Your Moment of Zen: Merton on Descartes
June 30th, 2008
The taste for Zen in the West is in part a healthy reaction of people exasperated with the heritage of four centuries of Cartesianism: the reification of concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization. Descartes made a fetish out of the mirror in which the self finds itself. Zen shatters it.
– Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 285.
Comments? Thoughts? Is Merton correct?
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