I came across this interesting blog post titled "how to be a metaphysical hitchhiker". The blog's tagline--An ongoing blog about what a non-theistic conception of divinity (a la Spinoza, Epicurus and Lucretius) might mean for liberal religious communities and individuals who wish to maintain a fruitful and meaningful connection with the liberal Christian tradition.
I'm not doing the post justice but here's a sub-section, better to read the whole thing. Stevens is the poet.
This obsession with the ideal over the given - of seeing the pear as the observer wills - is precisely what has led to the current ecological, economic, political and religious crises we are currently facing. It is a view of the world that must, therefore, be challenged.
However, anyone wishing effectively to challenge this view needs to adopt an unusual approach - an approach offered up in part by Wittgenstein and Stevens. For the current modern human view of Nature can only truly be challenged by the first place by accepting that it, too, is a given. To seek, in one grand revolutionary gesture, to replace wholesale the old world-view with a new would simply perpetuate the already deeply problematic human tendency to privilege the ideal over the given. Instead, what is required is to find an effective way of always working collaboratively with what is actually in front of us. Of working with pears and human-beings as we actually encounter them in the world.
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