Thursday, 4 January 2018

Intellect And Life

See recent posts. After graduating, should I have become a life-long academic? No. I would have been an ivory tower intellectual with no concrete or practical experiences to philosophize about. I needed to complete my education by experiencing unemployment and different kinds of work. Only by working as a Religious Education Teacher in a school did I read enough Biblical commentaries to form an opinion on the origins of Christianity. See here. In my view, understanding of society, of consciousness and of our received religious tradition are essential and of inherent value quite apart from any practical applications. Fortunately, reading, rereading and studying the works of Poul Anderson is an enjoyable way to address all of these issues.

1 comment:

S.M. Stirling said...

Yup, you need to get out into the real world to have something to write -about-, otherwise you can get trapped in a self-referential puzzle palace of words. I've often thought that the "linguistic turn" in university culture owes a good deal to the prevalence of persons there who've never been hungry or physically threatened.