Doubting my Motives

First time I've had five minutes to post in...well, weeks.

---

I just got finished reading a short book called A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning by James V. Schall, SJ. It's an excellent little book, full of short, digestible insights like these:

• Just because someone is smart does not mean he is wise. Much of the serious disorder in the world can usually be traced back to some intellectual...
• Reasons for the difficulty of learning (include) the baffling multiplicity of useless questions and arguments...
• Thus, practically speaking, we encounter the greatest minds among those no longer alive, and the way we encounter such minds is to read their books carefully--which today often means taking a commonsense approach on those contemporary theories that tell us we can find no truth in a text.

Schall quotes the philosopher Etienne Gilson in the preface: there are things and I can know them. Schall's weighty project in this short essay is to re-establish a commonsense link between theory and the world of things. He argues against reading all of the great books (this is a recipe for confusion), but passionately for finding the great books that make sense of our human experience, and reading them over and over again.

Learning is valuable only insofar as it helps us to function more fully in the world. By this I do not mean (nor, I hazard, does Schall) that everything should be weighed on the scales of production and instrumental rationality. What I mean is that theorists and intellectuals who seek only to disassemble what is known and to unshackle our beliefs from our actions are not to be trusted.

Schall's most fascinating paraphrase is that of Chesterton: humility is displaced; it is thought to be located in the intellect where it does not belong, whereas it is a virtue of the will, an awareness of our own tendencies to pride. We should not doubt our minds but our motives. The condition of not knowing should not lead us to a further skepticism but a more intense search for truth.

The Occamist in me likes this, but the Calvinist is wary. Francis Schaeffer argued that the beginning of the end for Western Rationalism was Aquinas, someone Schall (a Roman Catholic) affectionately references in the book. Aquinas believed very much in the continued rationality of man, even after the Fall. His moral compass failed, but not his mind. But for Schaeffer and many others, this is insufficient to explain the pervasive nature of sin.

Even Solomon seemed to agree that sin affects the mind: see my post Insane Hearts.

What then? Do we doubt our minds? Our motives? Perhaps both?

Comments

[David Balzer]

Doubt both. One thing I've heard about how the fall affects our minds is that our minds are like a saw. It may still have a fairly sharp blade, although that's probably affected by the fall as well, but it's AIMED in the WRONG direction. I think this is helpful, but maybe I should doubt my thoughts.