On Writing (and thus on Wizardry)

Sam Rocha (pictured above, and the author of A Primer for Philosophy and Education and creator of Late to Love, an album inspired by Augustine) has been interviewing the bloggers in Patheos’s Catholic channel about the method and madness of their writing, and, this week, it was my turn.  If you head over chez lui, you can check out our conversation, which includes references to So You Want to be a Wizard and the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.

Here’s a teaser:

INTERVIEWER

Writing, to me, is an interesting artifact of our thoughts. What do you think about thinking of writing as a thinking fossil?

LEAH LIBRESCO

I think it’s a little more active than that. The act of writing forces us to make our thoughts more concrete, more specific, and to examine what about them is compelling, how to convey it outside our ideolect, etc. So in addition to just recording the thought we were having (as some kind of magic, materialist brain photo would) it alters it, links it to more concepts, makes it stickier and more available for new connections.

 

[…]

 

INTERVIEWER
That one, not technically related to religion, shift, cleared the way for other changes.
So what do you make of postmodern Catholics or personalists (cousin’s of existentialists) or others who may not square philosophically with deontogical-leaning virtue ethics? The reason I ask this is because I know people who have been made Christian by Nietzsche, and I often ask them the converse side of these questions.

LEAH LIBRESCO
Well, if Catholicism is the fullness of truth, you can picture it kind of as a global minimum in a big rumpled rug of all philosophical beliefs. (In this schema, increased height represents increased strain/distance from objective reality). I understand(ish) the path from the foothills where I grew up to that valley, but I don’t necessarily grok how other people wound up there. That’s why my conversion is only semi-helpful or interesting to others. It’s a map from the foothills of neo-Platonism and deontology to Catholicism, but is completely useless if you’re trying to find a route along the Nieztchean Overridge.

Blessed Ramon Llull tried to make a general almanac. He has this big project that was basically a philosophical choose your own adventure book where you answered questions about your beliefs, flipped to the corresponding pages, and then the book would try to lead you, Socratically, to Catholicism.

 

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