The Map is Not the Territory
Posted on February 22, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off
Two good meditations on the relationship of the scriptural map to the territory of reality by Fred Clark. I was particularly taken by Clark’s description of his awakening to reason because it bears a strong similarity to my own, though in my youth I moved away from the church more out of a sense that it hated emotion rather than that it hated reason. Rocknroll & poetry drove me away from fundamentalism when I was sixteen, those texts providing a better, though by no means perfect, map of my experience than the bible. As Gregory Bateson & George Luis Borges demonstrate, we make a tragic mistake when we imagine that there is any perfect map. The most important moments in a life are perhaps when the insufficency of the map we have becomes apparent & we are forced to become cartographers of our own experience, extending the map for our own & maybe even for others’ use.
