Philosophy of ReligionDr Tom Kerns
Philosophy of Religion
Introduction to Edwin Abbott's Flatland
Just this afternoon I came across the following passage in my university's alumni magazine. It quotes physician-alumnus Dr Andy Kuzmitz (who found the first intact dinosaur heart a couple of years ago in South Dakota):
"Picture truth in the middle," Kuzmitz says about his passion for exploration. "Around it are all these various windows: art, music, religion, philosophy. And you can look through each window and see truth from a different side. Some people spend all their life looking through one window. I wanted to get up and look around and get a glance through all the windows.
"Too many people get stuck in their window," Kuzmitz says. "They'll say, 'I've got the truth,' and they do.... But God's a lot bigger than people want to believe. We can't understand it all." (Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2001, p 55)
This is not a new idea to us by now, though Dr Kuzmitz does express the idea well. We have already discovered that there is probably much more to truth and Reality than we might normally have guessed. And most recently, one thing we have learned from Rudolph Otto is that Being may be more complex, and perhaps even more seemingly contradictory, than our little minds would like.
What we may now also learn from Edwin Abbott, in his classic little story about Flatland, is that there may be much more to Reality, by many orders of magnitude, than we normally conceive of. In this story, written in 1884 and subtitled A Romance of Many Dimensions, we learn of a land of two dimensions. It is inhabited by two-dimensional people who are apparently unable to conceive of any more than two dimensions, just as we are perhaps slow to conceive of amy more than three dimensions (or perhaps four, if we count time). So just what is it that we can learn from these little squares and hexagons and straight lines? That question is what I'm hoping your discussions will explore.
There are many different aspects -- I almost said many different dimensions -- to this deceptively simple little text. The author is both a minister and a mathematician, so you will see him using mathematical and geometrical metaphors to express his ideas about religious experience and about social mores.
This book can be divided into two main parts: 1) the first half or two-thirds of the book, which consists of Abbott's description of Flatland, its people and its social habits, and 2) the last third or so of the book in which Abbott describes the Square's encounter with Spaceland, the land of three dimensions. While the first half of the book is very interesting, it is not the part on which we will be focusing. That part is more concerned with Abbott's biting commentary on the social standards of his day. There is much to enjoy here if you like social critique. For example, Abbott (who was himself a supporter of social and political equality for women) uses this forum to make fun of the attitudes toward women in Flatland and in the England of his day.
But this first part of the book, interesting and enjoyable as it is, will not be the focus of our discussions. The bulk of your classroom discussions of this book will be focusing on the last half or third of the book, the part in which the little two-dimensional square is introduced to a world vastly larger than he had ever imagined.
There will be no Study Questions for this book. Most of your classroom Discussion (in the week seven folder) should center around this Question, though: What comparisons do you see between, on the one hand, the square's encounter with Spaceland and, on the other hand, Otto's description of The Numinous and James's descriptions of religious experience. There will not be any specific DQs for this week, but the bulk of your discussions of this book should center around these two comparisons.
I hope you enjoy reading and discussing it. Most people find this book to be pretty entertaining, but even more enjoyable -- and much more insightful -- the second time through.
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