Woody Allen versus truth and beaty. [Jokingly]

Article: Woody Allen's Bleak Vision
By Rev. Robert Barron

The "buffered self" versus the "porous self." Or nihilism versus transcendent reality.

I was chagrined, but not entirely surprised, when I read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe.

I broke the follow quote up into sections.

Woody Allen’s perspective represents a limit case of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self,” which is to say, an identity totally cut off from any connection to the transcendent. On this reading, this world is all we’ve got, and any window to another, more permanent mode of existence remains tightly shut.

Prior to the modern period, Taylor observes, the contrary idea of the “porous self” was in the ascendency. This means a self that is, in various ways and under various circumstances, open to a dimension of existence that goes beyond ordinary experience.

If you consult the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages, you will find a very frank acknowledgment that what Woody Allen observed about the physical world is largely true. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas all knew that material objects come and go, that human beings inevitably pass away, that all of our great works of art will eventually cease to exist.

But those great thinkers wouldn’t have succumbed to Allen’s desperate nihilism. Why? Because they also believed that there were real links to a higher world available within ordinary experience, that certain clues within the world tip us off to the truth that there is more to reality than meets the eye.

These clues include the reality of beauty and our appreciation of it; and the existance of "morality — more precisely, the unconditioned demand of the good..."