Outline of Orthodoxy
Hey Fellow Chestertonians,
As promised here is the first installment of the outline. It is often commented that Orthodoxy seems unstructured or without a thread of a continuous argument. The onlooker or a person first introduced to Orthodoxy always makes the comment that the books seem to be a perpetual tangent. One topic leads into another, but is not directly related to any central thesis. To anyone well acquainted with Chesterton this stings a little, because we know that there is an overarching Argument in the book despite our difficulties at proving it to the people we first introduce the book to. But these comments do illustrate something. Chesterton is a much larger thinker then most of us have ever been exposed to. "Everything means something" and it is the something that everything means that Chesterton is trying to demonstrate. In the whirlwind of everything that fly around us in Orthodoxy it is easy for us to lose sight of the purpose. Now nothing that Chesterton dedicates a page to can be summarized in a sentence. Chesterton may be expansive, but he has no wasted words. All of his illustrations and demonstrations shed more light on the subject, and the book would have been something less than it is if Chesterton had left anything out. The outline is not meant to be a cliff notes version of Orthodoxy, in fact the outline is not even meant to make any sense in reference to itself. Rather it is meant as a reminder to the person who has already read the book about what points were made and where they were made in the book. Thereby allowing the person to see two parts of the book together which they might not have seen a connection between. That is the hope and that is the first purpose of this outline. What follows is an inadequate outline of chapters 2 3 and 4. Sharon I'll post your material up when I get to those chapters and Carlos I'm going to post your comments in a separate post.
1 The maniac effects me in the same way modern thinkers do.
2 Modern thought can be evaluated by whether or no they make a man go mad
3 Imagination does not cause insanity, reason does
4 The madman has lost everything except his reason
5 A mad mans arguement is complete in a purely rational way.
6 The madman explains a large number of things but not in a large way
7 The madman is without healthy complexity and healthy hessitation
8 Modern thinkers share with maniacs this expansive reason with a contracted common sense
9 Materialism has an insane simplicity, understanding everything and making everthing not worth understanding
10 Materialism lacks complexity like the madman
11 Materialism tends to destroy the materialists humanity like madness
12 The oposite argument that everything is a personal dream is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice
13 The materialist and (the illusionists?) insanity is proved by the maifest mistake of their entire lives.
14 It is reason without proper first principals that leads to madness
15 Mysticism is what keeps man sane. A man can understand everything with the help of what he does not understand.
16 Healthy men accept apparent contradiction and inscrutable truths.
CH III The Suicide of THought
1 Last chapter was not meant to attack reason it is my ultiamte purpose to defend it.
2 Religous authority was reared as a defense of the right of man to think.
3 Many modern thoughts have the effect of stopping thought, they are the only thoughts that should be stopped.
4 List of thought stopping thoughs
a Materialism makes thought mechanical and not very exciting
b (Illusionism?) Makes it such that there are no things to think about
c Evolutionary philosohpy destroys the notion of essential diffrences between things
d HG Wells opposite attack prevents the association of things
e Theory of progress (fundamental change in human ideals) makes constructive thought about past, present and future impossible.
f Pragmatism essentialy ignores the primary need for objective truth
5 A school of "artists" having seen the peril of reason have rejected reason as an authority and have declared that authority to reside soely in a mans will.
6 But just as complete free thought really destroys thought pure praise of vollition really paralizes the will
7 This has been a rough review of recent thought what follows is my view of life.
8 Moderns have torn the soul of Christ and are puzzeled by its fragments, there is a moral Unity and utility in this creed which we only see parts of.
CH IV The Ethics of Elfland
1 There are two principals of democracy
a That the common things to men are more important and more extrordinary than the peculair things in one man
b And that the political instinct is one of these common things
2 Tradition is democracy extended through time
3 I have always been on the side of hard-working people, on the side of democracy and traditions
4 I will list 3 or 4 ideas that I discovered that constitute my natural philosophy.
5 I shall demonstrate how these were first discovered by Christianity.
6 The things I believe most are fairytales. The first doctrine that arises from fairy tales is that the world does not explain itself.
a There are certain logical sequences that are necessary, that are law.
b To call something a law is to imply we have a synthesis of ideas that connects one thing with another.
c Mere repetitions such as are found in nature are not laws because we havn't this inner synthesis.
d There is a simple test, the test of the imagination. If observable sequences in nature have imaginable alternatives they can not be called laws.
8 Fairy tales have the capacity of awakening the original instinct of wonder at life. They demonstrate that life is magic not law.
10 The third doctrine is the doctrine of conditional joy.
a An incomprehensible happieness rest upon an incomprehensible condition
b To me this did not seem unjust. Its foolish to complain of not understanding the limits of the vision when one does not understand the vision.
11 Modern thought is upposed to fairytales on these two principals
a Modern thought supposes if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead.
b But this is not true, it is generaly the dieing or fatiguing of things that brings alteration.
c On the contrary I felt that the world and the repetion in the world meant something, and if it means something there must be someone to mean it.
d Modern thought is also opposed to the poetry of limits, it emphasizes the largeness of the cosmos so as to subjugate morality.
e But my feeling about the cosmos was quite the reveres that it was something small and precious such as something pulled from a sinking ship.
12 The summation of these points restated is:
first, that this world does not
explain itself...Second, I came to feel as if
magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.
There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is
As promised here is the first installment of the outline. It is often commented that Orthodoxy seems unstructured or without a thread of a continuous argument. The onlooker or a person first introduced to Orthodoxy always makes the comment that the books seem to be a perpetual tangent. One topic leads into another, but is not directly related to any central thesis. To anyone well acquainted with Chesterton this stings a little, because we know that there is an overarching Argument in the book despite our difficulties at proving it to the people we first introduce the book to. But these comments do illustrate something. Chesterton is a much larger thinker then most of us have ever been exposed to. "Everything means something" and it is the something that everything means that Chesterton is trying to demonstrate. In the whirlwind of everything that fly around us in Orthodoxy it is easy for us to lose sight of the purpose. Now nothing that Chesterton dedicates a page to can be summarized in a sentence. Chesterton may be expansive, but he has no wasted words. All of his illustrations and demonstrations shed more light on the subject, and the book would have been something less than it is if Chesterton had left anything out. The outline is not meant to be a cliff notes version of Orthodoxy, in fact the outline is not even meant to make any sense in reference to itself. Rather it is meant as a reminder to the person who has already read the book about what points were made and where they were made in the book. Thereby allowing the person to see two parts of the book together which they might not have seen a connection between. That is the hope and that is the first purpose of this outline. What follows is an inadequate outline of chapters 2 3 and 4. Sharon I'll post your material up when I get to those chapters and Carlos I'm going to post your comments in a separate post.
CH II The Maniac
1 The maniac effects me in the same way modern thinkers do.
2 Modern thought can be evaluated by whether or no they make a man go mad
3 Imagination does not cause insanity, reason does
4 The madman has lost everything except his reason
5 A mad mans arguement is complete in a purely rational way.
6 The madman explains a large number of things but not in a large way
7 The madman is without healthy complexity and healthy hessitation
8 Modern thinkers share with maniacs this expansive reason with a contracted common sense
9 Materialism has an insane simplicity, understanding everything and making everthing not worth understanding
10 Materialism lacks complexity like the madman
11 Materialism tends to destroy the materialists humanity like madness
12 The oposite argument that everything is a personal dream is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice
13 The materialist and (the illusionists?) insanity is proved by the maifest mistake of their entire lives.
14 It is reason without proper first principals that leads to madness
15 Mysticism is what keeps man sane. A man can understand everything with the help of what he does not understand.
16 Healthy men accept apparent contradiction and inscrutable truths.
CH III The Suicide of THought
1 Last chapter was not meant to attack reason it is my ultiamte purpose to defend it.
2 Religous authority was reared as a defense of the right of man to think.
3 Many modern thoughts have the effect of stopping thought, they are the only thoughts that should be stopped.
4 List of thought stopping thoughs
a Materialism makes thought mechanical and not very exciting
b (Illusionism?) Makes it such that there are no things to think about
c Evolutionary philosohpy destroys the notion of essential diffrences between things
d HG Wells opposite attack prevents the association of things
e Theory of progress (fundamental change in human ideals) makes constructive thought about past, present and future impossible.
f Pragmatism essentialy ignores the primary need for objective truth
5 A school of "artists" having seen the peril of reason have rejected reason as an authority and have declared that authority to reside soely in a mans will.
6 But just as complete free thought really destroys thought pure praise of vollition really paralizes the will
7 This has been a rough review of recent thought what follows is my view of life.
8 Moderns have torn the soul of Christ and are puzzeled by its fragments, there is a moral Unity and utility in this creed which we only see parts of.
CH IV The Ethics of Elfland
1 There are two principals of democracy
a That the common things to men are more important and more extrordinary than the peculair things in one man
b And that the political instinct is one of these common things
2 Tradition is democracy extended through time
3 I have always been on the side of hard-working people, on the side of democracy and traditions
4 I will list 3 or 4 ideas that I discovered that constitute my natural philosophy.
5 I shall demonstrate how these were first discovered by Christianity.
6 The things I believe most are fairytales. The first doctrine that arises from fairy tales is that the world does not explain itself.
a There are certain logical sequences that are necessary, that are law.
b To call something a law is to imply we have a synthesis of ideas that connects one thing with another.
c Mere repetitions such as are found in nature are not laws because we havn't this inner synthesis.
d There is a simple test, the test of the imagination. If observable sequences in nature have imaginable alternatives they can not be called laws.
8 Fairy tales have the capacity of awakening the original instinct of wonder at life. They demonstrate that life is magic not law.
10 The third doctrine is the doctrine of conditional joy.
a An incomprehensible happieness rest upon an incomprehensible condition
b To me this did not seem unjust. Its foolish to complain of not understanding the limits of the vision when one does not understand the vision.
11 Modern thought is upposed to fairytales on these two principals
a Modern thought supposes if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead.
b But this is not true, it is generaly the dieing or fatiguing of things that brings alteration.
c On the contrary I felt that the world and the repetion in the world meant something, and if it means something there must be someone to mean it.
d Modern thought is also opposed to the poetry of limits, it emphasizes the largeness of the cosmos so as to subjugate morality.
e But my feeling about the cosmos was quite the reveres that it was something small and precious such as something pulled from a sinking ship.
12 The summation of these points restated is:
first, that this world does not
explain itself...Second, I came to feel as if
magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.
There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is
Posted on: Wednesday, July 04, 2007
posted by Jim | 2:12 PM
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