A surprise from Ana

     Yesterday I went to the lake with Ana.   The sun had set.   As we drove into the parking lot Ana said, "When I was in Casa Asistencia (the orphanage) I drew a picture one day. The face was like your face."  Wow! I thought.  She had a picture in her mind of her Daddy to be, and it resembled me.  

     The day prior we were enjoying an evening with cousins Brian and Cyndi.  I had been thinking in the past weeks about their family.   The family that Brian and Cyndi raised  seems  model.  Brian mentioned tht one on one time with each of his kids was  key for him in his fathering.  Cyndi gave another tip to their success that stuck with me. She said that she talks to her kids all day long. Out of those talks she gleams "nuggets of gold." 

These nuggets were windows into her children's hearts.   I thought about that as I rode with Anna. God was gracious and gave me a big "nugget."  At the beach I asked Anna, who loves to draw, to draw me a picture of the beach.  Before she started I asked her,"what do you feel looking at the water?"  She said, "I feel like, no fear....like the waves are covering me and protecting me."  Wow! Another nugget?  Did she feel protected with me?  Whether it was me or just the water, I enjoyed the thought and the moment.  I really like being her Daddy. 

Bottom line is always- EPISTEMOLOGY

 

    I (Chris) really like how J. P. Moreland brings a balance to  mind renewal, soul transformation, and power in the Spirit, in his book Kingdom Triangle. In his comments about Brian McLaren  the issue again is about epistemology. 

   The real battle in Mexico is also with the epistemology of animism in Tenancingo, (though it appears like the rest of Mexico as being a third world western city) and Kingdom truth, which we need to contextualize to the region. 

Check out John Piippo's blog entry on Moreland and McClaren... 

Here is Piippo's entry...

J.P. Moreland, in his excellent book Kingdom Triangle, critiques the “Emerging church” which, he says, “appears to have hitched its wagon to postmodernism in a way that is fraught with difficulties seldom appreciated.” (67)

Moreland writes: “I do not wish to be harsh or inappropriately critical of my brothers and sisters who are part of the Emerging church. There is much good in the problems they are bringing to the surface and in some of the solutions they are offering. For now, I simply register my concern about what I believe is their unnecessary association with postmodern language.”

What, for Moreland, are his main objections to postmodernism (which he admits “is a variegated movement with many stripes”)? Postmodernism:

Rejects objective truth construed as a correspondence with reality

Rejects the rational objectivity of reason

Rejects the reality of simply seeing, and the human ability to be aware of and know reality directly, unmediated by “conceptual schemes,” language, or their surrogates. (67)

Moreland holds to a correspondence theory of truth. Which means: “In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More generally, truth obtains when a truth bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth maker.” “Truth bearers” are what, in logic, are called “propositions” or “statements.” A “truth maker” is what makes a proposition or statement true. Moreland, in his philosophical work, writes much to explain the correspondence theory and argue for its plausibility. In Kingdom Triangle, see especially pp. 80-85.

Moreland especially looks at, among others, Emerging church leader Brian McLaren. For McLaren, absolute truth-claims cannot be made. Moreland quotes McLaren: “I think that most Christians grossly misunderstand the philosophical baggage associated with terms like ‘absolute’ or ‘objective’ (linked to foundationalism and the myth of neutrality)… Similarly, arguments that pit absolutism versus relativism, and objectivism versus subjectivism, prove meaningless or absurd to postmodern people.” (78)

McLaren-ist postmodern epistemology seems to say that “no one approaches life in a totally objective way without bias. Thus, objectivity is impossible, and observations, beliefs, and entire narratives are theory-laden. There is no neutral standpoint from which to approach the world… Knowledge is a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures, not a justified, truthful representation of reality by one’s mental states.”

In this regard Moreland’s manifesto pleads that Jesus-followers reclaim the Christian mind.

I like the way Moreland develops this in Kingdom Triangle. I find him loving and gracious, and concerned. McLaren’s postmodern rejection of objective or absolute truth is confused in two ways. (see p. 83 ff.) This section of Moreland deservers to be studied. Moreland himself is working through these things. One can see, on reading him, that he is growing in his understanding of the real issues that underlie the discussion.

Brian McLaren, in his (to me) wonderful and challenging book Everything Must Change, responds to the Moreland-type criticisms. McLaren, like Moreland, focuses on Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

McLaren is concerned in learning what the message of Jesus is and applying it here on earth. He seems especially disdainful of Christians who overspend time debating “religious esoterica.” (20) Yet he does spend some time responding to the issue of “postmodernism.”

McLaren argues that philosophers and theologians whose epistemologies concluded that one could have absolute, certain knowledge, contributed to a cultural confidence that was arrogant and “excessive.” While this may be true, surely it does not follow that one cannot have certain, objective truth about things. What follows, at most, is that one in possession of such truth should be careful so one’s confidence does not become “a dangerous, malignant confidence.” And this cuts both ways. Surely one could become excessively arrogant as regards any theory of knowledge that one believes is true.

McLaren argues that the opposite of “postmodern” is not best understood as “modern,” but as “postcolonial.” “Postmodern” is one side of the coin, “postcolonial” the other. (44)

McLaren cites non-Eurocentric Christian leaders who don’t “focus on philosophical questions of truth and epistemology, but rather on social questions of justice, which are ultimately questions about the moral uses of power.”

Here, to me, is the heart of McLaren’s thinking: “This integration of postmodern and postcolonial concerns – for both justice and truth, for both a proper confidence and a proper use of power – made it possible for me to turn from a set on intramural arguments (which had preoccupied me for several years) to the more global exploration articulated in my two preoccupying questions: ‘What are the biggest problems in the world today?’ and ‘What do the life and teaching of Jesus have to say about these global problems.’” (45)

I very much like what both Moreland and McLaren are writing about, and how their thinking is developing. Moreland’s new emphasis on the urgent need to reclaim the demonstrative power-acts of Jesus and the Kingdom is welcome (McLaren gives a few sentences in acknowledgement to this in his The Secret Message of Jesus. A such, his work is excellent but imbalanced). And Moreland’s Dallas Willard-like call to reclaim the human soul is important. McLaren’s emphasis on the kingdom of God, here, now (both future and present), is important, and Moreland would agree. McLaren’s great fear that a correspondence theory of truth has and yet could create an epistemological hyperconfidence can be balanced by a serious call to a devout and holy life.

I like what McLaren writes in a footnote. “Conservative critics of postmodernism – including many critics of my work – rightly realize that one can so successfully undermine a culture’s excessive confidence that it eventually lacks sufficient confidence… [On the other hand] we have many modernist defenders backing away from the dangers of relativism and nihilism, only to fall backward into an immoral defense of cultural chauvinism, colonialism, and empire. One hopes we can all work together in more balanced, both-and ways in the future.” (303, fn. 3)

I am now thinking of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

I’d like to see J.P. Moreland and Brian McLaren come together and advance God’s Kingdom on earth together. I think it will happen soon...

Posted by John Piippo at 5:06 PM 1 comments 

by J. P. Moreland  

Finite conscious minds such as the ones we possess provide evidence of a Divine Mind as their creator. If we limit our worldview options to theism (the belief that there is a personal God) and naturalism (the belief that the physical, material world is all there is), it is hard to see how human minds could result from the rearrangement of brute matter. It is much easier to see how a Conscious Being could produce the finite conscious minds we possess.1

In my last article, I explained why evolutionary theory enjoys a level of intellectual acceptance that goes far beyond what the evidence warrants. In this article, I will argue that, even if evolutionary theory is someday able to adequately explain the origins of the human brain, it will remain fundamentally unable to explain the existence of the human mind. As we shall see, human consciousness is a serious threat to the plausibility of evolutionary theory.

The nonphysical, immaterial nature of mind

I will refer to states of mind, or states of consciousness, as “mental states.” Common mental states include sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires and volitions.2

Mental states may be caused by physical states, and physical states may be caused by mental states. A feeling of pain (mental state) may be caused by being stuck with a pin (physical state), and one’s arm going up (physical state) may be caused by an intention to vote (mental state). But just because A causes B, that does not mean that A is the same thing as B! Fire causes smoke, but fire is not smoke itself. Being stuck by a pin causes pain, but being stuck by a pin is not pain itself. A desire to vote causes one’s arm to go up, but that desire is different than the arm’s going up. The fact that a state of one’s mind can affect physical states and the fact that physical states can affect the state of one’s mind do not mean that corresponding mental and physical states are identical to each other. In fact, they are fundamentally different.

We know that mental states are in no sense physical (i.e. part of the physical, material world) because they possess four features not owned by physical states.

First, there is a raw qualitative feel — a “what it is like to have it” — to a mental state. For example, pain hurts. A physical state may cause pain, but the physical state itself can be completely described in the vocabulary of physics and chemistry, or in the commonsense vocabulary of the physical world. Being hurtful, however, is not describable in the vocabulary of any of these.

Second, many mental states have intentionality — “ofness” or “aboutness” — which is directed towards an object. A thought, for instance, is about the moon. But no physical state is about anything. The brain is a physical object, but a brain state cannot be about the moon any more than a rock or a cloud can be about the moon. Only a state of mind can be about the moon.

Third, mental states are internal, private and immediately accessible to the subject having them. A scientist can know more about my brain than I do. But I have direct knowledge of my mind which is not available to anyone else.

Fourth, mental states fail to have crucial features that characterize physical states. Unlike physical states, they have no spatial extension (it doesn’t make sense to ask how tall or wide someone’s thoughts are) and they have no location either (which is why it doesn’t make sense to ask where someone’s thoughts are). In general, mental states cannot be described using physical language.

The inability of evolutionary theory to explain the existence of mind

Given that mental states (states of mind) are immaterial and not physical, there are at least two reasons why evolutionary theory cannot explain their existence.

Something from nothing: According to evolutionary theory, before consciousness appeared, the universe contained nothing but matter and energy. The naturalistic story of the cosmos’ evolution involves the rearrangement of the atomic parts of this matter into increasingly more complex structures according to natural law. Matter is brute mechanical, physical stuff. Consciousness, however, is immaterial and nonphysical. Physical reactions do not seem capable of generating consciousness. Some say the physical reactions that occur in the brain are capable of producing consciousness, yet brains seem too similar to other parts of the body (both brains and bodies are collections of cells totally describable in physical terms). How can like causes produce radically different effects? Though evolutionary theory can handle the appearance of the physical brain, the appearance of the nonphysical mind is utterly unpredictable and inexplicable. Thus the emergence of minds and consciousness seems to be a case of getting something from nothing.

The inadequacy of evolutionary explanations: Naturalists claim that evolutionary explanations can be offered for the appearance of all organisms and their parts. In principle, an evolutionary account could be given for increasingly complex physical structures that constitute different organisms. One of the driving forces behind Charles Darwin’s exposition of evolution was the belief that all mental phenomena could be explained as features of physical objects. However, if minds and consciousness exist, they would be beyond the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory, and this would threaten the theory’s plausibility.

Of course, theists think that minds and consciousness do, in fact, exist. But because naturalistic forms of evolution have proven incapable of explaining minds and consciousness, their existence has been rejected by naturalists.

The naturalist’s question begging rejection of mind

According to naturalist Paul Churchland:

    The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. … If this is the correct account of our origins, then there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances or properties [such as minds and mental states] into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact.3

Here, Churchland claims that, since we are merely the result of an entirely physical process (that of evolutionary theory), which works on wholly physical materials, we are wholly physical beings. But if, by saying “there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves,” Churchland is saying that naturalistic evolutionary theory can adequately explain the nature of man, his argument clearly begs the question.4 This can be seen in the following outline of Churchland’s argument:

(1) If we are merely the result of naturalistic, evolutionary processes, we are wholly physical beings.

(2) We are merely the result of naturalistic, evolutionary processes.

(3) Therefore, we are wholly physical beings.

Naturalists like Churchland accept premise (2). But why should we accept it? Those who think consciousness and mind are real do not. They argue:

(4) If we are merely the result of naturalistic, evolutionary processes, then we are wholly physical beings.

(5) We possess nonphysical conscious minds, so we are not wholly physical beings.

(6) Therefore, we are not merely the result of naturalistic, evolutionary processes.

Naturalists argue for (3) on the basis of (2), but (5) and (6) show us that the truth of (2) assumes the truth of (3). Put another way, nobody will not think that (2) is true unless they already think that (3) is true — but (3) is exactly the point in question. The naturalist’s argument assumes the very thing it’s trying to prove.

As we saw above, the existence of minds and consciousness would threaten evolutionary theory’s plausibility. The naturalistic explanation of the nature of man, however, begs the question by simply assuming that we are wholly physical beings. It gives us no reason to think that minds and consciousness do not exist.

The real issue, then, is the evidence for and against the immaterial, nonphysical nature of minds and consciousness. If the evidence is good, then we should embrace the idea that mental states and physical states are essentially different and that evolutionary theory cannot account for the former. But we have seen that the evidence is good. Mental states possess four features not owned by physical states, and evolutionary theory seems fundamentally incapable of explaining the existence of mental states. This means not only that the evolutionary argument fails but also that there will never be a complete naturalistic account of the nature and origin of human consciousness.

It will not do to claim that consciousness simply “emerged” from matter when it reached a certain level of complexity because “emergence” is merely a label for (rather than an explanation of) the phenomena being explained. Since we are made in God’s image, there should be something about us that can’t be adequately explained without postulating God’s existence. And that is the case with mind and consciousness. Their reality supports the falsity of naturalism and the truth of theism.

1 Note from the editor: Alongside this article, I highly recommend J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae’s Body and Soul (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000).

2 This argument will assume a commonsense understanding of sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires and volitions. For those unclear on these terms:

    * A sensation is a state of awareness or sentience, a mode of consciousness — for example, a conscious awareness of sound, color, or pain. Some sensations are experiences of things outside me like a tree or table. Others are awarenesses of other states within me like pains or itches. Emotions are types of sensations.

    * A thought is a mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence. A thought is the mental content of a statement. Some thoughts logically entail other thoughts. For example “All dogs are mammals” entails “This dog is a mammal.” If the former is true, the latter must be true. Some thoughts don’t entail other thoughts, but merely provide evidence for them. For example, certain thoughts about evidence in a court case provide evidence for the thought that a person is guilty — “He said he would kill him” provides evidence for the thought “He is the murderer.”

    * A belief is a person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are. If a person has a belief (e.g., someone believes that it is raining), then that belief serves as the basis for the person’s tendency or readiness to act as if the thing believed were really so (e.g., she gets an umbrella). At any given time, one can have many beliefs that are not currently being contemplated.

    * A desire is a certain inclination to do, have, or experience certain things. Desires are either conscious or such that they can be made conscious through certain activities, for example, through therapy.

    * An volition is a act of will or choice, an exercise of power, an endeavoring to do a certain thing, usually for the sake of some purpose or end.

3 Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), p. 21.

4 An argument begs the question if it assumes the truth of the very thing it’s trying to prove. For example, if I argue “Paul doesn’t lie. … I know he doesn’t lie because he told me so,” I have begged the question. Paul’s telling me that he doesn’t lie is only a reason to conclude that he doesn’t if I already assume it’s true that Paul doesn’t lie. 

Chris's loss of sight

so here is the low down on the loss of sight.....


schemic optic neuropathy is damage of the optic nerve caused by a blockage of its blood supply.

Blockage can occur with or without inflammation of the arteries (typically in association with a disorder called temporal arteritis)
Vision may suddenly deteriorate.
People with temporal arteritis may have pain when combing their hair and when chewing, generalized muscle aches and pains, fatigue, or a combination.
Blood tests and sometimes removal of a piece of the artery (biopsy) are done to diagnose temporal arteritis.
Temporal arteritis is treated with corticosteroids.
Causes
Blockage of the blood supply to the part of the optic nerve within the eye can lead to impaired function of optic nerve cells. Two types can occur: nonarteritic and arteritic.

Nonarteritic ischemic (WHAT I, CHRIS, HAS) optic neuropathy usually occurs in people older than 50. Risk factors include high blood pressure, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. Rarely, it occurs in younger people with severe migraines. Arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy usually occurs in people older than 70. The blood supply to the optic nerve is blocked due to inflammation of the arteries (arteritis), most notably temporal arteritis (giant cell arteritis—see Vasculitic Disorders: Giant Cell Arteritis).

Symptoms
Loss of vision may be rapid (over minutes, hours, or sometimes days). Depending on the cause, vision may be impaired in one or both eyes. Vision in the involved eye or eyes can range from almost normal to complete blindness. A small area of vision loss at the center of the visual field slowly enlarges and can progress to complete blindness. People with temporal arteritis tend to be older, and their loss of vision tends to be more severe. They may have pain when they chew, muscle aches and pains, and pain when they comb their hair.

About 40% of people with nonarteritic ischemic optic neuropathy spontaneously improve over time. In this condition, repeat episodes in the same eye are extremely rare. Involvement of the other eye is estimated to occur in about 20% of affected people over the next 5 years.

In people with arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy caused by temporal arteritis, loss of vision in the other eye occurs in 25 to 50% of people within days to weeks if treatment is not started.

Diagnosis
Diagnosis involves examination of the back of the eyes with a viewing instrument (ophthalmoscope). Determining the cause involves determining whether the person has any of the disorders known to be risk factors.

If temporal arteritis is suspected as a cause, blood tests and removal and examination of a temporal artery tissue sample under a microscope (biopsy) may be done to confirm the diagnosis. If a person has no symptoms of temporal arteritis, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) of the brain may be done to make sure the optic nerve is not being compressed by a tumor.

Treatment
In people with nonarteritic ischemic optic neuropathy, treatment involves controlling blood pressure, diabetes, and other factors that affect the blood supply to the optic nerve. In people with arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy caused by temporal arteritis, high doses of corticosteroids are given to prevent loss of vision in the other eye. The role of aspirin


in preventing involvement of the other eye is being investigated, although at this time there is no evidence to support its use.

Our lives are gifts that have been presented to us, without our consent or request. I know not the full purpose of that journey, but the condition of our common fate is the same for each of us. My ultimate goal has never been to be happy. Happiness is not something to avoid, but it is not a valid goal in itself. Evil is the present state of this world, and our existence is condemned to struggle against those 'Principalities of Darkness'. Our firm desire should be that justice and the rule of our supreme creator will become our reward, because of His love for each of us. So we seek to know more of those Truths that exist, and have been revealed to us. Yes, that is a belief; not reached solely through reason. Its a leap that each can make if you ask to enter.

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.
While humans are inherently reflective and self-conscious beings, to become a true self one must not only be conscious of the self but also be conscious of being aligned with a higher purpose, vis God's plan for the Self. When one either denies this Self or the power that creates and sustains this Self, one is in despair.

There are three kinds of despair presented in the book: being unconscious in Despair of having a Self, not wanting in Despair to be Oneself, and wanting in Despair to be Oneself. The first of these is described as "inauthentic despair," because this despair is born out of ignorance. In this state one is unaware that one has a self separate from its finite reality. One does not realise that there is a God, and accepts finitude because one is unaware of possibility of being more inherent in Selfhood. The second type of despair is refusing to accept the Self outside of immediacy; only defining the self by immediate, finite terms. This is the state in which one realises that one has a self, but wishes to lose this painful awareness by arranging one's finite life so as to make the realisation unnecessary. This stage is loosely comparable to Sartre's bad faith. The third type is awareness of the Self but refusal to submit to the will of God. In this stage, one accepts the eternal and may or may not acknowledge the creator, but refuses to accept an aspect of the Self that one in reality is, that is to say, the Self that one has been created to be. To not be in despair is to have reconciled the finite with the infinite, to exist in awareness of one's own self and of God. Specifically, Kierkegaard defines the opposite of despair as faith, which he describes by the following: "In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it."

The Sickness Unto Death has strong Existentialist themes. For example, the concept of the finite and infinite parts of the human self translate to the concepts of 'facticity' and 'transcendence' in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Kierkegaard's thesis is, of course, in other ways profoundly different from Sartre, most obviously because of Kierkegaard's belief that only religious faith can save the soul from Despair. This particular brand of Existentialism is often called Christian Existentialism.

Cupitt begins by asserting that theological realism has been gradually demythologized since the Enlightenment. He claims that the increasing human consciousness of the social construction of reality has led to the impossibility of maintaining such a realism. Given that meaning is pure social construction, theological realism is rendered a dead option. Yet Christian ethics (if not other ethical systems as well) is still stated in the 'residually-theological' terms of a platonic-realist framework.2

Cupitt asserts that "all modern philosophies of language" agree that the world is a human creation, the human world a communication network in and by language.3 He consistently fleshes out this claim with reference to structuralist and post-structuralist ideas, even remarking that French structuralism is much the most advanced tradition in carrying the ideal of 'world-as-language' to its utmost conclusions.4 Thus he cites structuralist theories of language and meaning-creation as furnishing the description and effecting the culminating result of the process of demythologizing realism.

Structuralism insists on the social construction of meaning - that there is no reality beyond what is said in language. The Saussurian term langue refers to the total linguistic framework within which utterances take place. Language does not express or point to an external reality; it actually forms this reality. Different linguistic constructions thus name and hence 'create' a different reality.

How long does it take to plant a church? Church Planting or Meaning Planting?

Is there meaning to a nation with such a violent beginning? Why protudes every conversation.
A short man amidst giants. A woman with one are on an elevator with two armed women. A child with three fingers playing cards with those with a full hands. Shame is the desease that seems incurable. USA, Europe, western TV is the norm. Anything less is shameful and to be dispised. So, being dark skinned, is a plague for most. Many seek a whiter skinned woman or man to marry. Just to escape the shame.
As we plant the "church" we are planting a meaning, we are planting a way of seeing life through different eyes.
Carl Rogers speaks of .
"it is possible to explain a person to himself, to prescribe steps which should lead him forward, to train him in knowledge about a more satisfying mode of life. But such methods are, in my experience, futile and inconsequential. The most they can accomplish is some temporary change, which soon disappears, leaving th eindividual more than ever convinced of his inadequacy.
The failure of any such approach through th intellect has forced me to recognize that change appears to come about through experience ina a relatioship."

Soren Kierdegard points out that the the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose "to be another than himself."

This is seen in the Novel....
In her Novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf explores the different ways in which individuals search for and create meaning in their own experience. She strives to express how individuals order their perceptions into a coherent understanding of life. This endeavor becomes particularly important in a world in which life no longer has any inherent meaning. Darwin's theory of evolution, published in 1859 in The Origin of Species, challenged the then universal belief that human life was divinely inspired and, as such, intrinsically significant. Each of the three main characters has a different approach to establishing the worth of his or her life. Mr. -Ramsay represents an intellectual approach; as a metaphysical phil-osopher, he relies on his work to secure his reputation. Mrs. -Ramsay, devoted to family, friends, and the sanctity of social order, relies on her emotions rather than her mind to lend lasting meaning to her experiences. Lily, hoping to capture and preserve the truth of a single instant on canvas, uses her art.

Unlike Nietzsche who claimed his own authorship, Woolf gives it to others. It’s the others that sculpt us The Self can only go as far as the others allow. They elongate or constrict us. James’s spirits are high when his mother predicts a trip to the lighthouse, and they are crushed when Mr. Ramsey says it won’t happen. Charles Tansley “revives” when Mrs. Ramsey tells him a confidence. He needs others to take notice of him in order to BE. There is no division between self and others, they permeate us. The self is not autonomous. Minta knows she is beautiful only by the reaction of others.

In solitude .Mrs. Ramsey finds that “it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep.” Mr. Ramsey cannot suffer in silence. He needs others to witness his misery. “Alone, perished,” Lily Briscoe hears him saying. Unlike Emerson, who looks to transcend the self through nature, with Woolf it is the others that help us escape from the self. In “To the Lighthouse,” we find other exits from us. Daydreaming for Mrs. Ramsey, reading Scott, for Mr. Ramsey.
“What does it all mean?," the characters ask. Woolf seems to be present in that question. We left the self with Nietzsche, being “like a lake that ceasing to permit itself to flow off will form a dam that will rise higher and higher.” With Woolf it flows. But to flow it must have a direction: to marriage, to the letter Z, to a dissertation… to the lighthouse. None of the characters will make it, at least, not as they planned, but it is their purposes that make them BE. They look for a center, and flow towards it. Woolf also begins to take action in the last part of the book.

In “The Lighthouse,” Woolf converges with Lily Briscoe, who finds that a brush is “the only dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos.” Like Nietzsche, she finds in art the best answer to life. Woolf captures her center with words. At first, her mother is the center. All the characters gravitate around her. In this petrified moment, Mrs. Ramsey represents everything she must’ve been to Woolf. She traps her mother with her pen. “To the Lighthouse” is a moment stolen from eternity.

Later, like Lily, she must change the center. Woolf moves it from Mrs. Ramsey, to herself. She finally finds her own center, her own voice. As an artist she traps the grain of sand while it is still dry before the wave of life strikes it one afternoon in September. Just a few hours to catch the self at the moment of being. An elusive vision, a mirage, but it is hers forever.
sensed a pairing of "feminine" and "masculine" thinking in this book. The whole style, the connectivity, the flowing thoughts, the inexpressable thoughts, the allusions, the metaphors, all helped draw out the directness and baseness of Mr. Ramsay and other men in the novel, for example, the shocking punch Woolf made with this single- paragraph chapter:

[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]

I'm not sure Woolf wants to say which way of looking at the world is better, she simply want to draw the two approaches to extremes in Mr. Ramsay and the men on one side with the "masculine" perspective, and especially Lily and Mrs. Ramsay and the structure and perspective of the novel itself on the other side with the "feminine" outlook.

I enjoyed Woolf's skill of description in this novel. She has a talent for using metaphors and analogies, and can capture and minutely

describe events that ordinarily just pass through your mind in fleeting thoughts:

They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.

But his father did not rouse himself. He only raised his right hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his knee again as if he were conducting some secret symphony.

He read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single path; and somethimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the thicket, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at thim, a bramble blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page after page.