Saturday, March 05, 2011

Sceptic, Saint, Revolutionary

Reason and love may be fancifully described as the two wings of the human spirit. Flight is not possible with one wing alone. With love and no reason the saint becomes amiably ineffective and superstitious. With reason and no love the sceptic becomes a clever cynic. The perfect man would be a sceptical saint. And in our day he would be also a revolutionary.

Olaf Stapledon, Saints and Revolutionaries, Chapter 3. Brought to mind by John Wright's discussion of Darkness and Light, which is essentially the science fiction version of the nonfiction Saints and Revolutionaries. Stapledon, of course, had a doctorate in philosophy, and was a philosophy lecturer for a time; his philosophical works, like his science fiction, consist of striking passages and arguments knit together with stretches of the odd and even bizarre. Perhaps at some point I'll go through and discuss some of his philosophical works here.