Coping with the Human Predicament: Living an Examined, a Disciplined and a Charitable Life

By Douglas Patterson

Americans during the first decades of the 21st century have enjoyed a very high standard of living; even though we may vary greatly in wealth, few people in this country actually go hungry. Most enjoy adequate nutrition and shelter and medical care and transportation and communication services; many live in more luxurious environs than the kings of yore did in their castles.
Ironically, many of us have not become happier or healthier in equal measure to our increase in wealth. In fact, many at all income levels appear to have become downright unhealthy - both physically and mentally - in the midst of plenty.
Jesus’ admonition that “Man does not live by bread alone” was uttered in a religious context; but it is an accurate observation when viewed on a secular level as well. Good living requires that we satisfy our needs on more than a survival level.
Many people do deal with their problems through their religions. Their belief in a loving Heavenly Father and eternal life gives their lives meaning and purpose and dignity. At the same time, they like their less religious friends must deal on their own with the trials and tribulations of temporal living. Some members of each group live much more satisfactory lives than others.
My purpose in writing this book is to review the thoughts of many great thinkers concerning how one best copes with the problems of temporal living. I have boiled down my key points in the book’s sub-title: Living an examined, a disciplined and a charitable life.
Having spent my life in the field of education, I am convinced that well-educated (not necessarily long schooled) people generally deal better with life’s vicissitudes than those with less education. If a person has read widely and has participated positively in the affairs of his community, he is likely to have developed the breadth and the flexibility that equips him to embrace life and to deal intelligently and effectively with its ups and down.
One who has developed sound critical thinking skills is better prepared to deal with the flood of information and opinions that washes over us each day than is his less reflective brother. He is unlikely to blur the lines between fact and fancy. While enjoying the fruits of our very rich imaginations, he does not treat metaphors as objective descriptions of reality.
Throughout history, philosophers have advised self-discipline as one of the most important attributes of am effectove person. Those who control their urges and appetites rather than allowing them to take over their lives enjoy a freedom of thought and action not experienced by those self-indulgent people who continually give in to their impulses.
Even though food is readily available, many Americans still eat as if famine were right around the corner. Our automobiles whisk us around in comfort; but they have deprived us of the exercise that we need to remain physically fit. Even though we may own a plethora of material things, advertising whets our appetites to acquire more things that we may not need and perhaps cannot afford.
Those people who get the most out of life have somehow escaped from narrow egotism and have learned to care for others. They have developed the ability to love their neighbors as themselves.
In this book, which was written with teenagers and young adults in mind, I hope to reinforce some very basic insights concerning how one leads productive and happy temporal life – whether he expects to awaken after death or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas Patterson
• Release date: Jan 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301866335

Douglas Patterson

With the exception of a three year stint in the U.S.Army, I have spent my life in and around the public schools. My parents were both teachers, and I have taught language arts courses at the high school level for a total of 37 years. I was born during the great depressions and grew up in Southern Idaho (both literally and figuratively) just north of Poverty Flat. I lived in the very small town of Bellevue, Idaho, that had a population of some 500 people and an equal number of dogs. In this rural environment, I enjoyed a Tom Sawyer like life, not on the Mississippi but rather on the Woodriver where my friends and I fished an swam and roamed the riverbottom and the surrounding hills from morning til night. My parents never locked the doors to our house, and we never worried much about it being burglarized. (For you skiers,Sun Valley is seventeen miles north of this town.) After graduating from Hailey(now Woodriver) High School,I enrolled at the University of Oregon at a time when the school had a student body of 5,000 students and the football team rarely won a game. After graduation, I spent a marvelous tour of duty with the U.S. Army which took me to Europe. I was stationed in Germany for a couple of glorious years and became a dedicated Europhile. After I was discharged, I started my teaching career in the small town of New Plymouth, Idaho, near the Oregon border. After three years, I moved to Yakima, Washington, where I worked as an English and German teacher for the next 34 years. After retiring,I quickly grew bored and began writing books primarily for my own amusement. Four of the books that I am publishing with Smashbooks are language arts textbooks focusing on linguistics, critical thinking, and literal and literary composition. The other two deal with self-improvment and very basic economics. Because breaking into the traditional publishing business has always been such a long shot,I was very pleased to see ebook publishing develop into a platform for people like me who are looking for an inexpensive way to offer their materials to the public. Since they say that confession is good for the sould, I must admit that my picture was taken by a yearbook photographer at least twenty-five years ago. I have no defense except to say, "Vanity thy name is not woman alone!"

Book preview

Coping with the Human Predicament

Living an Examined, a Disciplined,

And a Charitable Life

By Douglas D. Patterson

Copyright 2011 by Douglas D. Patterson

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I – Philosophical Assumptions

Chapter 01 – Schools of Thought

Chapter 02 – Free Will

Chapter 03 – Faith

Chapter 04 - Know Thyself

Chapter 05 - Personal Responsibility

Chapter 06 - Risks and Rewards

Chapter 07 - A Liberal Education

Part II – The Cognitive Domain)

Chapter 08- Perception

Chapter 09 - Memory

Chapter 10 - Conceptualization

Chapter 11 - Abstraction/Evaluation

Chapter 12 - Imagination

Chapter 13 - Enumeration (Descriptive Statistics)

Chapter 14 - Inductive Inference

Chapter 15 - Deductive Inference

Chapter 16 - The Scientific Method

Chapter 17 - Fallacies

Part III – The Affective Domain

Chapter 18 - Initiative

Chapter 19 – Perspective

Chapter 20 – Tolerance

Chapter 21 - Charity

Part IV – Planning

Chapter 22 – Personal Planning

Chapter 23 – Policy Argument

Afterword

Example A - A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Example B - The Declaration of Independence

Preface

The human predicament, as the existentialists are fond of saying, arises not out of the fact that we are mortals, but rather because we realize that our lives are transient. Our super-sized brains have increased our level of self-awareness to the point that we ask ourselves such philosophical questions as Why am I here? and What is the meaning of life? and Is there a life after death? English poet John Keats’ who died much too young pondered such existential questions in one of his most famous poems:

When I have Fears that I may cease to be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact'ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats – (1795-1821)

This young poet’s premonitions of death were apparently well founded for he died long before he had experienced much of what life had to offer and before he had had the time to realize his great potential as a poet. In his short life he demonstrated a literary talent which might have rivaled Shakespeare’s, had he lived three or four decades longer.

We humans react to our predicament in a variety of ways, some of which are less adaptive than others.

By far the most common approach is through religion. Instead of viewing death as an end, the faithful see it as a beginning. Many Christians believe in an anthropomorphic God, a being who resembles an old man with long flowing white hair like the one that Michael Angelo depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For many He is a personal God, a loving Heavenly Father, who is intensely interested and intimately involved in our daily affairs. After we die, we are resurrected and may dwell with Him throughout eternity in Heaven - a place where no one is ever hungry or cold or lame or ill. Religious people’s belief in an after-life in Heaven at the feet of a loving God helps to sustains them during the trials and tribulations and travail of their temporal lives.

Many Christians and all Muslims also believe in a less defined God (or Allah). In fact, the iconoclasts objected violently to the practice of depicting God in human form. In Protestant churches, one generally does not see many images; and the practice of displaying pictures of Allah is strictly forbidden in a Mosque.

Carl Marx, of course, referred to religion as the opiate of the people and thereby endeared himself to Christians – and to Jews and Muslims and Buddhists as well. His belief that life is temporary and finite certainly offers far less comfort to those who are approaching the end than the religious alternative does. Although his economic theories have been tried and found wanting, Marx’s view that humans need to focus on and to strive to solve his-worldly problems is not entirely misplaced. In fact, one hears a similar view expressed by religious people when they say, God helps those who help themselves!

Whether we are slated for eternal life in heaven or (perish the thought) hell or we at death have only to look forward to the end of our existence, we must all deal with several decades (if we are lucky) of temporal living; and we all – saint and sinner alike – have choices to make in the way that we approach that effort.

At the most basic level, we can choose to live childish, self-centered, self-indulgent lives; or we can approach life as positive and self-disciplined and charitable adults.

Those who take the immature approach will probably encounter many unnecessary difficulties in their lives, and they are unlikely to bring much joy into the lives of others. Those who tend toward nihilism, for example, are always wet blankets. They reject traditional beliefs and values and insist that existence is senseless and useless. Starting with such assumptions, no wonder their lives are such downers.

Hedonists live self-indulgent pleasure-seeking lives; but their obsessive pursuit of the good life often leads to unhappy outcomes.

A more adaptive approach is through a quiet affirmation of life. No matter what awaits us after death, we are wise to live as if our lives have enduring value.

Socrates told his students that an unexamined life is not worth living. Conversely, then, living an examined life must enrich our temporal experience. Alexander Pope’s notion that the proper study of Mankind is Man may be a bit too restrictive, but studying our own nature is certainly one of the most important ways in which we can do Socrates’ bidding. If we occupy ourselves with learning about how the social and physical world in which we live functions, we will probably live safer and more fulfilling lives; and if we make a commitment to treat other humans and animals and the environment in which we live with proper respect, we will find many interesting ways with which to occupy ourselves during our time on this earth.

Philosophers, both religious and secular, have concluded time and time again that self-disciplined and restrained living is a much better way to pursue happiness than are negativity and self-indulgence.

Since the human predicament will resolve itself for each of us soon enough, we might as well make the best of things while we are alive. Both those who believe that death is a final curtain and those who see it as a transition to eternal life are likely to look back on their temporal lives with greater satisfaction if they have lived examined and self-disciplined and charitable lives.

Back to the Table of Contents

(automatic)

Part I – Philosophical Assumptions

Taking a careful look at the various philosophical assumptions that guide our lives and the lives of others is an essential step. Philosophers have divided these assumptions into four major areas of study:

Metaphysics

Ontology Perhaps the most basic questions of all relate to the nature of reality. Idealists, as we shall see, have a very different view of reality than materialists do. What is the nature of man? is a sub-set of that question. Those who believe man is a divine being think very differently from materialists who generally consider man to be a part of the animal kingdom.

Cosmology This was at one time a very active branch of philosophy. Man throughout history has gazed at the heavens and speculated about the moon and the stars and about how the universe is organized. After many false starts, Copernicus gave us a relatively accurate but in his day highly controversial picture of the solar system. The space program has, of course, provided us with a very detailed view of our solar system and has lifted the veil on the universe as well. Now cosmologists ponder such ultimate questions as the origins of the universe.

Epistemology

This branch of philosophy, which is sometimes listed as a subset of metaphysics and sometimes as a branch of philosophy in its own right, deals with the nature and limitations of human knowledge. Those who call themselves absolutists have great faith in our ability to know the truth; relativists by contrast view human knowledge as fallible at best.

Ethics

A third major area of philosophical study involves questions of goodness and evil. Discussions in this field often divide absolutists and relativists into opposing camps; and they sometimes subdivide absolutists and relativists as well.

Aesthetics

This branch of philosophical focuses on the nature of beauty and its counterpart ugliness. Disputes in this area often become quite heated – even though they tend not to generate much light. Reaching an agreement as to what is beautiful and what is not is difficult at best.

The philosophical assumptions that guide our thinking, as we shall see, can have a very large impact on the way that we live our lives.

Back to the Table of Contents

(automatic)

Chapter 1 – Schools of Thought

The various philosophical schools fit into two distinctly different orientations: idealism which emphasizes ideas as ultimate reality and materialism which focuses primarily on the physical world. The Greek philosopher Plato promoted idealism whereas his pupil Aristotle emphasized materialism.

Idealism

Ontology (What is the nature of reality?)

In his essay The Cave, Plato suggested that experience is like shadows projected onto the wall of a cave. He said that if we sit and watch the shadows, we will never know the truth. Instead, we must emerge from the cave into the sunlight of ideas as our source for certain knowledge. He apparently believed in knowledge a priori. He assumed that concepts and ideas exist in pre-packaged form and that each of us is somehow equipped to discover or to know those truths independent of our worldly experience.

Religious Idealism

The Greeks believed that the world was governed by rather capricious anthropomorphic gods who had all of the failing of human beings – but on a grand scale. Zeus was wrathful and amorous. Hera was jealous. Athena was wise as an owl. Ares was warlike. These super-humans often came down from their home on Mount Olympia and mixed their genes with humans – thereby creating demi-gods. Since the Greeks were restricted in their travels to the Eastern Mediterranean, they naturally assumed that the world they knew was all the world there was and that the sun the stars and the moon moved in their paths around their fixed position.

Christianity, a form of religious idealism, has dominated much of western thought for two millennia. God, who has remained unseen by most of us, is for many an unquestioned reality. I have never seen Him, but I know that my Redeemer lives in a kingdom called Heaven, a place that I also have never visited, is the Christians’ affirmation of a truth that transcends those shadows on the wall. God is conceived by many as a really super-human being who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Others think of God in much more abstract terms. The Iconoclasts believed that man should never attempt to draw a picture of God, as His being is simply beyond our comprehension.

Some think of God as a loving being while others talk of Him as wrathful and jealous. In any Case, God is the law giver, and the central task of humans is to learn and to obey His will.

Life on this earth is transient; but life in Heaven (or in Hell) is eternal.

Secular Idealism (an abstract world)

Plato’s theory has, of course, been one of the most important streams of Western thought. His emphasis on abstract ideas over the concrete experience results in a fixed or at least conservative world view. Ideals become fixed beacons in the lives of those who embrace them. If one accepts the notion that the world is flat that belief will influence and restrict the way that he lives his life

In his Republic’ Plato argued for a form of government in which a philosopher king rules based on ideal principles. Such views tend to support dictatorships in which superior" men govern. The problem is that those who hold themselves out as superior men more often than not turn out to be flawed, and their arbitrary rule can become just as onerous to their subjects as that of a buffoon might be.

Plato’s Athens was also a source of many of the idealistic principles which have been incorporated into modern democracies: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal is an ideal that one has difficulty supporting by observation of real people in a concrete world; but it remains one of the central pillars of American democracy.

Epistemology (What do we know and how do we know it?)

How, according to idealists, do we learn about the unperceived world without focusing on those shadows on the wall? Many philosophers have attempted to explain how we can know the truth without employing our eyes or our other senses.

Religious Idealism

Revelation

Traditional religion is based on a belief in directly revealed truth. God appeared to Moses and gave him the Ten Commandments. Individuals such as Joan of Arc and Bernadette and Joseph Smith have all reported visions of supernatural beings; and their followers have accepted their reports as valid.

The writers of the Bible are said to have been inspired by God, and as a result that book is a source of God’s revealed Word. The Catholic Church in the Platonic tradition argues that the Bible must be interpreted for the flock by an educated and inspired clergy. Protestants insist on reading the Bible for themselves, and as a consequence, they have come up with a multitude of different interpretations.

God, according to religious idealists, takes great personal interest in the affairs of man. Some believers insist that He reveals Himself through events. If people are wicked, He may send floods and storms and earthquakes to punish them. When a believer’s tribe is victorious in war, he may interpret this favorable outcome as a positive sign from God.

Mysticism

Occasionally one hears of a house that realtors are having trouble renting or selling because of claims that it is haunted. Communication with the dead via séances is still considered a viable route to truth by some people.

On a bit more respectable level, renowned religious figures have at times claimed mystical communications with the supernatural world. Jonathan Edwards, who is arguably America’s more original theologian, said that he felt the presence of God and that he sensed His grace flowing unto him. Through these extra sensory perceptions, Edwards believed that he learned of God‘s will. In his most famous sermon, Edwards claimed that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God who dangles us over a flaming pit and may choose to cut the thread or to save us - whether we listen to and obey Him or not. No wonder Edwards felt such a need to determine whether God planned to save his soul.

Many evangelical revivalists and the members of their congregations have reported extra-sensory contact with God during their services. They and their congregations sometimes become quite over-wrought emotionally before they experience their visions.

Many a guru and crystal ball gazer and palm reader has claimed to be clairvoyant, and fortune tellers have always found a few people who are willing to pay for their services. These mystics are always useful tools for dramatists in foreshadowing events for the benefit of the audience. At the beginning of Act I in Shakespeare‘s Macbeth, the weird sisters signal a dark future for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and as the events in Shakespeare’s play unfold, the Macbeths rush blindly toward the doom that the witches had foretold.

Skeptics tend to interpret mystical experiences and communications and insights as figments of overly suggestible imaginations; but those who are inclined toward mysticism often accept them as real contacts with the other side, and they occasionally found new religious faiths based on their mystical experiences.

Secular Idealism

Although both men claimed to be religious, two of the most important philosophers in the history of Western civilization offered avenues to the truth that did not directly involve organized religion.

Rationalism

The French philosopher Renee Descartes developed the theory of rationality as a source of absolute knowledge. According to his view, God created the human mind in such a way that each of us can arrive at the truth simply by applying his reason and common sense. In so doing, he did much to undermine the power of the clergy, and he encouraged the faithful to believe in their individual capabilities.

During the 18th century, Descartes’ ideas held sway throughout Europe and North America.

Many of the founding fathers of the USA were schooled in Descartes’ rationalism. In his pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine argued with devastating logic for freedom of the American colonies from English control. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence presented a classic (unified, coherent, and emotionally restrained) argument; and the influence of rationalism can be seen in our constitutional form of government as well as in many of the buildings which house its agencies.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…! is a concise expression of Descartes’ creed. If one applies his God-given faculties of reason and common sense, he can know the truth without lengthy investigations of observable realities.

Can one without regard for experience simply reason his way to truth? Modern psychologists say no, that deduction is only one element of our thought processes. We arrive at generalizations by examining and counting particular things; then if our generalizations prove valid and reliable, we may employ them as premises to deduce valid and reliable conclusions. Math students do so every day in their algebra and geometry classes.

Descartes’ greatest contribution may not have been in providing a road map to absolute truth but rather in redefining the world as an orderly place and in sweeping away many of the superstitions with which humans have tortured their minds in the past. His greatest disservice may have been, as brain surgeon Antonio Damasio pointed out in his book Descartes’ Error, decoupling the two hemispheres of our brain and neglecting the emotional side of our being.

Intuition

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason also pointed to weaknesses in Descartes theories; but he then advanced the irrational notion of categorical imperatives - which we commonly refer to as conscience – in their place. Not by reasoning but rather through listening to our non-rational inner voices, Kant insisted, we can know the truth. Emotional reactions, not reason, were the watchwords of Kant and his followers. Whereas Descartes’ rationalism leads to a sedate and restrained and elegant life style, the emotional excesses of Kant’s romanticism flamed white hot – and in a short time they consumed themselves. The emotional right lobe requires the steady hand of the rational left lobe on its tiller, or it soon runs itself onto the rocks.

Kant’s views were favored during the early 19th century romantic movement in Europe and the United States. Beethoven’s early works sound much like those of Mozart; but as he grew older his music took on a much more emotional character. Painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable of Britain; Eugene Delacroix of France; and Thomas Cole of the USA painted pictures which invited much stronger emotional responses than did the works of the neo-classicists.

Romantics sought their intuitive insights in a variety of ways.

Beauty

The German Sturm und Drang (romantic) movement reached its apex with Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s drama Faust. In this story, the main character sells his soul to the Devil for a moment of perfect (aesthetic) bliss. Faust seeks his moment of fulfillment in romantic love, alchemy, witchcraft, etc. In the end, after all his romantic excesses, Faust finds his moment of pure joy by following the old Christian principle of service to one’s fellow man. As God had predicted in the beginning of this play, A good man in his dark struggles, knows the right way!

With that line Goethe reflected the essence of Kant’s theory of knowledge. In the world of Kant, one‘s non-rational conscience tells him the right path, no matter how hard he may try to ignore what it is telling him. In the end, however, Goethe appears to have concluded that romantic excess is not as reliable a road to truth and to personal fulfillment as is serving the needs of others. In Siddhartha, a novel written by another German writer Herman Hesse, the title character comes to the same basic conclusion. These men were signaling the end to the romantic/emotional outburst that occurred at the beginning of the l9th century.

Romantics have always sought truth in beauty – both natural and man created. Jon Jacque Rousseau and William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau communed with nature and found truth in its beauty. Though they were careful observers of the material world, their interest was not so much scientific as aesthetic. By looking at daffodils and skylarks and nightingales and all the rest of nature, they escaped the dreary intercourse of daily life and found those moments of pure ecstasy for which romantics yearn.

John Muir and other members of the Sierra Club took a similar tact. Yosemite and Mt. Rainier and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and the Sequoias, and all the other natural wonders that these men worked so hard to preserve were for them God’s cathedrals where one might learn His will.

Artistic

Creative artists, of course, write poems and plays and compose music and paint pictures which also appeal to our love of beauty; and many an audience has looked to their works as sources of inspiration

Romantic Love

Cyrano de Bergerac, along with generations of his audiences, sought the meaning of life in his unrequited love for Roxanne. This play’s theme which explores the nature of spiritual love, appears time and time again in romances ranging from Victor Hugo‘s The Hunchback of Notre Dame to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter to a short lived television program called The Beauty and the Beast.

Mind Altering Substances

Drugs, sex and rock and roll- the paths to mind expansion followed by some young people during the l960s --were really nothing new. When Timothy Dr. O’Leary took LSD for mind expansion, he was following a path blazed by romantic author Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is said to have found the inspiration for his poem "Kubla Kahn" while under the influence of opium.

(Kant’s notion of knowledge and of imperatives a priori crops up in some remarkable places. Famed linguistic scientist Noam Chomsky talks of a language instinct and a universal grammar. He apparently theorizes that we are all born with an urge to talk and with rules of syntax somehow etched into our brains.)

Ethics

Goodness and beauty to the religious idealist are not mere human preferences. They are defined in absolute and inflexible terms. The Ten Commandments are not rules that have grown out of tribal experience but are rather from the Word of God transmitted directly to Moses who is said actually to have seen Jehovah.

Plato spoke of goodness, along with other high level abstractions, as an unalterable principle – and not a human evaluation. When he emerges from his cave into the sunlight of ideas, the great thinker is somehow able to distinguish between good and evil.

Aesthetics

Classicism is an art movement founded on the aesthetic principles of unity, coherence and emotional restraint.

Hellenic art is governed by rules which produce statues of beautiful people who actually do not resemble real people very much. They are perfectly proportioned. They lack the flaws which make real humans highly individual. They exist in the perfect world of ideas, but not in the imperfect world that real people occupy. The elegant statue of Venus de Milo, for example, was chiseled out of stone following an ideal aesthetic template which existed in the world of ideas without input from man. Classical Greek drama in which the Greek playwrights wrote following strict guidelines even today remains remarkably powerful.

In a much later era, Johann Sebastian Bach developed a theory of music to which musicians of the Western world cleave as a guide to creating beautiful compositions. Mozart wrote elegant, neo-classical music. In each of his compositions, every element seems to fit into a logical whole. Neo-classical architecture strove to recapture the form of Greek buildings. Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia along rational, neo-classical lines. Artists created idealized images, and writers placed extreme emphasis on the values of unity, coherence and restraint in their compositions.

Idealism in Practice

Those who like Plato spurn the shadows on the wall and look instead to the sunlight of ideas range from great men such like Jesus and Socrates to villains such as Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. Those who advocate admirable ideas often do great good. Those who advocate pernicious creeds often commit terrible crimes.

Because idealists are totally convinced of the validity of their ideas, they often feel obliged to spread their truths to their neighbors. Whenever they employ persuasion, their behavior is acceptable. Unfortunately, too many try to convert others through coercion. The religious wars fought throughout Europe during the sixteenth and early l7th centuries between conflicting Christian factions are good examples of idealism run amok. The Spanish Inquisition is perhaps the best example of evil being done in the name of God.

Idealism requires that we learn to recognize and to live by pre-established definitions and rules; and as a result this point of view sustains a highly traditional approach to thinking and to morality and to art.

Materialism

Unlike Plato, for whom experience was only shadows on the wall, Aristotle focused his interest on the material world as revealed by those shadows. He did not believe in a world of ideas divorced from our perceptions of the physical world. Real world triangles are not imperfect representations of a perfect template; our concept of triangles arises instead from observing them in the material world. Form does not reside above material reality - but is rather as part of it.

Extreme relativists, of course, argue that the concept triangle was invented by humans in an effort to organize their experience into recognizable patterns.

This-Worldly Orientation

Realists (materialists) spend little time thinking about other-worldly things but focus instead on this world. Like Newton, they view the world in mechanistic terms. It is a place in which all events obey immutable laws of nature. Storms and earthquakes and illness come about as a result of natural causes - and contributory causes - and not because of the wrath of a personal God. Many of the idealists’ concerns lie beyond our ability to know, but realists (who sometimes call themselves scientists) simply choose to spend their time and effort dealing with this worldly things that they can study and problems that they can solve.

Realists are often charged - as Archibald MacLeish does in his poem Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell – with a lack of spirituality. In this work, MacLeish speaks of science in religious terms. He refers to science as a simple saint who deals with such questions as how every living thing was feathered and the climate of each star but who never asks the profounder questions concerning the meaning of life.

In the key lines of the poem, MacLeish asks a question that might have made Plato proud:

Who dares to offer her the curled sea shell!

She will not touch it - knows the world she sees

Is all the world there is! Her faith is perfect!

With these lines, the poet identifies himself as an idealist who disdains those shadows on the wall much as Plato did. Though he does not identify his particular path to certain knowledge, MacLeish obviously rejects his senses as his most important source of truth. He ends his poem with two questions concerning man’s urge to know more than science can ever disclose.

What surf

On what far sea upon what unknown ground

Troubles forever with that asking sound?

What surge is this whose question never ceases?

Mac Leash no doubt intended that this criticism be taken to heart. To him, an otherworldly orientation is apparently of prime importance. He needs to know what human life on this planet is all about. The realist simply shrugs off the charge and continues focusing his attention on things and events in the observable world.

This poet’s treatment of realism using religious terms and symbols, however, is not entirely without merit, for science is also based on non-provable core beliefs. In order to accept science as a discipline, one must place his faith in three basic assumptions:

(l) Natural kinds exist.

(2) Events are caused.

(3) Laws of nature are immutable.

One cannot offer absolutely certain proof that these assumptions are correct.

Realists on the most fundamental level believe most readily in what their experience shows them. Like Francis Bacon and John Locke and John Dewey and many others, they assume that our most reliable knowledge comes through our senses - from those shadows on the wall that Plato spurned. As John Locke put it,