"I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval
period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity.
And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is
comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or
the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there."
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional
reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and
this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're
getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism,
mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of
classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.''
"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason.''
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes
considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it
really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art.
Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some
people still condemn it because it doesn't make `sense.' But what's really
wrong is not the art but the `sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp
it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's
more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the
roots.''
(ZAMM, Chapter 14)
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