Truth: Philosophy in Transit

Alternatively, a fool seeks a good thing but excessively, to the neglect of the whole, in a disproportionate way, so that it runs wild over the rest of his life, like people who strive for success in their business – which can be a good thing – but in so single-minded a way that it destroys their health or family life, which is unwise.

You see the difference: the passion for God who is truth versus the dispassionate assertion that this proposition (‘God exists’) is true (or is not).

argue that by criticizing the excessive rationalism of modernity, postmodernity has created an opening for what has been called the ‘return of religion’.

The short answer is that once rationality takes over, a profound inversion takes place: truth ceases to be a claim made upon us, and becomes a claim we make on behalf of our assertions.

Reason, as Foucault would point out, was endowed with the power to legislate what counts as knowledge, a phenomenon we see every time the psychiatrists define a new ‘disorder’, thereby creating a category that passes itself off as a bit of knowledge, hitherto unknown, which allows us to pathologize what is really just a part of life and to monitor

that he let his love of reasoning overrun everything else and failed to take into account that there are certain things for which we do not need definitions and cannot give reasoned arguments.

is simply a matter of doing what we have to do anyway (our moral duty), but doing it this time as if our duty were the will of God, which we are free to believe, if we like, while the rest of religion (rites, doctrines, etc.) is just superstition.

But I do believe that something is getting itself said in religious narratives, which are populated by fictive beings and are not to be judged by the standards of true assertions.

Notice that the psalmist says ‘foolish’, not ‘irrational’. What’s the difference? The opposite of foolishness is ‘wisdom’, whereas the opposite of irrational is ‘rational’, and the ancients were more concerned with being wise than rational.