Aristotle said about the mean … life’s commandments are not simple dichotomies of behavior… honor thy mother and father means more than just you parents … it means respecting the past as something to learn from not always condemn… especially when dealing with humble men who truly tried to serve the world in good steed … Aristotle and Mansfield and my father were not infallible, or perfect or always wise …yet probably better than most and all leave legacies in their own way
…may we be able to discuss such things of importance that perhaps we can pass down to others what is important beyond the moments of failing humans…Something else I have been thinking about especially in the computer age…
If man can separate out his heart from his intellect, as he wishes to do, then what does that do to Aristotle’s logic? Tell me if i have this right….Aristotle taught that all material things have form and matter. Every material thing is made up of matter but it has an immaterial part called a form. that is how we can study … we study the immaterial forms to learn language … there are chairs in the immaterial, and then there is this chair! Every chair in reality is unique, but our education teaches things in general…
Now if we teach that man is rational, in general, then that gives man a form of rationality…
But Aristotle also said that by nature man has an irrational part that cannot be separated out from his nature…
So by convention to think well, established by Aristotle, man is rational … yet his nature is different …perhaps Aristotle thought that via study one could eliminate that pesky irrational side …( or is it our true corrector to face our nature??)
The ages always had a name for this problem, for their professions, that they were both art and science. Where the science or study left off, the heart could help guide it…
but now in the computer age we seem to have gotten lazy … we think our computers are the source of all knowledge with their 0s and 1s … so let us transfer Aristotle’s dilemma to a computer model… now remember I am a physician and a nephrologist once told us that to calculate renal clearance one needs to do this long elaborate equation …’ but hey you guys are docs … and that just isn’t practical … so do this easy one, it gets you 95% of the way there…’ … he felt that, in this instance, close can count … so let me know if I make errors just to demonstrate my argument …
we have form and matter called our bodies…and Aristotle called our form without matter our mind ….the mind/body dilemma
yet by convention Aristotle made our mind a rational form … yet by nature we also have an irrational form, the form for our base instincts or our enferior emotional selves … so we have a dilemma …
either we have two forms that are immaterial one logical/rational which we will label 0, and a second form that is emotional/irrational we can call 1
but I think it would be illogical to be two forms … we must have unity… and in that unity must reside BOTH rational and irrational, heart and mind, in one form…
now what does that do to our form then, as a whole…. 0+1=1which may be a good kind of irrational or 0-1=-1 which may be a bad sort of irrational ….. but that which is not entirely rational is then by definition irrational … so one can see why Aristotle made this error … and why the ages have hoped for an order to our existence … we all have been evolutionists long before Darwin … we have just assumed that it is by the cream that one can define oneself… yet sour milk is made also and , with the right recipe it is often better than the cream … have all our great intellects led perfect lives??? Einstein, Darwin, Freud?? or did they suffer from the same short tempers, pesky family arguments as we all do … oh the base side of life is just so bothersome is perhaps how they rationalized away their human-ness….
our neurology books teach of the primitive brain, with the the paleo architecture…around our ’emotional areas’ and then we declare that our ‘higher’ learning centers are our evolved neocortex … yet such language has always made me pause … how in the heck can they know that? did they create it that way or is it just as they would prefer it to be THAT way again to give us a sense of higher order of function
….did any of you play sports … I played football… and there was nothing better than knocking off a team that thought they were invincible … they had reached that higher order of being …yet how shocked when they were annihilated by a perceived inferior team …. human pride is amazing!!so we still have aristotle’s dilemma- divide our intellect from our heart in order to improve, yet is such a thing possible, or even something that is good? All I will say is there are reasons to have a heart and it must be connected to the intellect … one must protect the other … here in DC as i said last night there are millions of people who THINK they know things for they have studied them, in general, but haven’t a clue on how they were in the specific … they have lost hold, not of the subject matter, but the matter itself … they are irrationally lost within the intellect of ideas without a heart to guide them …but they are unaware of their plight …. such a terrible pity….
please let me know if what i said is correct … I do think man is capable of some logic but it needs to be directed by the heart … the heart is crucial … did not Jesus say love thy neighbor as thyself…what an amazing truth .. yet one first must understand herself or himself, as we once did as children, when we were more heart than intellect … has our need to know things in general, ruined our hearts??? and our world?? big questions to explore…just a few cautions….
the only thing I would give away freely are my comments, if they are helpful in your process in that dialog.,… my paper is being submitted to a few professional journals and all my poetry belongs to me copyrighted etc etc so I would not want them published until they are in final draft and thus can be referenced to
but I would help with your dialog in that conversations are fun and what I say is really no different than what a lot of regular people say….so there is no ownership in common-sense … and again I am a catholic and catholic doctrine is where I live under, how I have learned through priests and nuns as I learned under my mother and father…do I always agree with them? probably not completely in action but I do but perhaps in spirit … but I think the commandment is honor thy mother and father without any stipulation on whether one agrees with them in all things …. I feel the same about my church and would really want to help it out if I could
and people have to want to listen
also I am very fallible and very human and I seem better when things are spontaneous than when I try too hard
I think everyone has life and such life must be respected..so I am not sure you saw my soul for that is a difficult thing to perceive…but I think you saw my effort to communicate with people-it is not an intellectual process only and perhaps that is why I may have come off as having a soul, sort of why a football coach can be seem as effective…they do not succeed by just intellectually stating knowledge- they try to reach people… I actually played and coached football and much of how I learned to communicate came from watching some great coaches in action—they are the Socrates of the modern world!!! people who just shoot for knowledge just fall flat..everyone needs enthusiasm…. that people may see me as something special every once in a while is a bit sad……just speak from the heart and the mind will follow … it is something everyone can do
I think though if one would spend time with sick people, one would get a different perspective on life….I also recommend you reading danger of words…it is almost a must for every person who wants to understand our dilemmafinally I am a great believer in that those that try to both understand life and profit from it do not understand the ethical rub.I have trouble with a number of Christian organizations that profit from people’s faith. I would be willing to help out but would want to make sure that if it did become a book, that it truly be done in a manner that no person would have ownership in a way that would cause the ethical rub
…thus if it was owned by an organization such a true non-profit organization, that truly looked out for other people’s welfare, I would be OK …if this is impossible I could just help you with your own thoughts and they remain your own….but again I say that most of what I say is common sense…something most cab drivers have, most farmers etc…all I do with people is make them use it, in their own way, with their own talents
so I am not sure we will be the next Socrates and Plato but if we have no real need to enrich ourselves, and are willing to have conversations that make people once again have a sense of wonder in the world and have a heart once againagain I have some poetry within me that explains a lot of what I feel and I think everyone has that too, in some manner, in some form- you just have to open it up
it really sounds wonderful and a dialogue would be great
I agree with you, words are not as they seem, yet they are all we have… a dialogue can show the theme more than a treatiseI think that is why I began writing poetry…it was a way to show emotion and rhythm with some sense of intellect
here is one of my favoritesWater of Life
Yes I do feel it all in all
Deeper and deeper we go
Its the motion of the waterfall
That kinda lets me know
About the power of our descent
The baptism from our birth
The discoverment of divine intent
Against the disillusionment of the earth
That tricked us into thinking that
We are the masters of this universe
These human skills have made us ‘lord’
But now we ride a different verse
Deeper and deeper we go
Into the river of no return
And as we drown into the flow
Perhaps we can finally learn
The special power of the good
(They had seemed so helpless when we thought we had it all)
That maybe only now it will be understood
The real meaning of this waterfall
To free us from this flesh
To finally feel the Power of the Holy Spirit
To Become One With The Holy Light
And the perfectness of being in it.Shawn
I would certainly help in any way I can….my thoughts are not held in captivity…and it will take an army to beat the enemy which is not the people but the ideas people hold…but I am a Catholic within, throughout, forever…..even if my church has made errors I still am forever in its debt… I think one also needs to debate these people…writings are often hokum especially if you have no interest which makes up about 99% of the worldthanks for your thoughts…. I too have a sadness for how minds become trapped by what they want to believe…. one nice thing about my job is I deal with the real not the theoretical…where all ideas one has must intersect, with most dissolving away, by reality
I think I try to tell my patients, reality sucks but you never will if you can stay courageous, kind, and willing to leap into territory you always thought you’d drown inwell I am far from a philosopher although perhaps we all are to some degree…..as I left the conference my cabbie told me about his life…a couple kids, girlfriend, and nothing to believe in..he said everyone in Liverpool just exists..that is all
…I had that sense of that in liverpool … i sense it in a lot of places … people have lost the meaning of lifeI am not a big fan of Darwin nor Descartes
Descartes made life momentary and Darwin made it meaningless
but how many scientists and psychologists love these men … I sense almost an evil-ness to it
they turn hypothesis into facts and refuse any further discussion….why not be true scientists and consider other hypotheses such as Pasteur’s life must spring from life…..such a more hopeful hypothesisand often these same scientists become nothing they profess to be once they themselves face death …. I took care of one man in the Hemlock society who did not want to face his own death … family wanted everything done … but I had to tell them there was nothing I can do….what irony!!
oh well enough of this…have a great 4th of July…I hear Bermuda is beautiful and hopefully I will get down there soon especially if we are chosen to help them
I will read Phaedro within the next couple of weeks, then I’ll look at your notes
here are the two good for nothing passages…one from apology, the second from Jeremiah“ When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think they are putting money or any thing else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you. If they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have justice at your hands- I and my children.”
and then from Jeremiah in which God reminds us to watch out for imaginations of the heart(which we often think is our intellect)
13:1 Thus saith the LORD unto me, Go and get thee a linen girdle, and put it upon thy loins, and put it not in water.
13:2 So I got a girdle according to the word of the LORD, and put it on my loins.
13:3 And the word of the LORD came unto me the second time, saying, 13:4 Take the girdle that thou hast got, which is upon thy loins, and arise, go to Euphrates, and hide it there in a hole of the rock.
13:5 So I went, and hid it by Euphrates, as the LORD commanded me.
13:6 And it came to pass after many days, that the LORD said unto me, Arise, go to Euphrates, and take the girdle from thence, which I commanded thee to hide there.
13:7 Then I went to Euphrates, and digged, and took the girdle from the place where I had hid it: and, behold, the girdle was marred, it was profitable for nothing.
13:8 Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 13:9 Thus saith the LORD, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem.
13:10 This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart, and walk after other gods, to serve them, and to worship them, shall even be as this girdle, which is good for nothing.
13:11 For as the girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man, so have I caused to cleave unto me the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah, saith the LORD; that they might be unto me for a people, and for a name, and for a praise, and for a glory: but they would not hear.
13:12 Therefore thou shalt speak unto them this word; Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Every bottle shall be filled with wine: and they shall say unto thee, Do we not certainly know that every bottle shall be filled with wine? 13:13 Then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land, even the kings that sit upon David’s throne, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness.
13:14 And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them.
13:15 Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the LORD hath spoken.
13:16 Give glory to the LORD your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness.
13:17 But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears, because the LORD’s flock is carried away captive.
13:18 Say unto the king and to the queen, Humble yourselves, sit down: for your principalities shall come down, even the crown of your glory.
13:19 The cities of the south shall be shut up, and none shall open them: Judah shall be carried away captive all of it, it shall be wholly carried away captive.
13:20 Lift up your eyes, and behold them that come from the north: where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock? 13:21 What wilt thou say when he shall punish thee? for thou hast taught them to be captains, and as chief over thee: shall not sorrows take thee, as a woman in travail? 13:22 And if thou say in thine heart, Wherefore come these things upon me? For the greatness of thine iniquity are thy skirts discovered, and thy heels made bare.
13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.
13:24 Therefore will I scatter them as the stubble that passeth away by the wind of the wilderness.
13:25 This is thy lot, the portion of thy measures from me, saith the LORD; because thou hast forgotten me, and trusted in falsehood.one more point of clarification- I too fall into the trap that if man is not rational then he is irrational. Drury, by way of Wittgenstein would say the terms are meaningless because they become irrefutable. Drury has five categories where our words give confusion. This is the one called the missing hippopotamus…he said Wittgenstein would discuss in a room of thinkers the following point- say someone says there is a hippopotamus in the room but you can’t see it, you can’t feel it, or smell it, or taste it and thus it is an idea that is not in reality but it cannot be refuted because the one who stated it will not change his mind.To state man is rational suffers from this error. How does one refute it, if it is a given? what does it really mean?????? it is much more complicated than how we usually just assume it…everyone has a certain state in how they view the world- emotionally and cognitively…..if it is a rationality it cannot be defined in any measurable way …. and at best our best times to clarify truth often are short-lived and thus we easily fall into Drury’s categories—you must read the book, I see it finally is on Amazon….his day was too comfortable to listen to his words…now in our new reality of culture wars, clashes of irrefutable ideas..in a day of nuclear bombs, beheadings etc….his words can give us clarity….
Drury goes on to give examples- one being Freud’s theory that all human actions have a sexual connotation to them. If one believes that then one can interpret all actions in such a way. Drury says it is a logical-philosophical error in that an idea is really a hypothesis and a hypothesis is never a fact. science can mathematically prove the existence of that fact but only indirectly. (Aristotle would concur-he felt science only gives indirect evidence and a day may come when such an hypothesis could be disproved.)
Drury states that our modern world is filled with missing hippopotami-easily done by our best and brightest and he gives example after example….
it is not rationality that one seeks, it is clarity…but that is not what we search for- one example is that people work like dogs to take care of themselves in retirement…but that is somewhat confused—- should we not prepare for death? that is the clear logical reality we face…that we pretend to only look for the good life of leisure is simply a delusion of ours-I take care of old people and the life of an aging person is not really a good one by measurement of what they can do. Ask a young person about life and they think of forever, ask an old person about life and none of them would ever want to live another 75 years or more……I always tell them I can get them at least another 75 yrs, in jest, mind you- never have I had anyone ever think my joke is close to being funny…they just wouldn’t want it….yet tell that to our scientists who search for keys to keep us alive forever…..I laughed when I was in Ireland about the headline in the paper-CRISIS-INCREASED PENSIONERS- in such and such a year we will have x number of people with only y number to support them etc …… but is that not what our rational society wants-no pain, no death, comfortable retirement, no war, and no god to bother them if somehow they just didn’t get the whole thing figured out…..:):):)
the modern world defines away its confusion and that becomes its means of clarity
Socrates, Wittgenstein, Drury etc make us stop and say…no this does not work..you simply make your facts irrefutable and unfortunately make your confusion worsewe need to see that science, logic, rationality are all very limited means of discovery
they speak nothing in regards to our creation. creation can never be studied for it remains the part of every experiment that we have ever done or will ever do- it can never be a variable to study as a hypothesis
Drury uses the example of doing an experiment via a microscope….the microscope is the way of viewing the experiment and can never be studied within that experiment
being in reality, one cannot ever truly study it for one would have to be in another reality or another consciousness in order to ‘study’ it
yet we , our scientists, think we can do this…their ‘religion’ can never be more than the creation we are in
yes it is amazing to view the intricacies of creation but this should never ever make man confident that he knows truly what he is doing without the intervention of a Creatorperhaps this is why I stay a catholic- many of the priests have been haughty and evil yet what out there is not
at least I remember the day when I knew a good priest, who cared about souls more than power, and a good doctor who cared about people more than money, and mothers and fathers who did everything to ensure their child’s well being was primary which meant as Socrates once said…please scold my children to search for truthwell I will stop but these issues are ones EVERY human will face and as always we come up to our limits on what we know and we should think that perhaps it may be important to think a bit that perhaps life’s purpose is something we just can’t figure out on our own
the thing which has had me face my dilemma, has not been joy, but sorrow….
….I have cried over much in my life despite having quite a lot…. I used to see this as a weakness but it really means things matter to me … or should I say people matter to me and I care for them … yet sometimes such sorrow brings on a bad attitude or makes one cold (who likes sorrow so toughen yourself up via no emotion etc)… and there was a time I at least was upset enough over certain things I lost faith in people and in God, if not for long but for long enough time to teach me a lesson I shall never forget… it took working in a brain injury unit to see my sorrows were gifts and my losses were often a source of strength…and … I have never lost my sight or my strength… I never lost my mind nor my ability to think etc
what I have found out is that one learns about life through tragedy, but as bad as it sounds, if you approach it right, gifts come to you which you never had before- they are divine giftsmy treatment of brain injury has always been unique…..I have not really followed the norm of treatment in that I have noticed that cognition and behavior were intricately related, so much so I that it is how I lecture and teach, showing their theoretical relationship- I show essentially a bell curve with thinking, cognition, mental power, whatever on the vertical and kinetic activity, emotion, behavior on the horizontal….when people are way way too kinetic, they do not think clearly…..when they are way way absent of kinetic activity they do not think well then either. I use medicine to bring them more into the middle and voila- more kinetic control and better thinking
now I suspect it is more than a two dimensional relationship, at least three, perhaps multiple but the point is they are related in some manner…and may simply be different aspects of what we inexplicably call life..something we will never be able to define
…this had me thinking not so much about the neurologic/medical implications of such a relationship…it means we always have some inclination to our thinking either positive or negative…thus one’s ’emotional view’ of life affects how one sees the world, even if one is invisible to the effect…almost like Arthur able to pull out the sword from the stone……one needs a humble caring outlook to see the greatness and beauty of life
emotion and thinking are not separate as we have treated them over the years…2500 to be exact and that profoundly affects our idea that we are rational creatures and thus my paperif what I say is correct and we are in a fog in regards to why we are here, then it profoundly affects everything in our lives-what is just , what is good, what is fine etc.
if we think we know yet we truly don’t know, then we are quite prideful and foolish
if we admit we don’t know, then perhaps we search for answers and thus we are lead to the divine and it must be One, not many for many leave us in the same boat… we must come back to the realization that our laws are not based on some rationality formed by smart humans but by a God who revealed Himself to us, to Moses giving us a basis to live our lives upon
it throws out the notion that we only need a god to give us a notion to be rational….instead we are creatures with a free will to follow God’s planeven if such a plan does not make sense to us etc
such a notion we are not rational as we would like to be could be a devastating thing on many levels yet on the other hand it would at least restore the notion of wonder in the world-who made us, why were we made etc questions education often drain from us with their presumed well formed answers
it would kill Freud, Descartes, Darwin etc etc but in my mind this would not be so bad
I would rather know that my journey to acquire kindness via suffering teaches me the profoundness of creation…it is the indirect source of my knowledge and not just some sentimentality many would prefer it to be
…oh well here is my paper…still needs some work…. and I really treat it as a philosophic paper onlyread it and tell me what you think
I also have written a collection of poetry which may also explain where I am coming fromsorry I do not know much about Origen but I have trouble with everyone in the past
what is nice about Socrates is he tells you all in about fifty pages….what profoundness
well here is the paper
