What's the Big Idea?

File under bad news / good news:

Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.

Okay, with this in mind, as mentioned in the previous post, I've been reading volume IV of Kreeft's 1,000+ page survey of philosophy, this one covering contemporary philosophers, mostly from the 20th century. 

It's the most depressing slog I've slogged through in I don't know how long. No wonder progressives are so unhappy. Who wouldn't be? It's like touring a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Yes, of course. And

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

Imagine smelling what the left sees! There's not a big enough state to undo that.

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

True, but must they punish us as well?

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

Most of the guys covered in the book (they're all men) were miserable specimens of humanity, and about this, Nietzsche did get at least one Big Thing right -- that most philosophy is but an unwitting form of autobiography: "In the end one experiences only oneself." And 

I have come to realize what every great philosophy up to now has been: the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs. 

True enough, but speak for yoursoph, Fred. 

Moreover, there are great and small souls, not to mention vertically open and closed ones. If objectivity does not exist, then we're done here; likewise Truth. Why would you write one more word if there is neither truth nor objectivity? Just get on with the sacking and burning, the taxing and spending, i.e., the Will to Power.

Could it be that even Nietzsche didn't believe his own bullshit? Problem is the Nazis most certainly did. On the one hand you can't blame the thinker for what other people do with his thoughts, and besides, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!

Our narrator mentions the truism that "Most philosophers have one Big Idea that is central to all their ample and diverse writing." 

This got me to wondering about my own a. and d. writings, and whether someone will someday come along and say, "Oh yes, Gagdad. Of course, everything he wrote was reducible to x. He just couldn't stop himself from writing about x in so many ways. Tedious, really."

Okay Mr. Future, but what is x? 

No, seriously. Because if I could figure that out, I could address it directly instead of being so elliptical.

Maybe there is no other way -- you know, orbiting the Mystery. 

Best I can do?

At least until the day you go full Thomas and the straw goes up in flames.

Call it the Joy of X, I guess.

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

I never explain, I only circum-scribe, i.e, speak in circles, is that it? Or is the scribe the circle?

False dichotomy.

A little more circumspect, please. Don't presume to circumscribe my circumlocutions!

Someone has to do it.

Let's get back to circumnavigating these atheistic scribes. 

It is easy to convert to a doctrine when we hear a defender of the opposite.

That's for sure.

Now, speaking of Big Ideas, what is the Big Idea of this book? That's kind of a trick question, since it covers 28 thinkers, each presumably with his own Big Idea. 

A last section covers five neo-Thomists, but excluding them, the majority are atheists. I don' know if the greatest ones are atheists, but certainly the loudest ones are.

And atheism is the biggest and loudest idea of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And now it all comes into focus: Implications of Godlessness. And it is at once depressing -- not to mention perverse, destructive, shallow, narrow-minded -- because

The death of God is a report given by the devil, who knows very well that the report is false.

And vis-a-vis Nietzsche and Sartre in particular,

Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred.

But karma has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass:

Unbelief is not a sin but a punishment.