Home
The problem you describe is by no means uncommon, for it’s one thing to see—and to be rightly disgusted by—the pernicious consequences of reductionism and something quite different to be able to justify that disgust dialectically. You’re right to think that “learning how to think is the key”. Writings by authorities like Schuon are profoundly helpful, of course—for example, the opening chapters of his Logic and Transcendence, which I’m currently translating and editing. It’s very easy, however, merely to acquiesce in accepting what he says in “Fall and Forfeiture” (Light on the Ancient Worlds) or “Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity” (From the Divine to the Human) instead of allowing his words to provoke the active mental engagement one needs in order to defend the principles he articulates.
What I would recommend, very highly, is a careful, line-by-line study of the third chapter of C. S. Lewis’s book Miracles. It’s called “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”, and it’s proven to be just the right therapy for others in your shoes—people who are having a difficult time in debates with reductionists. Having read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested Lewis’s argument, you could perhaps then bring some of your newfound love of Sri Ramana to bear on the problem by asking yourself, “Who is being ‘plagued’ by reductionism? Who is it that might not ‘really be free’?” Obviously, the “who” who is asking these and similar questions is not in the instant of asking them inside of the reductionist box. To know a limit qua limit is ipso facto to be unlimited by that limit.
One other bit of advice: don’t fight for too much. It’s important for a fallen man to admit that the greatest part of his day-to-day life is indeed determined by powers beyond his immediate control and that much of his behavior, both inward and outward, is well described by reductionist thought. Freedom is a spectrum, after all, and not a yes or no. Only God is totally, perfectly free. The first step toward entering into His freedom, of “partaking of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) through theosis—Hindu moksha—is to acknowledge that our actions and thoughts and seeming choices are in large part not truly “ours”. On the contrary, we are asleep, benighted, “dead in our sins”, and most of our time is spent responding (poorly) to forces we didn’t put there. Once we see this—and of course the “we” who do see it, and don’t just read about it in some book, are already beyond the grip of these forces—we can begin to take steps to break free and wake up.