Soul
From Denial to Discovery Michael Wynne looks at how a lifelong “pilgrimage of reason” eventually led a famous philosophical atheist to embrace the reality of a Divine Mind.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters - Goya (1799)
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Reason has to win” is the last, portentous line of Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s influential 1920s dystopian novel We. On the most immediate level it amounts to the protagonist’s horrifying “affirmation” of the “happy” salvation he is assured since he has just been cured of the affliction of a soul (that is, his imagination) by agreeing to have a lobotomy; this means he can now go on as a fully functional cog in OneState, the regimental totalitarian machinesociety of which he is part.
which proposes that all future generations of a given twentysixth century community will be programmed so that they will know nothing other than the most de-individualised ultraconformity. Still, that word reason, taken in its widest meaning, “Reason, taken in its does inevitably set up powerful – both sinister and widest meaning, does resonances positive. In its immediate (very inevitably set up bleak) context, the reader may reminded of the protagonist’s powerful resonances be earlier logic-drunk assertion of – both sinister and his feeling that he has “conquered the old God”, but also in a positive.” But it may not be stretching broader philosophical domain the things too far to read a gleam lives of the Numbers, as the word “reason” may carry striking of hope offered in the sentiment proles of OneState are termed. connotations of the divine (as that reason must triumph – an indeed it does in Zamyatin’s satire, infinitely less mutilated form of It might seem incongruous to though in a savagely distorted reason, that is to say, than that construe anything affirmative positivist sense that cuts out any which is mindlessly referred to from the close of a novel application to a theist reality). 14
by the novel’s protagonist, and one that, moreover, incorporates all those human features (love, dreams, independentmindedness) that are in dire peril of being long forgotten in the “divinely rational and precise”