Tareva - Week 12

In class on Monday we discussed passages from Berry's book "A Continuous Harmony." I am a Wendell Berry fan, almost for the exact same reasons that I am a Gary Snyder fan. I enjoy when texts are so well written that readers feel rewarded by the opportunity to read those books. Berry's writings are an example of those books that evoke positive, smart emotions, that makes one think for themself. Berry's writing style forces readers to think outside of the box and look at aspects of life from a standpoint that would otherwise be ignored.

The discussion of Berry's text led our class into talking about Sigmund Freud. The idea was that Freud claimed that religion is a delusion. Freud believed that religion is something that humans created to give ourselves comfort in troubling times when we have no control over what is going on around us, or within us. Freud also made the claim that we provided the concept of God in an attempt to create a being of such power but with human characteristics (personified God/Christ). Freud believed that humans personified God so that we could feel like we had means of communicating with this higher power. Freud claimed that humans knew that the concept of God would connote sanctified, Holy notions, thus we needed means of being able to connect with something so powerful.

Within the parameters of the class discussion a classmate introduced the idea of "what does it matter?" to the Berry/Freud conversation. The student was asserting that it does not matter if things in life are delusions, fiction, the actual, or the truth. Her claim was that it does not matter if people's delusions are actually real because they claim the label of "real" once they become real to the person experiencing the delusion. There is some truth in this claim. The fact of the matter is, if a delusion has made itself real to the person experiencing it, then that "delusion" becomes reality to that person. Therefore, it shouldn't matter if everyone else thinks it a delusion, and only a delusion. Although there is some validity in this claim, I think it morally wrong to ignore the need for questioning reality. My feelings are that questioning delusions, reality, and the abstract are rooted in the nature of philosophy as a whole. To assert that things are the way they are and that's just it seems outrageous to the philosophy discipline. What would happen to the world if humans no longer desired to know if things are real or fake. We would not question anything! There would be no difference between fantasy and reality if we chose to no longer distinguish the two.

Berry encourages us all to be more conscious of our interactive relationship with nature.