Opus 2024-435: Living in denial

I’m wondering if people who deny God and make a big deal of denying God have some basic underlying emotional and psychological problems.  I am currently trying to finish up a book by Will Durant called The Story of Philosophy.  In it he works through what he considers to be the major philosophers of our western culture.  It took me a while to get onto his methods, but what he does is immerse himself in the philosopher he’s writing about, and then write as if he is that philosopher.  I used to think he was expressing his own ideas, but I finally realized that this was his way of getting across what they had to say.

In the current batch that I’m reading after a hiatus of a couple years, he gives a biographical sketch in an attempt to try and help us see where these people are coming from.  The three that are standing out to me now are Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche.  All of them have major issues in their life.  As a general rule, they seem to be unable to get along with other people.  Their childhoods were a mess.  They are the kind of people you would not want to leave your children with.  Their only claim to fame is that someone thinks their writings were worth reading.

What Durrant has to say reinforces a thought that I had about what is considered classical literature.  I find that just because people tell me something is an awesome reading that will change my view of the world, it doesn’t mean a lot.  I feel that there are certain elites, who get so impressed with their eliteness that they forget that their thoughts are not necessarily significant or coherent.  I think of a joke that I once heard that tells of a polar bear sitting on a block of ice as it floats across the ocean and going to the edge and yelling “Radio”.  Now, the joke is on the people listening.  There is no joke.  There is no humor.  There’s nothing there, but an attempt to manipulate you into laughing at something that has no point.  The joke is on you.  I often think that much of the important classical literature falls into that category.

Read with your mind, turned on.  Assume that your mind is working.  If what you read seems like nonsense then consider the idea of the possibility that it is nonsense.  The only question is, does the person who wrote it realize that it is meaningless or are they as much in the dark as you are.  Have sympathy for those who read this kind of thing and then go, “Oh wow!”

Durant, Will.  The Story of Philosophy.  Garden City, New York:  Garden City Publishing Co., Inc.,  1926.

homo unius libri