loving logic
i don’t mind logic- as a hobby programmer, i think it’s a wonderful, beautiful thing. i grew up atheist, and no one pushed me into it. i don’t think there are a lot of people who appreciate logic more than i do- but i’m sure some people do.
loving the imagination
i don’t mind the imagination either. it offers us opportunities to make leaps and bounds, leaps that can be harmful, that’s why it’s so wonderful to have logic to help us minimize that harm. no amount of logic is going to make us perfect or infallible, we’re just “not that good.” we’re human. we make mistakes, and it’s for our limitations more than our methods. as we grow, we take on larger problems, and yet smaller problems haven’t all disappeared.
i don’t have a problem with this kind of logic, or that kind of logic, but i do see a problem in a certain context- just as the imagination can be used as an excuse for doing very stupid things, like “god made me do it,” i think logic can be an excuse not to feel, not to admit irrational beliefs, and i don’t think there are any people without irrational (or subjective) beliefs. for some people, pretending to be objective is just another way of feeling superior. that’s not the same thing as rationality.
excluded middle
this is not something everyone does enough to worry about it, but it is probably something everyone does. at a time when it’s appropriate to set cold unemotional thinking aside and try to feel enough like another person to know where they’re coming from, if we always pretend to be computers or robots instead of thinking, feeling human beings, it limits our ability to understand each other. it’s an excuse to have poorer communication, to be “right” when we don’t even know what we’re talking about.
i’m against this kind of cold-logic-as-a-rule, it should be there to help us test the answers to important questions. one thing i feel is very important for atheists and theists to do is try to understand each other more. i don’t think magical thinking or logical thinking are going away, to abandon either would be to use half the brain (maybe not literally…) but i think we have two ways of thinking, and both are very good in the right context. either way can be dangerous, either way can be used to (poorly) excuse inhuman acts (take eugenics as an example of such logic) and in the long run it seems likely to me that cold logic will expose many of these excuses for what they are, but in the short run complimenting our logic with emotion can give extra “hints” as to what’s really going on.
logic in modern culture…
the people i think best embody cold logic and warm logic are christopher hitchens and douglas adams. i see christopher hitchens as cold, absent-minded, and even dishonest. what he knows he knows very well, but what he doesn’t know he’ll make into your problem. douglas adams on the other hand, is a better comedian because he better understands the things he satires. you have to think about things to understand them well, and i see douglas adams as the archetype of the atheist who thinks with both brains.
he is the kind of person i think of when i think of being “open-minded.” it doesn’t change his conclusions, but if you can truly appreciate logic, you know that how you get there matters too. and depending how you look at it, his conclusions are just a little more “reasonable” than those arrived at by hitchens. adams is warmer, more open, more tolerant of humanity’s stupidity. it makes him less of a hypocrite, too. armed with empathy, adams looks around his person and sees an imperfect, fallible being. and those who live in glass houses… by all means be logical, but don’t be deceived by your ego. it will only make you cold, and not nearly as insightful as you think.
…and classical philosophy
this contrast between cold, closed logic and warm, open logic didn’t start with hitchens (yes, by my own argument it’s possible i’m being unfair) and adams (who could have been as guilty as hitchens once or twice…) as i see the same in descartes and plato. of cold logic you have “cogito ergo sum” (to be fair, that’s not the entire quote) and from plato you have “we will be better and braver and more useful if we think that we ought to search for what we don’t know.” i implore the imaginative to test their theories with all the logic they can find, as i implore the logical to search for the variable they haven’t figured into their equations. that is the domain of the imagination, which allows us to search for the things we DON’T know.
a holistic view
these things compliment, and help along the everlasting journey to making knowledge whole. the alternative seems to be to sort out and shun the imagination, deriding, shaming, and ultimately censoring half our thought. that is why it’s unlikely i will ever admire hitchens. he is not promoting the expansion of our thinking, but rather a switch from one extreme to the other, to increase one thought and stifle the other as useless. i can’t get behind a person who thinks any category of thought is without purpose. the brain does not stop when you use the imagination, it just works differently.
so i argue the value of logic, and of dreams. which constitute reality? every experience is subjective, and we can put our minds together, but i will not stop mine and replace it with yours, and i would never ask you to do that either. that would be the ultimate arrogance, but i admire adams, and plato, because i believe they knew better than that- and that is my defintion of wisdom. it comes and goes, and comes back, like subjectivity and objectivity. and when you combine the two, you have what i call “reality…” (as far as i know…)
license: creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
