Saturday, July 08, 2006

Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason II

I really enjoyed the interview with Jeanette Winterson this week! What a warm, articulate, funny and honest woman. What she spoke about and how she spoke were quite intriguing.

"...since the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, we have privileged reason, logos, the empirical sense, finding proofs for things, discovering things that can be touched, and tested in the universe. Absolute rationality has seemed to be the key to our advancements. And in many ways this Enlightenment, this rationality, this dependency on logic and reason, has freed us from many cruel superstitions, many nameless terrors. It also brought us technological advancements, of civilized advancements. But it's not sufficient."

"And the Greeks, for instance, who were a very rational set of people, still knew that there were two ways of arriving at truth. And it's Plato who makes the distinction between mythos and logos. That there is a mythic truth, which is an imaginative truth, and emotional truth, a way of understanding the world which is not about the facts and the figures, but which is never the less, valid. And we need to have kind of a balance. So, things need to be held in balance. And you wouldn't want to use mythic truth to tell you how to mend your washing machine, for instance."


The rapper/playwright Will Power was also interviewed, primarily about his hip-hop version of Aeschylus' play, Seven Against Thebes, the continuing story of Oedipus' sons. Once again, it was the first interview, with Jeanette, that really got to me.

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