Dubious wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 2:56 am
henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 12:28 am
why not kill it?
if it's not threatening you, and you aren't hungry, the question is:
why kill it?
...absolutely! Put another way - more in Nick's context - why not respect the life force which is as much in other creature as it is in ours if not threatened by it. Snakes are actually extremely valuable creatures in keeping rodents under control. Every farmer knows that! Only the upright rodent would seek to exterminate them without knowing what they're doing! If we were aware of how closely we resemble rat thinking, it would make us extremely uncomfortable realizing that in a number of ways we're really not all that different. It's said that familiarity breeds contempt.
Very true. Rat thinking or animal reason is pragmatic. It is only concerned with how we have become conditioned to feel now. Whether we kill or cure depends on conditioned feelings. Is man capable of more than rat reason? John Uebersax sums up the question:
The word 'reason' as used today is used ambiguous in its meaning. It may denote either of two mental faculties: a lower reason associated with discursive, linear thinking, and a higher reason associated with direct apprehension of first principles of mathematics and logic, and possibly also of moral and religious truths. These two faculties may be provisionally named Reason (higher reason) and rationality (lower reason). Common language and personal experience supply evidence of these being distinct faculties. So does classical philosophical literature, the locus classicus being Plato's Divided Line analogy. The effect of currently using a single word to denote both faculties not only produces confusion, but has had the effect of decreasing personal and cultural awareness of the higher faculty, Reason. Loss of a sense of Reason has arguably contributed to various psychological, social, moral, and spiritual problems of the modern age. This issue was also a central concern of 19th century Transcendentalists, who reacted to the radical empiricism of Locke. It would be advantageous to adopt consistent terms that make explicit a distinction between higher and lower reason. One possibility is to re-introduce the Greek philosophical terms nous and dianoia for the higher and lower reason, respectively. This discussion has certain parallels with the recent theories of McGilchrist (2009) concerning the increasingly left-brain hemisphere orientation of human culture.
Christian reason as opposed to Christendom has higher reason as its goal: to experience
direct apprehension of first principles of mathematics and logic, and possibly also of moral and religious truths. In other words the animal mind limited to animal reason is incapable of experiencing direct apprehension of higher truths In which life exists as a higher whole.
Unfortunately those capable of higher reason and guided by it are becoming less and less due to enchantment with the results of technology. The results of this loss doesn't lead to a pleasant perspective.
