Reuven, when my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. . . . It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. . . . I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, 'What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!'
- The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
How often am I like Daniel! It's so easy as an intellectual to go through systems of philosophy, to preach the benefits of one set of ethics over another, to go through abstruse metaphysical points as merely a mind. It really is only recently that I seem to be able to feel the suffering in a text at all rather than note it as one piece of information that helps me to understand the story.
(btw, credit for recommending the book, which has been a rewarding read, goes primarily to my uncle, Dr. Corduan, for bringing it up in Western Religions years ago, and secondly to Dr. VanGemeren who mentioned something by Potok in a recent Intro to OT course which reminded me that I should read it)
In other news, I think I got my boss to change my hours at Starbuck's to a more humane time. 4:45 in the morning (at night?) is just not right, and 5:45 isn't much better.
1 comment:
Uncle Dr? That sounds like Onkel Doktor, which is what we used to call the pediatrician when I was a kid. Thanks for the footnote, though.
Actually, I had been meaning to comment on your musings on causality. The problem with most discussions on causality over the last few hundred years (which entire era is beset by fundamental errors) is that they almost invariably begin with a misunderstanding of causality. The typical representation is the you have two events, call them A and B. Then, in whatever pre- or post-Humean fashion you assume, A is the cause of B, and B is the effect of A if they are constantly conjoined, linked by the a priori category of causality, or whatever.
But that's a really bad way of understanding causation. To borrow an example from Timothy McDermott in the appendix to vol. 2 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologica, consider a bunsen burner heating a beaker of water. It is clear that the burner is the cause of the water being heated, but how many events are we looking at? Only one! The same thing applies to the example of billiard ball A hitting billiard ball B and causing it to move. You don't have two events constituting the causal connection, but only one, namely the instant that A transfers its momentum and kinetic energy to B.
In metaphysical terms, causation occurs at the moment or over the duration that a potential is actualized. It can take a while, or it may be instantaneous, but it is only one event. I think your introspective analysis of causality contributes to making tht point.
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