November 3, 2005
-
Bond
USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:
“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”
From Log24, July 18, 2003: The use of the word “idea” in my
entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to
an
occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set
of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is
quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor:“That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under
is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength
when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an ‘Idea’ is. While Frost
attempts to give Mark a ‘training in objectivity’ that will destroy in
him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a
way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers
what it means to under-stand.‘He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had
always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head.
But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely
filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered
up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of
himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he
could cling to.’This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom,
where
opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way
we understand argument.”– “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert
Meilaender, First Things, November 1994The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism
can,
it seems, have life-and-death consequences. I prefer Plato’s
realism,
with its “ideas,” such as the idea of seven-ness. A reductio
ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism:“A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim
which the
platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences
such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….”The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives,
dangerously stupid.The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was007.
Related material:
Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs
