Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Brian Neuschwander <brian AT beachcitygas.com>]

David Alan Beck wrote:
> 
> Some of this talk about conciousness and will.... so
> how could there be doubt?...
> 
> Some mysteries just won't be
> solved on this side of reality."...
> 
> After all, isn't our very
> existence, in many ways, a mystery. (As Marcel calls it--another shameless
> plug for Marcel--the Mystery of Being.)
> .
> Sorry if this sounds like an intellectual cop-out. Who knows? Maybe it is.
> 
> David Beck
> 
> "I would feel more optimistic about a bright
> future for man if he spent less time proving that
> he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness
> and respecting her seniority."
>                       - E. B. White
> 


David,

Your perspective isn't laziness with age, but confidence from life.

After much contemplating of such "odd" things as the resurrection,
virgin birth, ascension, etc, I finally set all the difficulties aside
until I could resolve the matter of my own existence (without arid
scientistic reductionism).  Perhaps that is impossible "this side of
reality."

The pursuit of meaning without the tools of mystery leads to
impenetrable pedantry (like the pop postmodern philosophical gibberish),
or the half-right response of Alan Sokal in his "Fashionable Nonsense",
which is a reserved reductionism, a sort of laying the cards face down
on the table but daring not to turn them all over because they keep
coming up blank, so you have to leave a few face down in the desperate
hope that at least some of them do actually say something.

Accepting mystery is a much more satisfying enterprise than playing
solitaire with a blank deck.

All the best,

Brian