From Malone Vandam:I was looking in on a blog thread today — I won’t say where — and it was plain to me that reason alone could not set this disorder right. The alphabet of reason, to turn a phrase, has been burned behind it, and the culture is at ‘z’ with the first twenty-five letters wiped out, destroyed.
I depart from Billy [Beck], and radically so, in my belief that at the deepest point of this metaphysical morass is a crisis in faith amidst the ruins of the Church.--MVD
ReplyDeleteMalone Vandam needs to recognize that the problem, in spite of what Ayn Rand has claimed, did not begin with Kantian epistemological dualism. Church father Thomas Aquinas was first to throw open the door to irrationalism and despair when he dichotomized faith and reason.
In every dualism one element becomes “the evil god”. Since it is impossible to function without an ultimate belief system (i.e., faith in a transcendent order), reason was dethroned and irrationalism erected in its place. For an excellent historical analysis of this phenomenon, see Francis Schaeffer's nifty little monograph “Escape from Reason”.
As he so eloquently argues, we must abandon our rationalism to regain our rationality.
MALTHUS