Began to randomly re-read Surprised by Joy. Almost at the part where Lewis goes to serve in The Great War, as it's called. It's amazing to me how much of this autobiography I had forgotten: the interesting details that occasioned his experience of Joy, the 'fagging system', the abuse and bullying he endured, the captivating descriptions of the Irish and English countryside, the jaunts, the advice he gives when going through the walking trails, the unfortunate relationship he had with his dad (though it ended well), the meeting of key friends, the bittersweet ups and downs of his relationship with Warnie (his brother), the life-changing encounters with Wagner and Norse Mythology, William Morris, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and so much more.
One sentiment that stands out that I can really relate to is Lewis' confession of feigning interest in things for the sake of social acceptance (which partially lead him to be a prig, or getting that 'new look', as he called it). He would fake like he didn't like the things he loved to 'fit in' with the social groups he was trying to ingratiate himself into, and would (note) deliberately downplay his natural vocabulary (which he cultivated without noticing it as a 'vocabulary' at all from the books he loved to read as a child) to 'fit in' with the way the social groups talked. When he found out that there were other people that talked like he did (effortlessly, not out of any kind of insincere affectation), and valued the things he already had a taste for (he notes that he had no idea that people valued George Bernard Shaw the way 'the Bloods' valued 'games' at Wyvern), he had a kind of shock (even though it opened the door to priggishness). He could finally be himself, even though Lewis admitted that when this academically oriented' life (in the chapter 'Fortune's Smile', I think: when he talks about the 'Epicurean Life') was completely catered to, when he had the freedom to organize his schedule to perfectly serve all his loves and interests (at one point, Lewis outlined his actual, daily schedule!), it was ultimately a selfish life, or that was his own assessment.
I finally did a video on Daniel Howard-Synder's critique of Plantinga's logical problem of evil and touched on some of the issues I was having with the concept of Intraworld plentitude. I don't have the will or the memory to recreate what I rambled on about for almost two hours.
I've had new or perhaps recurring thoughts about why it is my mind can't be bothered to be affected by paganism (pre-Christian paganism). I know the kernel of this intransigency lies somewhere in the bowels of that labyrinthine mess that lurks in the shadows of that dreadful sounding thing called Bayes' Theorem. This has always gone to reinforce a metaphor that forces its way into my imagination every single time any question resurfaces that has to do with one or another kind of threat to my belief in the Christian metaphysic. Am I storming someone else's castle or am I attempting to explain to a potential raider of my own castle why an alleged 'weak-point' is actually a non-starter because of this or that hidden trip-wire that happens to be my ever-present, always-lingering background beliefs, beliefs that my critic doesn't seem to care about, but which are all-important if his aim is to persuade me to take leave of my castle, right? If my castle, as it is, can't be stormed because of the structural integrity of the interlocking instances of dialectical fit and epistemic consistency, then, what ought my critic's goals be in conversing with me about the fine points of my castle, if not those parts of the castle that are most responsible for my perception of the 'glue' that's responsible for the aforesaid structural integrity? Once I start to zoom in on this, while recognizing that my critic's cognitive architecture is roughly the same, give or take an intellectual virtue here or there, I begin to experience a sort of vertigo, the first, inchoate glimpse into what Kierkegaard's Climacus was talking about when he made mention of the idea of 'endless approximations'. Is this the root of what Plantinga was talking about: regarding being saved from an epistemic predicament by grace, and not works (the context of that pesky Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism that it seems that everyone loves to jeer at, even though it's incredibly difficult for the more audacious to explain in detail what it is exactly that warrants the jeering)? That was vague but I'm moving on.
There is a huge lacuna in my thinking: one expressed by books like Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, or Arnold Toynbee's The Story of History, or Jean Gebser's Ever-present Origin (the table of contents itself looks like a goldmine of meaning!), or even more contemporary thinkers of this type, like Jason Reza Jorjani and John David Ebert. This is one of broad, cultural critique, world-historical analysis, analysis of the origin, development, decay, and extinction of civilizations (I guess Jared Diamond fits this category sometimes). I confess I was introduced to this type of analysis though Ebert; he was the one that directed my attention to how analyses like these are connected in certain ways to the Germans and the French of the Continental and Postmodern traditions; but in other ways, it isn't at all; Ebert is radically opposed to the Postmoderns (his nemesis is nihilism), and for the Western mythos (though he's hard to pin down because he's also enamored of Eastern mythos - or elements of it: I remember he really piqued my interest when he mentioned some Indian epic that was supposed to dwarf the epic pretentions of Homer, an idea I find intoxicatingly mysterious). There's also other domains that these islands have commerce with: notably, myth studies (particularly, Joseph Campbell) and psychoanalysis. Ebert rails against the shallowness of Jung, for example (Ebert admire's Jung's advance over Freud and Jung's skill as a psychoanalyst, but Ebert chide's Jung's scientistic approach to the Archetypes; I think he sees Jung as being too reductionistic, that they manifest themselves within particular, perennial consciousness-structures, but that they shouldn't be identified as such). But when myth studies is applied in the context of civilizational analysis, I notice that my imagination is stretched to its utmost; I find that an excessive preoccupation with strictly analytical issues in philosophy is actually extremely Procrustean and narrow. Mystical sounding (but not mystical in themselves, mind you!) utterances like those talking about the presiding gods that seem to describe motivational structures, and the cosmogonic perceptions (or conditions under which these vast, systemic structures undergo, experience, or withstand internal or external revolutionary upheavals), of any particular civilization. I'm not well-versed on this enough to be precise, but it's something along these lines: it'll involve debates whether Western Civilization is primarily Promethean or Faustian. I find this infinitely more interesting than the question of whether Quine was right in his interpretation of the Existential Quantifier (though both questions are interesting relative to the parameters of your beloved research project).
I've been thinking about Tjump's analysis of the 'the best of all possible worlds'. I have been advised by both my past experience and the testimony of others that Tjump's glibness is his worst enemy, and that it tends to cast an ugly pall over what would otherwise be a gem of an idea, or the kernel of something with ideational potential. If I understand him, the idea eerily overlaps with a similar idea I ran across in C.S. Lewis' chapter on Divine Omnipotence in The Problem of Pain (I might also add that both Tjump and Lewis share this disdain for so-called 'involuntary impositions': one could argue that Lewis takes this theme to the next level by being angry with God for creating him without his consent! - as far as I am aware, being 'thrust into existence', as I think Heidegger had said, isn't a part of what Tjump is talking about when he mentions such impositions). There may be more ingredients, but I think we can safely say that a necessary ingredient is that the best possible world has to, at least, contain no instances of involuntary impositions of 'will'. Once this ingredient is shoved into theoremhood, nothing contrary to such a theorem can hope to assail it. I can't tell the reader how many times I've heard, in response to some criticism of his theory, the riposte: well, I don't definite good and bad that way, I define it this way. This procedural force-field gives the illusion of invincibility; and so it is, in the same sense that you can't refute the invincible consistency of a lunatic regarding all the redefinitions and reasons also raised to unassailable theoremhood. These games can be played forever. The benefits are a social enclave, but what is that to those who are actual philosophers? As to actual intellectual merits, Tjump's theory is very opaque to me and sometimes I think it continues to thrive under the very cover of its vagueness. I've heard the comparison made to voluntary choices made in the context of video games. This shines a tiny light on a pitch black background, but I wonder how to compare the state just prior to choosing the video game to what the best possible world would include regarding our pre-game stage-setting, so to speak?
I'm growing tired of the narrowness of analytic philosophy. (It's a narrowness of scope combined with a pretension of universal scope.) Imagine you're in an empty room. All around you are swirling, undulating intensities (Deleuze), and over there in the corner is an opalescent density whose spatial dimensions are comparably tiny compared to other swirling intensities in other parts of the room, alighting on you, passing through you, dazzling before you, beckoning you to give them your attention. The tiny intensity has an incredibly complex structure, a structure you could get lost in and think about forever. But the structure has an upper limit regarding imaginative meaning; the imagination is satiated long before ratiocination is surfeited. That tiny intensity is analytic philosophy, I'm beginning to think.
