The first is rigid, aims for certainty, tends to ‘either/or’ thinking, is abstract and generalised, ignores context and aims to free itself from all that is embodied, in order to gain what it conceives to be eternal truths. The second is deeper and richer, more flexible and tentative, more modest, aware of the impossibility of certainty, open to polyvalent meaning, respecting context and embodiment, and holding that while rational processing is important, it needs to be combined with other ways of intelligently understanding the world.
