The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => General Misc. => Topic started by: TaoHorror on May 29, 2018, 05:34:12 pm
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I love quotes. Love the quotes before each chapter in PON and Dune. Love them from all walks and times. So I'm starting a thread to collect cool quotes.
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If you can believe it, Jack Nicholson at a younger age was self conscious of his image as an actor and was reframing from doing work that could paint him as a perenial bad guy. Stanley Kubrick approached him for the starring role in The Shining and Jack took some convincing. Jack expressed he wanted to perform optimistic stories.
Stanley Kubrick responded, "The Shining is optimistic. Any story suggesting there is an after-life is optimistic."
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Ok, this thread is being ignored, no problem, no hurt feelings, I like talking to myself anyways, so here goes another winner ...
Rocky Horror Picture Show/Frankenfurter, "Don't dream it, be it"
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From Heretics of Dune: "The sun is not God!"
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The Royal Tenenbaums has a bunch of quotes that are really great, it's easily one of my top 3 movies, perhaps even #1. A couple of my favorites:
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.
Why would a review make the point of saying someone's not a genius? You think I'm especially not a genius?
[Pause]
You didn't even have to think about it, did you?
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From Heretics of Dune: "The sun is not God!"
Maybe for Dune, she's not - but she's surely is here. It gave us life and when she red-dwarfs, she will end us ... sounds like the power of a god to me.
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The Royal Tenenbaums has a bunch of quotes that are really great, it's easily one of my top 3 movies, perhaps even #1.
Haven't see this movie - guess I better, that is a serious recommendation, let alone some great quotes :)
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Inspired by today's Q talk:
Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, "I love whores."
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"In view of these portentous impossibilities, it has been assumed, perhaps as the result of a growing impatience with the difficult factual material, that Christ was nothing but a myth, in this case no more than a fiction. But myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do. The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth—quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail."
C. G. Jung - "An Answer to Job"
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"Though well-equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going"
- Dr. Leon Kass on the possibilities of genetic engineering and modern science.
I encountered this line when I was much younger (still in grade school), doing 'research' for a 'paper' I was 'writing'. It stuck in my mind, though now I can't recall exactly what paper I got it from. A quick search pulls several hits- it seems its oft quoted - so I'm no longer sure exactly where it came from or the exact context. Great line though.
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"Though well-equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going"
- Dr. Leon Kass on the possibilities of genetic engineering and modern science.
I encountered this line when I was much younger (still in grade school), doing 'research' for a 'paper' I was 'writing'. It stuck in my mind, though now I can't recall exactly what paper I got it from. A quick search pulls several hits- it seems its oft quoted - so I'm no longer sure exactly where it came from or the exact context. Great line though.
Reminds me of a Timothy Leary quote I have memorized thanks to it being in a song:
“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.”
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Just wanna say I like the thread, and ill share how ive been vulnerable to my own biases, yet I (hopefully I am, but I indeed try to admit when I'm wrong and proof is put in my face) usually keep an open mind in any subject. I love this community because when people do disagree, its civil. I really enjoy that. And, I have had many views changed by just reading posts here. And, please feel free to call me out when I am not. I can fully admit to being wrong. I love that quote from above, first time ive heard it. Good words to live by.
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(https://www.brainyquote.com/photos_tr/en/j/johnwooden/106379/johnwooden1-2x.jpg)
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"And, as for such faith: it is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false. Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being."
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life
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Christ would never have made the impression he did on his followers if he had not expressed something that was alive and at work in their unconscious. Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. It is this fact which also makes it possible to say that whoever believes in Christ is not only contained in him, but that Christ then dwells in the believer as the perfect man formed in the image of God, the second Adam. Psychologically, it is the same relationship as that in Indian philosophy between man’s ego-consciousness and purusha, or atman. It is the ascendency of the “complete”——or total human being, consisting of the totality of the psyche, of conscious and unconscious, over the ego, which represents only consciousness and its contents and knows nothing of the unconscious, although in many respects it is dependent on the unconscious and is often decisively influenced by it. This relationship of the self to the ego is reflected in the relationship of Christ to man.
C. G. Jung - "An Answer to Job"
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However, I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God or not that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. Equally, these people have still not got it into their heads that the psychology of religion falls into two categories, which must be sharply distinguished from one another: firstly, the psychology of the religious person, and secondly, the psychology of religion proper, i.e., of religious contents.
C. G. Jung - "An Answer to Job"
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However, I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God or not that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. Equally, these people have still not got it into their heads that the psychology of religion falls into two categories, which must be sharply distinguished from one another: firstly, the psychology of the religious person, and secondly, the psychology of religion proper, i.e., of religious contents.
C. G. Jung - "An Answer to Job"
Are you religious, H?
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Are you religious, H?
No, although that probably makes my actual position definitively less clear. I steal that quote from Jung, because he is infinitely more smart than I am and so can explain some aspects of my perspective far more eloquently than I ever could.
Anther quote from Peterson (I know you guys love him):
Then there is the conversation where one participant is trying to attain victory for his point of view. This is yet another variant of the dominance-hierarchy conversation. During such a conversation, which often tends toward the ideological, the speaker endeavours to (1) denigrate or ridicule the viewpoint of anyone holding a contrary position, (2) use selective evidence while doing so and, finally, (3) impress the listeners (many of whom are already occupying the same ideological space) with the validity of his assertions. The goal is to gain support for a comprehensive, unitary, oversimplified world-view. Thus, the purpose of the conversation is to make the case that not thinking is the correct tack. The person who is speaking in this manner believes that winning the argument makes him right, and that doing so necessarily validates the assumption-structure of the dominance hierarchy he most identifies with. This is often—and unsurprisingly—the hierarchy within which he has achieved the most success, or the one with which he is most temperamentally aligned. Almost all discussions involving politics or economics unfold in this manner, with each participant attempting to justify fixed, a priori positions instead of trying to learn something or to adopt a different frame (even for the novelty). It is for this reason that conservatives and liberals alike believe their positions to be self-evident, particularly as they become more extreme. Given certain temperamentally-based assumptions, a predictable conclusion emerges—but only when you ignore the fact that the assumptions themselves are mutable.
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Jesus, protect us from your followers
As a fellow Christian, I too can very much appreciate this one - originally saw it on a bumper sticker on a car in front of me, but research has it quoted by many, so not sure the original author. Says a lot on many levels, like great efficient code.
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The affective systems that govern response to punishment, satisfaction, threat and promise all have a stake in attaining the ideal outcome. Anything that interferes with such attainment (little old ladies with canes) will be experienced as threatening and/or punishing; anything that signifies increased likelihood of success (open stretches of sidewalk) will be experienced as promising or satisfying. It is for this reason that the Buddhists believe that everything is Maya, or illusion: the motivational significance of ongoing events is clearly determined by the nature of the goal toward which behavior is devoted. That goal is conceptualized in episodic imagery—in fantasy. We constantly compare the world at present to the world idealized in fantasy, render affective judgment, and act in consequence.
Jordan Peterson Maps of Meaning
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The phenomena that we would now describe as emotions or motive forces, from the per-spective of our modern, comparatively differentiated and acute self-consciousness, do not appear to have been experienced precisely as “internal” in their original form. Rather, they made their appearance as part and parcel of the experience (the event, or sequence of events) that gave rise to them, and adopted initial representational form in imaginative embodiment. The modern idea of the “stimulus” might be regarded as a vestigial remnant of this form of thinking—a form that grants the power of affective and behavioral control to the object (or which cannot distinguish between that which elicits a response, and the response itself). We no longer think “animistically” as adults, except in our weaker or more playful moments, because we attribute motivation and emotion to our own agency, and not (generally) to the stimulus that gives proximal rise to them. We can separate the thing from the implication of the thing, because we are students and beneficiaries of empirical thinking and experimental method. We can remove attribution of motive and affective power from the “object,” and leave it standing in its purely sensory and consensual aspect; can distinguish between what is us and what is world. The preexperimental mind could not (cannot) do this, at least not consistently; could not reliably discriminate between the object and its effect on behavior. It is that object and effect which, in totality, constitute a god (more accurately, it is a class of objects and their effects that constitute a god).
A god, so considered—more specifically, a potent and powerful god, one with a history—constitutes the manner in which a group or family of stimuli of isomorphic motivational significance reveals itself to or grips the collective (communicated) imagination of a given culture. Such a representation is a peculiar mix (from the later, empirical viewpoint) of psychological and sociological phenomena and objective “fact”—an undifferentiated mix of subject and object (of emotion and sensory experience), transpersonal in nature (as it is historically elaborated “construction” and shared imaginative experience). The primitive deity nonetheless serves as accurate representation of the ground of being, however, because it is affect and subjectivity as well as pure object (before the two are properly distilled or separated)—because it is primordial experience, rather than the mere primordial thing.
Jordan Peterson - Maps of Meaning
So, the 100? And so then further, Yatwer as a Principle?
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So, the 100? And so then further, Yatwer as a Principle?
Does seem like it indeed. And in a way that would Earwa a simulacrum of consciousness without sacrificing realism and complexity.
But the problem is, real-world implications are much more moot. It it very hard to determine the effects of methodology and necessary learning on the mind. Right now we have things that are explained using specific frames of reference (be it Newtonian formalism in physics, computational logic paradigm used in computer science, etc.), and you need to understand those things to navigate any modern society. This necessity forces aforementioned frames of references on the mind, certainly, but saying it conditions the mind is going a bit too far, in my opinion. It doesn't displace other ways of understanding the world, or no new frames of reference or paradigms would've surfaced.
It's very hard to say whether our acquired method of interacting with the world really changed us, and if it did, then to what extent.
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This necessity forces aforementioned frames of references on the mind, certainly, but saying it conditions the mind is going a bit too far, in my opinion. It doesn't displace other ways of understanding the world, or no new frames of reference or paradigms would've surfaced.
But that "forcing of a frame" isn't a form of "conditioning?" At least in the sense of our "default" method of perceiving?
To use one of Bakker's favorite says, in a way, and put simply, if we view everything from a hammer's perspective, we will be apt to see far more nails than screws perhaps?
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But that "forcing of a frame" isn't a form of "conditioning?" At least in the sense of our "default" method of perceiving?
To use one of Bakker's favorite says, in a way, and put simply, if we view everything from a hammer's perspective, we will be apt to see far more nails than screws perhaps?
It's more of an obvious cognitive mistake than conditioning, the way I see it. Just using a wrong model out of habit. Like when I first start speaking English after speaking Russian for a while, I would have a horrible accent, which will mostly fade away given a few minutes. What happens there is me trying to pronounce English words using muscular routines developed for Russian ones, because I had just been speaking Russian before. And then I hear myself speak, realize that I'm doing it wrong, and correct my behavior.
It's even more complex than that, actually. I specifically developed other routines for speaking because my Russian ones weren't producing results in regards to speaking English. The point being, when you use an inappropriate frame of reference for something, it instantly negatively impacts your performance.
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It's more of an obvious cognitive mistake than conditioning, the way I see it. Just using a wrong model out of habit. Like when I first start speaking English after speaking Russian for a while, I would have a horrible accent, which will mostly fade away given a few minutes. What happens there is me trying to pronounce English words using muscular routines developed for Russian ones, because I had just been speaking Russian before. And then I hear myself speak, realize that I'm doing it wrong, and correct my behavior.
It's even more complex than that, actually. I specifically developed other routines for speaking because my Russian ones weren't producing results in regards to speaking English. The point being, when you use an inappropriate frame of reference for something, it instantly negatively impacts your performance.
Fair point. I think if we substitute the word "habituation" for "conditioning" we can perhaps see how they go hand-in-hand though. Conditions provide us the frame, which we internally habituate into the default. In this way, the habit then continues to condition the response to rely on the habitual frame, given it's previous utility. So, the habit conditions and the conditioning habituates the frame, ad infinitum.
That is, until something comes along and violates, forcing a new frame to be needed. In this case though, the response could be to discover a new frame, or "double-down" and construe the violation in a manner that makes the frame fit, no matter how poorly. So, in your example, the way you "correct" your "recognition" of "I'm doing it wrong" when using your Russian frame to speak English, is to shift the frame. But there is a chance you could have gone the other way, deciding the English would be "better off" spoken with your Russian inflection and fostering on.
So, to come back around to Peterson's point, is to say then that our habit of characterizing the world only as objects, leads itself to continuance, even when it is simply not the right frame...
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So, to come back around to Peterson's point, is to say then that our habit of characterizing the world only as objects, leads itself to continuance, even when it is simply not the right frame...
Indeed, it is the case. It is also a known cognitive bias:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
The whole problem is, it reduces fitness, which stops its infinite propagation. Yes, it's encountered often, but it is not be all, end all of modern behavior. A mistake shouldn't be considered a model, its effect is different because its impact is negative.
For example, this is why Bakker can see what he sees in our society and shout his warnings. He wouldn't be able to do that if the things he warns about lay completely beyond every frame of reference available to humanity.
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So, to come back around to Peterson's point, is to say then that our habit of characterizing the world only as objects, leads itself to continuance, even when it is simply not the right frame...
Indeed, it is the case. It is also a known cognitive bias:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
The whole problem is, it reduces fitness, which stops its infinite propagation. Yes, it's encountered often, but it is not be all, end all of modern behavior. A mistake shouldn't be considered a model, its effect is different because its impact is negative.
For example, this is why Bakker can see what he sees in our society and shout his warnings. He wouldn't be able to do that if the things he warns about lay completely beyond every frame of reference available to humanity.
Right, right, I mean, there are ways out of the loop, the first being, of course, to recognize that the frame can be incorrect. Next is conceptualize what the better frame would be. But there is a reason why Bakker and Peterson aren't exactly highly regarded by most people though...
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Right, right, I mean, there are ways out of the loop, the first being, of course, to recognize that the frame can be incorrect. Next is conceptualize what the better frame would be. But there is a reason why Bakker and Peterson aren't exactly highly regarded by most people though...
People actually hate to think, and being forced to think is loathed even harder. Thinking is all manners of inconvenient.
At the same time, I don't consider the opinion of the masses to be as important as it is presented today. Some things must be done, any opinion notwithstanding. It will come to "deal with it or die".
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People actually hate to think, and being forced to think is loathed even harder. Thinking is all manners of inconvenient.
At the same time, I don't consider the opinion of the masses to be as important as it is presented today. Some things must be done, any opinion notwithstanding. It will come to "deal with it or die".
Right, it's not that the opinion (especially the uninformed opinion) of the masses is a qualifier, but it is a mark of what is generally going to happen. So, difficult to accept facts are going to take a long time, if ever, to become permeate the general populace. The cost will probably end up high, but the way that system might actually be for the better, even though it certainly is frustrating.
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but it is a mark of what is generally going to happen.
It's like you say, more a mark of how soon it will happen and how well it's going to be received.
And I agree, this is one of the main reasons why many long-overdue improvements are stalled. I remember having a similar conversation with Wilshire about progress. Unimpeded progress is not the norm.
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but it is a mark of what is generally going to happen.
It's like you say, more a mark of how soon it will happen and how well it's going to be received.
And I agree, this is one of the main reasons why many long-overdue improvements are stalled. I remember having a similar conversation with Wilshire about progress. Unimpeded progress is not the norm.
Right, I mean, at it's best, you'd want a society that is conservative enough to not throw away things of value, but liberal enough to actually change with the times and adapt to new circumstances. How you actually achieve that balance is tricky though. Especially with how entrenched people are now-a-days.
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Right, I mean, at it's best, you'd want a society that is conservative enough to not throw away things of value, but liberal enough to actually change with the times and adapt to new circumstances.
I don't think it's possible to control the rate of societal evolution (at least not in a productive manner). On the other hand, it's very possible to take it into account.
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I don't think it's possible to control the rate of societal evolution (at least not in a productive manner). On the other hand, it's very possible to take it into account.
Hmm, that is complex. I think it is possible to move it in small degrees, which is probably as "good" as it gets. If it's plausible to be able to nudge people in a given direction, then I think it's plausible that you can nudge larger groups of people and so society.
However, if you foster entrenchment, nothing good is going to come of it.
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However, if you foster entrenchment, nothing good is going to come of it.
That's for certain.
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Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness—that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism…. Our whole European culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.
He that speaks here has, conversely, done nothing so far but to reflect: as a philosopher and solitary by instinct who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside. Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals—because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.
We require, at some time, new values.
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
Point of departure: it is an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration,” or corruption of all things, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most honest and compassionate age. Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted.
The end of Christianity—at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be replaced), which turns against the Christian God: the sense of truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history; rebound from “God is the truth” to the fanatical faith “All
is false”; an active Buddhism.
Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism.
“All lacks meaning.” (The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.)
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Well shit, if that isn't hitting a nail on the head...
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I was a "fan" of the man in my younger years - deconstruction of Christianity/Judaism paired with a dystopic vision of what it'll be like without it. It's a lie, it's self-limiting/enslavement/reduction, but the road out of it leads to nothingness.
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I was a "fan" of the man in my younger years - deconstruction of Christianity/Judaism paired with a dystopic vision of what it'll be like without it. It's a lie, it's self-limiting/enslavement/reduction, but the road out of it leads to nothingness.
It's interesting, because (and I don't mean this to attempt to put forth the idea that somehow I was smart or anything even approaching it) in my necessarily depressive teenage and later years, it seemed clear to me that rationality was not a surrogate savior to, say, religion. I had no ability to understand how or why though. It's interesting to read that kind of why, now, later in life when it is actually less helpful to me due to circumstance but allowing what might be a more substantive perceptive.
I think the word lie and the word truth though, in a subjective sense, are semantic traps, perhaps.
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I was a "fan" of the man in my younger years - deconstruction of Christianity/Judaism paired with a dystopic vision of what it'll be like without it. It's a lie, it's self-limiting/enslavement/reduction, but the road out of it leads to nothingness.
It's interesting, because (and I don't mean this to attempt to put forth the idea that somehow I was smart or anything even approaching it) in my necessarily depressive teenage and later years, it seemed clear to me that rationality was not a surrogate savior to, say, religion. I had no ability to understand how or why though. It's interesting to read that kind of why, now, later in life when it is actually less helpful to me due to circumstance but allowing what might be a more substantive perceptive.
I think the word lie and the word truth though, in a subjective sense, are semantic traps, perhaps.
I was summing up what I think he was saying briefly, not saying I agree/disagree with it. Calling it a lie is too simplistic, ofc. I'm not as gifted as Nitz with his command of succinctness, I'm more awkward.
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I was summing up what I think he was saying briefly, not saying I agree/disagree with it. Calling it a lie is too simplistic, ofc. I'm not as gifted as Nitz with his command of succinctness, I'm more awkward.
Aren't we all? If I was even a 64th as smart...the things that could be done...who knows?
I think the crux might come in to the intersection of what is true, what could be true, and what should be true. True, as in, actually Being.
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Psychology deals with ideas and other mental contents as zoology, for instance, deals with the different species of animals. An elephant is “true” because it exists. The elephant is neither an inference nor a statement nor the subjective judgment of a creator. It is a phenomenon. But we are so used to the idea that psychic events are wilful and arbitrary products, or even the inventions of a human creator, that we can hardly rid ourselves of the prejudiced view that the psyche and its contents are nothing but our own arbitrary invention or the more or less illusory product of supposition and judgment. The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition. They are not made by the individual, they just happen to him—they even force themselves on his consciousness. This is not Platonic philosophy but empirical psychology.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion
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Its funny that he used an Elephant :P
Well described though. Much more succinct than anything Bakker comes up with.
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Its funny that he used an Elephant :P
Well described though. Much more succinct than anything Bakker comes up with.
No offense meant to Bakker, but Jung was probably one of the 1% (or less) of the smartest humans who ever lived. I just don't think Bakker is in that league, smart as he is...
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Psychology deals with ideas and other mental contents as zoology, for instance, deals with the different species of animals. An elephant is “true” because it exists. The elephant is neither an inference nor a statement nor the subjective judgment of a creator. It is a phenomenon. But we are so used to the idea that psychic events are wilful and arbitrary products, or even the inventions of a human creator, that we can hardly rid ourselves of the prejudiced view that the psyche and its contents are nothing but our own arbitrary invention or the more or less illusory product of supposition and judgment. The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition. They are not made by the individual, they just happen to him—they even force themselves on his consciousness. This is not Platonic philosophy but empirical psychology.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion
Isn't this just what is said at the start of the SA series specifically this point "The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition"
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Do non-mathematicians spawn mathematical ideas?
What's an example of an idea that exists almost everywhere and at all times?
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Do non-mathematicians spawn mathematical ideas?
What's an example of an idea that exists almost everywhere and at all times?
Sure, before there was formal "math" as we'd call it, Egyptians and many other cultures were able to do some pretty mathematical things. I mean, I guess in that sense, they were mathematicians, but there was no such thing as formal math, so what they were doing was really instinctively (or subconsciously) preforming mathematical operations? Perhaps in the same way that, say, a basketball player doesn't consciously preform the mathematics of the requisite arc needed to reach the basket with the ball. But in the sense, they reflexively (instinctively?) do just that. So, now I really have no idea what a mathematician even is anymore...
I believe he is talking more about mythological, i.e. psychological phenomena though. For example, the "engendering" of psychic phenomena (as male or female), or even just the universal experience of the numinosum, even if in form of different psychological symbols. The work from which I took the quote pretty much presupposes that you have already become familiar with Jung's earlier work on archetypes and so pretty well agree (by continuing to follow Jung's thought process through) that they are real. This is just part of what makes it so difficult to understand a great deal of his work. In addition to it simply being rather complicated in and of itself...
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So, I was watching/listening to the Peterson/Harris talks on YouTube the other day. And, much like Peterson, I tend to agree with most of what Harris says, yet, something still doesn't sit right. Stumbled across this in the Jung book I am reading:
As a matter of fact, it only needs a neurosis to conjure up a force that cannot be dealt with by rational means. Our cancer case [where a patient psychosomatically thinks they have cancer and actually show some symptoms] shows clearly how impotent man’s reason and intellect are against the most palpable nonsense. I always advise my patients to take such obvious but invincible nonsense as the manifestation of a power and a meaning they have not yet understood. Experience has taught me that it is much more effective to take these things seriously and then look for a suitable explanation. But an explanation is suitable only when it produces a hypothesis equal to the morbid effect. Our patient is confronted with a power of will and suggestion more than equal to anything his consciousness can put against it. In this precarious situation it would be bad strategy to convince him that in some incomprehensible way he is at the back of his own symptom, secretly inventing and supporting it. Such a suggestion would instantly paralyse his fighting spirit, and he would get demoralized. It is far better for him to understand that his complex is an autonomous power directed against his conscious personality. Moreover, such an explanation fits the actual facts much better than a reduction to personal motives. An apparently personal motivation does exist, but it is not made by his will, it just happens to him.
C. G. Jung - Psychology and Religion
This is what I think Harris doesn't really want to acknowledge. That we can assume humans are rational actors. But the fact is, often, perhaps most often, they are not.
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I have largely come around to just fully disliking Harris without any hesitations, and I definitely think that one of the big elements of that (even though I could not have articulated before now, so thank you H.) is this position on "humans as rational actors". It's not even really a debate. We are totally, completely NOT rational actors at all. Even if you JUST zero in on humanity's pervasive, nigh inescapable "optimism delusion", it becomes clear how hilariously non-rational we are in just simple day-to-life, even among people are who are proportionately aware of this delusion.
And this is without even really dipping your toes into the maelstrom of cognitive biases and waaaaaay headier content you see routinely on Three Pound Brain, for examples. Even philosophers/scientists/thinkers who are relatively of clued-in to the Bakker-esque material are mostly incapable of making that last big "leap" and wrapping their heads around the full scope of human delusion, especially when it comes to grappling with the "language" involved with investigation of non-intentional-anything.
TBF, I do RSB trends toward a more "radical" outlook/perception of other somewhat like-minded "thinkers" (dunno what else to call these dudes anymore) and can be overly dismissive of folks who are basically treading the same waters he is, particularly when it comes to "intentionalist talk" (though again RSB is not off-point here exactly, he just laser-focuses in on it with seemingly anyone whose actually throwing their hat into the ring).
Then again I may just have no fucking clue what RSB is talking about and I'm totally wrong. I flip-flop everytime I dive into that blog.
sorta TL;DR
I haven't really stayed up on Harris since my early-to-mid twenties and am still catching up on Peterson, but my opinion ATM is that Harris is a well-spoken, well-educated individual with some incredibly shallow views on a number of alarming topics and, ultimately, is just kind of an asshat. Peterson is similar, but IMO suffers most from an inability to articulate himself on a handful of interrelated and relevant topics/issues which then COULD be used to cumulatively build up to a coherent intellectual vision. These factors, for each individual, lend themselves to popularity and to the sense H. describes of "tending to agree with most of what Harris/Peterson says, yet still something doesn't sit right." This is because (most, certainly not all) of their views are fairly straightforward and non-crazy, and in piece-meal do make sense, but there's little cohesion (especially with Peterson) that make all these little pieces build up into some digestible, coherent, visionary concept.
TBF, I have less against Peterson than Harris. Harris's warmongering and views on religion, especially Islam, are almost completely asinine IMO when you lay it all out. I just lost all respect for so-called progressives that still thinks violence is a solution to anything short of like, an alien invasion or some crazy shit. War is fruitless, always has been, always will be. It's still an issue obviously and an enormous part of human existence, but it is never, ever the "right way" IMO. You can cut some slack for our ancestors who had no realistic recourse (although, they did, and used them more we are often led to believe), but in the 21st century for first world countries, there are no excuses).
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Well, I don't pretend that my "like" of Peterson is not bias. That being said, it isn't as if I don't know that he can and will be wrong about things. Like anyone else, he certainly is. That being said, Harris is essentially a "rationalism" fundamentalist, which simply isn't going to sit well with me. Peterson does get wishy-washy in places, most in places where he is outside his element. Simply, that is a product of the "big picture" being vastly complicated. I doubt he could or would be able to focus on the "whole" thing, even if he had some theory on it...
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warmongering ... progressives that still thinks violence is a solution ... part of human existence, but it is never, ever the "right way" IMO.
A big part of the issue is how to address a group unwilling to listen to any argument and simply relies on the Might Makes Right mentality.
Even in a relationship between just two humans, if one of them wants to take something from the other and is bigger, stronger, and/or willing to commit acts of violence for it, no amount of argument or pandering will help.
As Cnaiur put it so wonderfully: To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife.
When you're talking about entire countries and complex international relationships, its even harder. Until the US disbands its entire global military force, I think we're probably the last country that can talk about "war isn't the right answer"
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When you're talking about entire countries and complex international relationships, its even harder. Until the US disbands its entire global military force, I think we're probably the last country that can talk about "war isn't the right answer"
Well, one, war isn't actually irrational. At least, not iherrently. It can be perfectly rational to go to war.
Protestantism was, and still is, a great risk and at the same time a great opportunity. If it goes on disintegrating as a church, it must have the effect of stripping man of all his spiritual safeguards and means of defence against immediate experience of the forces waiting for liberation in the unconscious. Look at all the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world: it all comes from human beings and the spiritual condition they are in! Look at the devilish engines of destruction! They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all man-made. But since everybody is blindly convinced that he is nothing more than his own extremely unassuming and insignificant conscious self, which performs its duties decently and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that this whole rationalistically organized conglomeration we call a state or a nation is driven on by a seemingly impersonal, invisible but terrifying power which nobody and nothing can check. This ghastly power is mostly explained as fear of the neighbouring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent fiend. Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbour, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All one’s neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear, just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.
C. G. Jung - Psychology and Religion
You can safely skip the part about Protestanism and the rest is still perfectly applicable to the here-and-now and directly to your above point.
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... nigh inescapable "optimism delusion", it becomes clear how hilariously non-rational we are in just simple day-to-life
Go easy on our disallusionment - the only thing we have to fend off the existential terror that one day we're gonna die. "Primitive" man sees another die - they're "gone" ... where did they go? Logic can't resolve, not enough information, limited view ... disallusionment is necessary to continue conscious life - otherwise we're faced with ( perhaps factual ) jumping off a cliff is no different from eating breakfast.
Harris's warmongering and views on religion, especially Islam
While I do not see it the same way Harris does, terrorism does spread alarm and disgust by design. While I think he's wrong, I don't beat up those who want to fight back too much, it's an understandable response. Indiscriminate violence ( meh, maybe all violence - but the more arbitrary/indiscriminate, the more scary ) is jarring. Terrorism has jarred Harris, he is not immune.
In the spirit of RSB - we're all limited, so while it's cool to critique, be careful to not be overly critical for who appear to be fair actors risking exposure in the public discourse - it's not easy to bare one's soul to the world. Peterson and Harris appear to be fair actors, which is to say they're not aiming for political effects ( they could be operatives, just they don't appear to be to me ). At least they're trying, so yes, they don't get it all - but none of us do and collectively, continuing to talk and vet, we may get somewhere. So I enjoy listening to people like Petersen and Harris, even though they ( like myself ) miss so many marks. Not easy wrapping your head around everything as the more cogent you "stuff" the world into a box, the more it seeps out away from you - there's simply too much for a single brain to contain. Genius continues to pop up all over the world, in all corners, as the global level of violence has greatly decreased compared to the rest of human history. If we can continue, reducing violence, improving/spreading stable environments - the human gang intellect may make some headway into unknown. The last Jung quote details a great hurdle which currently seems insurmountable - imagine if we could move past it, what we would be capable of.
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Yeah i'm going to have to start reading some Jung, is there a natural starting place?
Every time i try and understand these super smart folk I feel like i'm trying to pour 5lb of shite into a 2lb bag.
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Yeah i'm going to have to start reading some Jung, is there a natural starting place?
Every time i try and understand these super smart folk I feel like i'm trying to pour 5lb of shite into a 2lb bag.
Hmm, that's a good question. Being the ignorant and headstrong teenager I was when I first picked up some of Jung's collected works, I dove straight in to the most dense, most difficult stuff. And naturally, was completely dumbfounded. For years. I still am on a good bit of it.
However, I recently looked over Peterson's "recommended reading" and he lists Jung's "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology" as a good starting point. I can't recall if I have read that completely, or only in part, but looking at it now, I think Peterson is likely correct. It even begins with a reasonable account of the historical development of psychology, that is, psychoanalysis, that is likely helpful to get into the subject.
Honestly, despite owning most of the books as physical copies, this is a case where the eBook versions are honestly superior. Because even after years and years of reading Jung, I still need google to guide me on several fronts. Also, always keep in mind that while Jung was most probably in the 1% of the 1% of smartest people ever, time bears out places where he can simply be wrong. We are the beneficiaries of ~100 years of new insight, grown upon his and others.
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Cheers H.
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Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.
C.G. Jung -Aion, Researches Into the Phenomenology of The Self
Written in 1950, this is still just as relevant, if not more so, today...
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Bertrand Russell:
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
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If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.
-The Enchiridion, 13
“For who is it that made the heavens crimson and the sun golden, who has given light to the moon and the stars with it, who has dried the earth in the midst of the many waters, who set you yourself among the things and who has sought me out in the perplexity of my thoughts?”
- The Apocalypse of Abraham
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If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.
-The Enchiridion, 13
Reminds me of an article I read a while back about how people abandon hobbies for not being "excellent" at them.
“For who is it that made the heavens crimson and the sun golden, who has given light to the moon and the stars with it, who has dried the earth in the midst of the many waters, who set you yourself among the things and who has sought me out in the perplexity of my thoughts?”
- The Apocalypse of Abraham
Reminds me of the line of thinking about consciousness, that its purpose is the ability to supply a specifically limited perception of God to God.
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I know, common, but in light of Q today and I feel spot on ...
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though I prefer it's slightly more modern usage, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
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I know, common, but in light of Q today and I feel spot on ...
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though I prefer it's slightly more modern usage, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
It's a very interesting little tidbit. In t he sense that it seems like something small, but is actually likely a symptom of a very "big" issue. That is, just who are we? In the sense of, who am I? What am I?
If we consider the narrative character of life, we likely find at least part of why we want to try to maintain "consistency."
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Going against the current tide of heavy material, something light to enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1kS_f3yS8c
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I know, common, but in light of Q today and I feel spot on ...
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though I prefer it's slightly more modern usage, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
It's a very interesting little tidbit. In t he sense that it seems like something small, but is actually likely a symptom of a very "big" issue. That is, just who are we? In the sense of, who am I? What am I?
If we consider the narrative character of life, we likely find at least part of why we want to try to maintain "consistency."
It could also just be a pithy excuse for being inconsistent in your dealings.
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I know, common, but in light of Q today and I feel spot on ...
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though I prefer it's slightly more modern usage, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
It's a very interesting little tidbit. In t he sense that it seems like something small, but is actually likely a symptom of a very "big" issue. That is, just who are we? In the sense of, who am I? What am I?
If we consider the narrative character of life, we likely find at least part of why we want to try to maintain "consistency."
It could also just be a pithy excuse for being inconsistent in your dealings.
Ha, wouldn't be the first time someone leveraged "wisdom"/philosophy to excuse bad behavior. The point of the quote is not to be purposely inconsistent or leverage it conveniently, but be smarter about identifying what truly matters.
Ascribed to Oscar Wilde ( another "updated" version of a quote ) I think nails the point : Life is too important to be taken seriously.
Simply, life is art, which makes it fun if you allow it. The Tao in me smiles at the truth of these contradictions. So, yes, both - don't weight yourself down with consistency, but don't revel in hypocrisy either. To go further, what we discussed in Q that day, I'm saying it's not even hypocrisy to be inconsistent across our sphere's of reality, sphere's of degrading importance if you will. So I say it's a mistake to deny your child welfare if they truly need it just because you're a Libertarian who believes society is better off without welfare. Don't pay more taxes than you owe even if you believe the tax rate should be higher for your perceived economic bracket. Consistency as a moral or the notion it's absolute application makes you moral is simply self destructive and not a contribution to a better self or world. Not all "smart" self interested decisions are immoral "selfishness" and indeed the world is better for it, not just for yourself. You could be a great person of morality and love and yet it's valid/correct to make some of your life decisions with self interest which does not invalidate your ethics. At first glance, this may all sound like fanciful cynicism - show the world you're worthwhile to take better advantage of it, camouflaged vampirc living - but, no, that's not what I'm getting at.
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"Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him."
- E.M. Forester
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"Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him."
- E.M. Forester
That's a good one.
These remarks will have made it evident to the reader that the ideal of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative principle of reason, requiring us to regard all connection existing between phenomena as if it had its origin from an all-sufficient necessary cause, and basing upon this the rule of a systematic and necessary unity in the explanation of phenomena.
A fascinating conclusion by Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
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These remarks will have made it evident to the reader that the ideal of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative principle of reason, requiring us to regard all connection existing between phenomena as if it had its origin from an all-sufficient necessary cause, and basing upon this the rule of a systematic and necessary unity in the explanation of phenomena.
A fascinating conclusion by Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
So if I understand this correctly, the belief in the divine is rational, not irrational.
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So if I understand this correctly, the belief in the divine is rational, not irrational.
In a way, but I think it is deeper than that. Perhaps, that the ideal, that is the transcendental ideal, which could be Divine, if we choose to define it that way, is the transcendent rational and so is the rationalizer of the rational. So, if there is anything transcendental about the rational, then the very idea of that thing conditions rationality to it's pinnacle (rather than something like self-consuming "navel-gazing"), not the literal, objectivist existence of an entity such as God.
Here is Scruton on that passage:
Considered thus it is the source, not of illusion, but of knowledge. The knowledge that it leads to remains circumscribed by the conditions of possible experience: in other words, it conforms to the categories, and does not reach beyond their legitimate territory into a transcendent realm. The idea “does not show us how an object is constituted, but how, under its guidance, we should seek to determine the constitution and connection of the objects of experience” (A. 671, B. 699). Thus reason is led back from its vain speculations to the empirical world, trading the illusions of metaphysics for the realities of empirical science.
So, perhaps then it is the manner in which we could connect transcendental rationality to practical, pragmatic rationality.
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( migrated from TSA FB Group post )
A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.
--R. Scott Bakker
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Doesn't quality as a "quote" being just a historical statement, more just quoting someone, but in the spirit of the season ...
“For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonor of God and offence of others, it is therefore ordered by this Court and the authority thereof, that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon such accountants as aforesaid, every person so offending shall pay of every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”
- Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1659.
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Doesn't quality as a "quote" being just a historical statement, more just quoting someone, but in the spirit of the season ...
“For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonor of God and offence of others, it is therefore ordered by this Court and the authority thereof, that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon such accountants as aforesaid, every person so offending shall pay of every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”
- Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1659.
Talk about a Grinch lol
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
- Plato
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In the spirit of the holidays, thought I would share a few of my favorite sophomoric quotes.
Death ... Death! Death to all those who oppose us!
- Locnar-infused Barbarian Leader, referred only to as "your Excellency", Heavy Metal
Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you're an asshole"
- unknown, bumper sticker
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Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist
only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking.
If it cannot be fitted into [this other thinking], then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it
really serves."
— Erwin Schrödinger
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Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist
only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking.
If it cannot be fitted into [this other thinking], then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it
really serves."
— Erwin Schrödinger
I love this whole "fuck physics, we're alive, mother fuckers" philosophy you've been sharing, Sci - very interesting stuff, gives me hope I'm more than a simple machine.
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I love this whole "fuck physics, we're alive, mother fuckers" philosophy you've been sharing, Sci - very interesting stuff, gives me hope I'm more than a simple machine.
<<insert supportive emoji>>
I don't think it's "fuck physics/science" so much as "fuck mechanistic-reductionist explanations".
As for being a machine, read Raymond Tallis' On Time & Lamentation. He's a retired neuroscientist turned brilliant philosopher.
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I love this whole "fuck physics, we're alive, mother fuckers" philosophy you've been sharing, Sci - very interesting stuff, gives me hope I'm more than a simple machine.
<<insert supportive emoji>>
I don't think it's "fuck physics/science" so much as "fuck mechanistic-reductionist explanations".
Right, that didn't come across correctly, was speeding along today. You nailed it and that's what I meant, not that physics is "wrong" but the perspective it is necessarily the science of "all".
As for being a machine, read Raymond Tallis' On Time & Lamentation. He's a retired neuroscientist turned brilliant philosopher.
I'll check him out, thanks for the referral. You missed ( or maybe you were lurking, you have an impressive post count number ) the fireworks on Free Will here. I concede my ( belief? ) we have free will likely stems from not wanting to be a machine, I want to take responsibility for my error(s) - it is me whose fucking up, not a bug in the program. That said, I am open to the possibility I'm a self-hating robot. I'll see what Mr. Tallis has to say on the matter as you might've guessed, we didn't end the discussion on consensus, the talk simply ran out of gas ...
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I'll check him out, thanks for the referral. You missed ( or maybe you were lurking, you have an impressive post count number ) the fireworks on Free Will here. I concede my ( belief? ) we have free will likely stems from not wanting to be a machine, I want to take responsibility for my error(s) - it is me whose fucking up, not a bug in the program. That said, I am open to the possibility I'm a self-hating robot. I'll see what Mr. Tallis has to say on the matter as you might've guessed, we didn't end the discussion on consensus, the talk simply ran out of gas ...
I think before free will one must try to suss out causation...a subject for another thread or two or 100...heh.
=-=-=
Our brains are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar source, but at the same time tingeing and restricting it.
–William James
'[The] spatial universe is not necessarily limited to the collection of physical objects located in the physical world. There may well be many different three-dimensional spatial (or four-dimensional spatio-temporal) systems of sense-data and images in addition...'
–JR Smythies
There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the “intellectual love of God”.
-Bertrand Russell
'Mind is positioned in a space of its own making ... . We wonder about the limits of the universe but never ask what is beyond the space of a dream.'
– Jason Brown
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'[At] the moment biology becomes biologism, science is turned into an ideology. What we have to deplore ... is not so much that scientists are specializing, but rather the fact that specialists are generalizing.'
– Viktor E. Frankl
'How can the brain be in the head if the head is in the brain?' –
-- J. R. Smythies
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'[At] the moment biology becomes biologism, science is turned into an ideology. What we have to deplore ... is not so much that scientists are specializing, but rather the fact that specialists are generalizing.'
– Viktor E. Frankl
'How can the brain be in the head if the head is in the brain?' –
-- J. R. Smythies
This post made you evil, Sci ( check out your post count before you post again ;) )
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'[At] the moment biology becomes biologism, science is turned into an ideology. What we have to deplore ... is not so much that scientists are specializing, but rather the fact that specialists are generalizing.'
– Viktor E. Frankl
'How can the brain be in the head if the head is in the brain?' –
-- J. R. Smythies
This post made you evil, Sci ( check out your post count before you post again ;) )
Damn missed my chance to commune with the numerology of the Dark Lord...I'm sure there'll be other chances -->
"The descent to Hell is the same from every place." -Anaxagoras
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From Heretics of Dune
... our God is a magical God whose language we speak."
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When something unreal can become almost real, it is perhaps more frightening to us, and perhaps more revealing.
-David Levinthal
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When something unreal can become almost real, it is perhaps more frightening to us, and perhaps more revealing.
-David Levinthal
I like this one, Sci - kinda aligns with your profile picture, which scares the shit of me every time I see it ( I'm sure that's the intended effect ;) )
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From Heretics of Dune
... our God is a magical God whose language we speak."
You've brought this up in conversation before, TL - what about it speaks to you?
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From Heretics of Dune
... our God is a magical God whose language we speak."
You've brought this up in conversation before, TL - what about it speaks to you?
To speak God's language is to be able to perform miracles on demand. What solace do mere beliefs provide in comparison?
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From Heretics of Dune
... our God is a magical God whose language we speak."
You've brought this up in conversation before, TL - what about it speaks to you?
To speak God's language is to be able to perform miracles on demand. What solace do mere beliefs provide in comparison?
Ah, nice, thank you!
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As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter. Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness. But that does not mean that it remains unasked in the unconscious. What is more, it is answered by views and beliefs like materialism, atheism, and similar substitutes, which spread like epidemics. They crop up wherever and whenever one waits in vain for the legitimate answer. The ersatz product represses the real question into the unconscious and destroys the continuity of historical tradition which is the hallmark of civilization. The result is bewilderment and confusion. Christianity has insisted on God’s goodness as a loving Father and has done its best to rob evil of substance. The early Christian prophecy concerning the Antichrist, and certain ideas in late Jewish theology, could have suggested to us that the Christian answer to the problem of Job omits to mention the corollary, the sinister reality of which is now being demonstrated before our eyes by the splitting of our world: the destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism with its utopian chimeras forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it. The advocates of Christianity squander their energies in the mere preservation of what has come down to them, with no thought of building on to their house and making it roomier. Stagnation in these matters is threatened in the long run with a lethal end.
C. G. Jung -Aion, Researches into the Phenomonology of the Self
Hmm, keep in mind here that God-image is not, per se, God. God-image can actually be used to stand in for the top of a hierarchy, or the pinnacle of an ontology. One could consider it as "thing of highest value" as well, although monetary value not necessarily being that connotation there (although plausibly so in cases).
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When something unreal can become almost real, it is perhaps more frightening to us, and perhaps more revealing.
-David Levinthal
I like this one, Sci - kinda aligns with your profile picture, which scares the shit of me every time I see it ( I'm sure that's the intended effect ;) )
I thought it was cute lol
C. G. Jung -Aion, Researches into the Phenomonology of the Self
Hmm, keep in mind here that God-image is not, per se, God. God-image can actually be used to stand in for the top of a hierarchy, or the pinnacle of an ontology. One could consider it as "thing of highest value" as well, although monetary value not necessarily being that connotation there (although plausibly so in cases).
What does he mean about making Christianity "roomier"?
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C. G. Jung -Aion, Researches into the Phenomonology of the Self
Hmm, keep in mind here that God-image is not, per se, God. God-image can actually be used to stand in for the top of a hierarchy, or the pinnacle of an ontology. One could consider it as "thing of highest value" as well, although monetary value not necessarily being that connotation there (although plausibly so in cases).
What does he mean about making Christianity "roomier"?
I'll need to dig a bit more into the context of the quote (I kind of tripped over it), but I think he means that it would be more accommodating of changes in circumstance. That is, not be stiflingly conservative.
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C. G. Jung -Aion, Researches into the Phenomonology of the Self
Hmm, keep in mind here that God-image is not, per se, God. God-image can actually be used to stand in for the top of a hierarchy, or the pinnacle of an ontology. One could consider it as "thing of highest value" as well, although monetary value not necessarily being that connotation there (although plausibly so in cases).
What does he mean about making Christianity "roomier"?
I'll need to dig a bit more into the context of the quote (I kind of tripped over it), but I think he means that it would be more accommodating of changes in circumstance. That is, not be stiflingly conservative.
I took it to mean by adhering ( demanding obedience ) to custom/tradition, they're selling themselves short as their contribution to our identity is so much more profound - they should step on the gas and expand to envelop the new in lieu of resisting/attacking it. Don't counter, absorb and expand - e.g. own the wonder that arises from science, make it holy, allow it to contribute to identity, as counter/repressing science fuels it's destructiveness to what we are.
But I could be wrong.
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I took it to mean by adhering ( demanding obedience ) to custom/tradition, they're selling themselves short as their contribution to our identity is so much more profound - they should step on the gas and expand to envelop the new in lieu of resisting/attacking it. Don't counter, absorb and expand - e.g. own the wonder that arises from science, make it holy, allow it to contribute to identity, as counter/repressing science fuels it's destructiveness to what we are.
But I could be wrong.
Yeah, I think we are both heading in the same direction.
The quote itself is ensconced in a short chapter which is very obtuse (there are parts that have a footnote per sentence). The main thrust of it though is how the "Christian mind" approached the figure of God (and Christ) in Revelation. That is, what was the need for Revelation? So, in this way, he discusses the idea of the Antichrist as a reconciliation of the sort of dual-nature of God and so something of the dual-nature of Christ.
So, what he seems to be saying is that such a thing as Revelation, while understandable, didn't need to be a forgone conclusion. And still doesn't have to be. That is, it need not be, necessarily, Apocalyptic. Rather then see that house as having to be destroyed to be reborn, one could see that house appended.
If I understand it right, which is a massive if, because most of the chapter is highly opaque.
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'Creativity itself is a groundless abyss of pure potential, more a fountain than a foundation.'
-Matthew Segall
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"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false."
-Borges
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“The divergence of the formulae about nature from the appearance of nature has robbed the formulae of any explanatory power.”
- Whitehead
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"Meantime the background of Eternity shows steadfast through all the pageants of the shifting world. This gives majesty to solitary landscapes, and to the vault of night; it urges me to go out and to be alone; to pace in starlight the solemn avenues, and to gaze upon Arcturus with his sons."
-F. Myers, Fragments of an Inner Life
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'We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.'
– William James
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To learn more about mental aspects of the world … we should try to discover ‘manifest principles’ that partially explain them, though their causes remain disconnected from what we take to be more fundamental aspects of science. The gap might have many reasons, among them, as has repeatedly been discovered, that the presumed reduction base was misconceived.
--Noam Chomsky: What Kind of Creatures Are We?
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It would be possible to see in Achilles the Dionysiac strain, a passion for destruction growing out of a hatred for the destructibility of all things; and in Hector, the Apollonian part, the will toward preservation growing out of love for human achievements in their vulnerability.
~Rachel Bespaloff
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"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false."
-Borges
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
-Borges
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'Thus the thought [e.g.] which we expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs no bearer. It is not true for the first time when it is discovered, but is like a [newly discovered] planet.'
– Gottlob Frege
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'Thus the thought [e.g.] which we expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs no bearer. It is not true for the first time when it is discovered, but is like a [newly discovered] planet.'
– Gottlob Frege
I was watching this video, where Suskin talks about special relativity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toGH5BdgRZ4&feature=youtu.be&t=1h31m21s) and specifically, I was thinking about what the "spacetime interval" is, or as we'd usually call it the speed of light and why it exists, that is, why does light only go that speed. Part of it, if I understood it correctly, is that in 4D non-Euclidean geometry, such as spacetime seems to be, the that the Pythagorean theorem still applies, except its actually inverse, that is, t² - x² not plus. Which is pretty interesting in it's own right. Of course, that's if I even understood it correctly...
But in light of your quote, it's fascinating, because that sort of means that it is a "formal rule" of the formal Euclidean geometry? Right?
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'Thus the thought [e.g.] which we expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs no bearer. It is not true for the first time when it is discovered, but is like a [newly discovered] planet.'
– Gottlob Frege
I was watching this video, where Suskin talks about special relativity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toGH5BdgRZ4&feature=youtu.be&t=1h31m21s) and specifically, I was thinking about what the "spacetime interval" is, or as we'd usually call it the speed of light and why it exists, that is, why does light only go that speed. Part of it, if I understood it correctly, is that in 4D non-Euclidean geometry, such as spacetime seems to be, the that the Pythagorean theorem still applies, except its actually inverse, that is, t² - x² not plus. Which is pretty interesting in it's own right. Of course, that's if I even understood it correctly...
But in light of your quote, it's fascinating, because that sort of means that it is a "formal rule" of the formal Euclidean geometry? Right?
That's all way above my pay grade, thus sadly I really cannot say. I just like the idea of math theorems being like undiscovered planets...
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That's all way above my pay grade, thus sadly I really cannot say. I just like the idea of math theorems being like undiscovered planets...
Well, it's frankly way above mine too.
But, I guess I would draw the even more general way of thinking about it (less about the relation between existence and knowledge), in the "eternal" sense of "if A, then B" sort of way. The Pythagorean theorem "works" because, if [Euclidean geometry] then [Pythagorean theorem]. In fact, the planet is the same sort of way, if [the starting conditions and "laws" of physics] then [the planet].
Both are not contingent on knowledge or observation, on being beheld or beholden. I think though that there is a big difference though in the notion of "eternal" though, because, the planet could not have existed for "all time" because it is the product of an evolution of state through time (motion), where Euclidean geometry really is not abut time or motion at all and would be true absent both (although we wouldn't exist to know that).
I think I am outside the "spirit" of what you were trying to convey not though.
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That's all way above my pay grade, thus sadly I really cannot say. I just like the idea of math theorems being like undiscovered planets...
Well, it's frankly way above mine too.
But, I guess I would draw the even more general way of thinking about it (less about the relation between existence and knowledge), in the "eternal" sense of "if A, then B" sort of way. The Pythagorean theorem "works" because, if [Euclidean geometry] then [Pythagorean theorem]. In fact, the planet is the same sort of way, if [the starting conditions and "laws" of physics] then [the planet].
Both are not contingent on knowledge or observation, on being beheld or beholden. I think though that there is a big difference though in the notion of "eternal" though, because, the planet could not have existed for "all time" because it is the product of an evolution of state through time (motion), where Euclidean geometry really is not abut time or motion at all and would be true absent both (although we wouldn't exist to know that).
I think I am outside the "spirit" of what you were trying to convey not though.
I think we're sorting of looking at this similarly, in that it's curious (to say the least) that something that comes to us via human mental "leg work" is something that is a non-contingent truth.
Admittedly I am a "Platonist" of sorts on this matter of Logical/Mathematical Universals...
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“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
-
“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
Do you mean Fichte?
-
“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
Do you mean Fichte?
Fuck...yeah.
-
“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
Do you mean Fichte?
Fuck...yeah.
Sorry for the pedantic intrusion, sci. Shall I delete my comments and allow you to make the edit?
-
“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
Do you mean Fichte?
Fuck...yeah.
Sorry for the pedantic intrusion, sci. Shall I delete my comments and allow you to make the edit?
Haha no worries, I appreciate the correction - my response was meant to be read as a humorous admission of fault. OTL
-
“Look at the wall. Form a clear representation of it in your mind.
Now, look at yourself, represent to yourself internally yourself looking at the wall.
Who is now doing the looking?”
-Fitche
Do you mean Fichte?
Fuck...yeah.
Sorry for the pedantic intrusion, sci. Shall I delete my comments and allow you to make the edit?
Haha no worries, I appreciate the correction - my response was meant to be read as a humorous admission of fault. OTL
Oh, that's how I read it, sci. I just wanted to afford you the opportunity to "restart" the quote. Cheers!
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“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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"Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd one."
-Voltaire
-
"There are no gods, only dead men."
----------------------------------------------------------
‘The reason that souls condemned to Damnation always suffer eternally is because their only hunger is hatred, and so they hate all things universally, including themselves and Creation and God its Architect. Fury becomes the backbone of blind, screaming outrage at the sheer arrogance of existence, the very Thing-in-Itself: this is the true sustenance of Hell. Fuel for an impossible machine, suffering made into a parasite of suffering, like an autophagous serpent consuming its own ever-regenerating tail. So you see why Hell is a circle -- a wreath of black fire that crowns a towering and ghostly pillar of rings, plummeting into the abyssal jaws of time. The Pit and its ruler Annihilation masticate in the dark and groan forever with the same bottomless hunger; so the eyes of Men are never satisfied.”
-
"There are no gods, only dead men."
----------------------------------------------------------
‘The reason that souls condemned to Damnation always suffer eternally is because their only hunger is hatred, and so they hate all things universally, including themselves and Creation and God its Architect. Fury becomes the backbone of blind, screaming outrage at the sheer arrogance of existence, the very Thing-in-Itself: this is the true sustenance of Hell. Fuel for an impossible machine, suffering made into a parasite of suffering, like an autophagous serpent consuming its own ever-regenerating tail. So you see why Hell is a circle -- a wreath of black fire that crowns a towering and ghostly pillar of rings, plummeting into the abyssal jaws of time. The Pit and its ruler Annihilation masticate in the dark and groan forever with the same bottomless hunger; so the eyes of Men are never satisfied.”
Whoah nice! Are these originals drawn from your writing?
=-=-=
"THE cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack
of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule,views
the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for
the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world
that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did
not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving
from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him,as if it were some mysterious farewell.
But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the
porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; eventhat was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events,
his very bones had disintegrated."
-- Nabokov's opening paragraph of SPEAK, MEMORY
-
"There are no gods, only dead men."
----------------------------------------------------------
‘The reason that souls condemned to Damnation always suffer eternally is because their only hunger is hatred, and so they hate all things universally, including themselves and Creation and God its Architect. Fury becomes the backbone of blind, screaming outrage at the sheer arrogance of existence, the very Thing-in-Itself: this is the true sustenance of Hell. Fuel for an impossible machine, suffering made into a parasite of suffering, like an autophagous serpent consuming its own ever-regenerating tail. So you see why Hell is a circle -- a wreath of black fire that crowns a towering and ghostly pillar of rings, plummeting into the abyssal jaws of time. The Pit and its ruler Annihilation masticate in the dark and groan forever with the same bottomless hunger; so the eyes of Men are never satisfied.”
Whoah nice! Are these originals drawn from your writing?
Lol, indeed. Testing out some of my 'in-universe chapter quotes'. Writing fake scripture is hard but it's getting easier, as time goes on...
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I hope some day you get a book published FB.
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Thank you Wilshire, that is encouraging!
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"The rationals are spotted in the line like stars in a black sky while the dense blackness is the firmament of the irrationals"
-G. Cantor
In honor of this reference to Peter Sas's work... (http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=2872.msg47542#msg47542)
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Love is at the root at everything, all learning, all relationships, love or the lack of it.
- Fred Rogers ( "Mr. Rogers" )
-
It is the most advanced industrial society which feels most directly threatened by the rebellion, because it is here that the social necessity of repression and alienation, of servitude and heteronomy is most transparently unnecessary, and unproductive in terms of human progress. Therefore the cruelty and violence mobilized in the struggle against the threat, therefore the monotonous regularity with which the people are made familiar with, and accustomed to inhuman attitudes and behavior-to wholesale killing as patriotic act.
Herbert Marcuse - The Individual in the Great Society
Well, hot damn Herbert, tell us how you really feel...
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But, as always, the key to making sense of our lives lies in those details that seem most nonsensical. The small strangenesses surrounding us are our best possible clues to reality.
—Peter Kingsley, Reality
-
"To understand mind one must understand matter.
To understand matter one must understand space and time.
And to understand space and time one must understand mind."
-Peter Sjöstedt-H
-
"A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out. " - Dr. Samuel Johnson
-
"The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
- William Faulkner
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“I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
- Hegel's thoughts on Napoleon
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No culture is able to achieve the integral fullness of the real, nor can any develop all the potentialities of the human being, for the latter is always in excess of itself. . . . Each culture explores certain sectors of the real, privileges and develops certain dimensions of experience, and, because of this fact, sacrifices other dimensions, other possibilities, which return to haunt it (the return of the repressed!), against which the culture protects itself through a number of mechanisms.
—BERTRAND MÉHEUST, Le défi du magnetisme
-
"When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that’s not criticism; it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can."
-Ursula Le Guin
-
“When the layman says ‘reality’, he usually thinks that he is talking about something evident and well-known; by contrast it seems to me that it is the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time to work out a new idea of reality. . . . What I have in mind concerning such a new idea of reality, is – in provisional terms – the idea of the reality of the symbol.On the one hand, a symbol is a product of human effort, on the other hand it indicates an objective order in the cosmos of which humans are only a part."
-Wolfgang Pauli
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"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
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Walking along a mountain path in Japan, we come upon a rudimentary hermitage with a large temple bell suspended from a simple wooden pagoda. Unlike Western carillon bells, the Japanese bell has no clapper and is struck on the outside much as one might strike a gong....Admiring the excellence and obvious age of the engravings on the casting, we hear the footsteps of the temple priest and turn to ask, “How old is this extraordinary bell?”
Touching his palm to the massive casting, he responds, “This is about five hundred years old, but” (removing his hand to point into the black void within the bell) “the emptiness within—that’s eternal”..
--Thomas P. Kasulis
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'Where the roots of Western culture ... considered the aim of life the perfection of man, modern man is concerned with the perfection of things, and the knowledge of how to make them.'
– Erich Fromm
-
"Physically we are alone. But in the imagination we are surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our culture."
-Terrence McKenna
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'The trouble with this fellow [the academic materialist] is that no one ever mixed raven's blood with his mother's milk. He is marvelously and uncannily bereft of any sense that existence is odd.'
- Alan Watts
-
I think it was themerchant who brought this quote to my attention, I love it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-Max Planck (German Physicist)
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'The idea of ... empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience in which there is no room for any sort of dichotomy.'
- Daisetsu T. Suzuki
-
"Man, in spite of his impotence, is set up as judge over God himself"
-Carl Jung
=-=-=
'I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.'
-Richard Nixon
-
'The idea of ... empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience in which there is no room for any sort of dichotomy.'
- Daisetsu T. Suzuki
Sniff, sniff ... but I love my dog, Hershey!
-
'I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.'
-Richard Nixon
I take it this one's a joke? It is quite funny :)
-
"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Wow, this one's intense, I love it :)
-
Walking along a mountain path in Japan, we come upon a rudimentary hermitage with a large temple bell suspended from a simple wooden pagoda. Unlike Western carillon bells, the Japanese bell has no clapper and is struck on the outside much as one might strike a gong....Admiring the excellence and obvious age of the engravings on the casting, we hear the footsteps of the temple priest and turn to ask, “How old is this extraordinary bell?”
Touching his palm to the massive casting, he responds, “This is about five hundred years old, but” (removing his hand to point into the black void within the bell) “the emptiness within—that’s eternal”..
--Thomas P. Kasulis
A common feature ( to me ) about Japanese quotes are I ( think ) get them, but can't articulate what I'm getting. They resonate at either multiple levels of my ability to understand, or at a different level than language.
-
I think it was themerchant who brought this quote to my attention, I love it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-Max Planck (German Physicist)
Ha ha, yes, deftly dealt
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“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
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"The sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground."
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
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'I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.'
-Richard Nixon
I take it this one's a joke? It is quite funny :)
As far as I know it's a legit quote lol
-
Great quotes lately everyone.
AS we all know, I am apt of over-fit Bakker and Hegel, so, as to not disappoint my own caricature:
Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finitude that is its own content. Turning away from the husks, and confessing and cursing its sorry state, it now requires from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as philosophy’s help in establishing once more its substantiality and solidity of Being. Philosophy is supposed to meet this need, not by opening up the locked fastness of substance and raising this to self-consciousness, not by restoring its chaotic consciousness to the order of thought and the simplicity of the concept, but rather by blurring the distinctions of thought, by suppressing the differentiating concept and by establishing the feeling of the essence, providing edification rather than insight. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite; not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold advance of necessity in the Thing, but the ferment of enthusiasm, these are supposed to be what sustains and promotes the expansion of the wealth of substance.
Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit
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In the case of all sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, people are convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, it seems that the dominant prejudice is now that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and gets leather and a tool, is thereby in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize, and how to evaluate philosophy, since he possesses the yardstick for it in his natural reason—as if he did not equally possess the measure of a shoe in his own foot.—It seems that philosophical competence is made to consist precisely in lack of information and study, as though philosophy left off where they begin.
Hegel - The Phenomenology of Spirit
You funny Hegel...
-
I quite like that last one, H!
"There is much talk, and I have listened, through rock and metal and time. Now I shall talk, and you shall listen."
-- Halo 2
-
"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dalí."
"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."
-- Salvador Dalí
-
“The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant
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“The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant
The hand dispensing salvific murder is absolved of responsibility for it is the expression of a common will, the sacrosanct will of the Just.
- Ad Arma! Ad Arma!
-
"Everyone believes in the Devil when the Sun goes down...at least a little bit..."
-Me
edit:
"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Reminds me of this museum curator I'd heard of who would comment on the natural history of man:
"From the Stone Age til now..my God, what a decline!"
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"We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us.
What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth?
We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road alone."
--Symmachus, (c. 340-c. 405), asking for the continuance of pagan ceremonies in the now Christian Roman Empire
Always liked this quote since reading it in highschool, though I guess now with the nutjobs on the 'Net you have to point out some ways of seeking the truth might make a difference if they involve doing evil shit to others...
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"Right now we're computational machines that consume the planet.
We need to be living imaginative beings that co-create the affordances that bloom the planet and in that process we bloom also."
-Bonnitta Roy
-
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
-Richard Lewontin, review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997)
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"I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all."
-Peter Hankins, Conscious Entities
"Be careful with favors, because it's funny how quickly a favor becomes an obligation."
-Me
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"I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all."
-Peter Hankins, Conscious Entities
Hmm, yeah, I'm really unsure how I should be considering Moral Realism. I find it hard to believe, but on the other hand, it seems weird if there isn't.
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Hmm, yeah, I'm really unsure how I should be considering Moral Realism. I find it hard to believe, but on the other hand, it seems weird if there isn't.
Do you believe in Mathematical Realism? But yes, Moral Realism has a "leap of faith" aspect.
=-=-=
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Merdian
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"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
-Wittgenstein
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"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
-Wittgenstein
All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.
Nagarjuna
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"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
-Wittgenstein
All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.
Nagarjuna
Reminds me of what Deleuze and Guattari say in What is Philosophy?
"Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance. Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it. The philosophical sieve, as plane of immanence that cuts through the chaos, selects infinite movements of thought and is filled with concepts formed like consistent particles going as fast as thought. Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts; by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it through functions. Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference."
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Really like those last two, very thought provoking!
'We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.'
– William James
(one of these days I'm going to end up taking a quote I've saved and posting here only to realize it was from here that I got the quote in the first place)
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(one of these days I'm going to end up taking a quote I've saved and posting here only to realize it was from here that I got the quote in the first place)
Then the thread is working ;D
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"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game".
Game developer Soren Johnson (https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369)
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"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates. And in fact when compared with the Spartan version, Plato's initiation process is more subtle and more arduous. There are a greater number of trials to overcome and, having survived the last, the initiate may find is "the only one." Then there may not be enough time for him to pass on his initiation. And there may not be anyone to follow him, with the result that the chain is broken.
So one day Plato began to write the Republic. And he wrote the text in the form it is in so that one who wanted to understand it might be subjected to that initiatory process of "sufferings and pleasures...labors, fears, and convulsions." The many who did not understand, and were not supposed to understand, imagined they were reading a treatise on the perfect State."
-R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
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That makes me think of what I just heard on a podcast the other day:
"She said, “The elders are pragmatical buggers. We wouldn’t have survived if they weren’t.” And she pushed me to look at this knowledge. These stories that we’re told sound superficial and childlike. That’s because they are, because you don’t get the detailed stories until you’re initiated. And so we’re hearing what the children would hear. So you’re grounding the information in the physical landscape. It’s so much more robust, and then as you get initiated, you get layer upon layer of complexity."
-Lynne Kelly on The MindScape Podcast (https://youtu.be/fYhVkbzr60E?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxY_fRExpDXr87tzRbPCaA5x&t=949) (I backed it up a bit, so you can get a broader context.)
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I dig these two quotes, will be listening to that podcast as well!
Also can't help but think of Seswatha and the Dreams. But if the Mandati are Initiates...what of the Meta-Gnosis?
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I dig these two quotes, will be listening to that podcast as well!
Also can't help but think of Seswatha and the Dreams. But if the Mandati are Initiates...what of the Meta-Gnosis?
I think we are getting a bit afield of the topic at hand, but I think the meta-Gnosis from the angle of Seswatha, is nothing more than a pipedream.
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That Lynne Kelly episode last week was imo probably the most interesting podcast Sean Carroll has had on Mindscape... the idea that essentially all ancient man-made monuments were specifically built and maintained to be used as memory palaces was super interesting and I was surprised that I hadn't given much thought to the methods employed by ancient people to memorize everything important they needed to know. One of those podcasts that had left me with a hell of a lot to think about.
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[it] has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow "debunks" the account given from the inside. "All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from the inside," says the wiseacre, "are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos."
And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, "If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature."
~ C.S. Lewis
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“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
- Shankar Vedantam
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That Lynne Kelly episode last week was imo probably the most interesting podcast Sean Carroll has had on Mindscape... the idea that essentially all ancient man-made monuments were specifically built and maintained to be used as memory palaces was super interesting and I was surprised that I hadn't given much thought to the methods employed by ancient people to memorize everything important they needed to know. One of those podcasts that had left me with a hell of a lot to think about.
Yeah, and then, of course, we were watching Mindhunters season 2 this weekend, so all the talk about "returns to the scene of crimes" also made me think of this as well.
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“Nothing is insignificant, nothing is inconsequential in the universe; an atom can destroy it all, an atom can save it all!”
-Gérard de Nerval
Also two of the Chimeras as translated by Mark Lamoureux
THE DISINHERITED
I am of darkness—widower, —unconsoled
Prince of Aquitaine & the stricken tower:
My one star is dead,—& my lute of the firmament
Bears despair’s black sun.
In night’s tomb, you consoler
Return to me Posilipo & the Italian sea,
That bloom so pleasured by my blighted heart,
& that trellis where the vine & the rose align.
Am I love or Phoebus?...Lusignan or Biron?
My face still red from the queen’s kiss;
I’ve dreamed in the cavern where the siren swims...
& two times crossed & won the Acheron:
Sang by & by of the lyre of Orpheus,
The saint’s sighs & the faerie’s shriek.
=-=-=
GILDED VERSE
And so! Everything is sentient!
-Pythagoras
Man, free thinker! You think you alone think
In this world where life splatters everywhere?
You’re free to dispose of your charge,
But the firmament’s gone from your schemes.
Respect the spirit that moves in beasts:
Every flower a ghost that opens to Nature,
Every alloy harbors the secrets of love;
“Everything is sentient,” & everything can change you,
Fear the eyes in blind walls,
Even dead matter is infused with a verb,
Don’t use it perversely.
Even in the shunned ones lives a secret god,
Like a nascent eye obscured by its lids,
A pure spirit blooms behind the veil of stones.
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Who is it, that carries this corpse around?
– Zen Koan
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Being alone is painful, but it’s pain you can get used to, like a chronic ache in the back, the stomach, in the hands. You have your dignity to brace yourself with, although it may not go numb until you get too old. It is the pain of not quite being a walking corpse. Even the coward who cringes inside his paroxysm of fright is more alive.
People must hurt each other, as inevitably as they breathe. Nothing can stop it. It’s not enough to accept it. Accepting it is not enough, like sighing resignedly and putting on an attitude of long-suffering. Don’t get to be too good at protecting yourself. You’ve got to be ripped to pieces for the one you love, again and again. That doesn’t prove anything but love, and its entitlements are a frailty that can’t be held. But you will live even in that hell. The fire that hurts you gives off light like any other fire, that illuminates beautiful things, and that is beautiful itself.
Far below, a new light, spreading in all directions. I see the deep sun. Sinking toward it, I begin to feel its warmth.
-Michael Cisco, The Great Lover
I don't think Cisco is trying to advocate putting up with physical abuse, rather I think he's saying love not only can be but will be torturous emotionally...
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I kinda see what he's getting at but... jeez thats a depressing way to look/phrase it.
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"Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. Who the hell do you think you are, that you should worry?
That is God's truth. Worry is praying to the devil. Worry is betting against yourself. Worry is preposterous."
Terence McKenna
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"Hating and avoiding cliffhangers or lack of closure is for the weak"
- Red Eagle
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I hope that quote, which is missing a period, was transcribed exactly as written.
The absence of the punctuation is very
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"It wouldn't hurt to light a candle for Jona - We are, all of us, feeling for the worlds that move between the cracks in our senses.
Light a candle for your friend. Good hearts push through many boundaries.
Have faith, Christoff.
Have faith in something."
-JM McDermott, Never Knew Another
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"Ah, you realize that magick is something we do to ourselves. But it is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernormal power in ourselves."
- Aleister Crowley
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We are now in a position to draw out the implications of Dasein's special way of being, which is existence. Cultures and cultural institutions have existence as their way of being, and so does each of us. To exist is to take a stand on what is essential about one's being and to be defined by that stand. Thus Dasein is what, in its social activity, it interprets itself to be. Human beings do not already have some specific nature. It makes no sense to ask whether we are essentially rational animals, creatures of God, organisms with built-in needs, sexual beings, or complex computers. Human beings can interpret themselves in any of these ways and many more, and they can, in varying degrees, become any of these things, but to be human is not to be essentially any of them. Human being is essentially simply self-interpreting.
Hubert Dreyfus - Being-in-the-world: A Commentary of Heidegger's Being And Time
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"my son is no bigger than a grub...where does he live? at the moment, between the leaves of a book. this is where he runs the least risk of being lost. inversely, he risks being squashed, if someone puts something on the book. otherwise he rests between the leaves without much difficulty.
what is the future for such a grub?
not much hope. he'll vegetate. if he stays this size.
but then slowly he takes on substance. this is doubtless the result of my efforts: sometimes i take him out, i place him in a bed, or outside, for after all he has a right to the world, and he seems to lean toward life. the danger that someone unaware will crush him remains. little by little he even gains in intelligence. he begins to think, to be happy, to become a real living being.
obviously, he is very far behind, since he has existed in this form for months. but now he has really decided to catch up. now i spy him running, having gone downstairs, and climbing...
i feel happiness, love for my grub leaving his twilight state. seeing life "crystallize" is such a blessing...."
-Helene Cixous, 'The School of Dreams'
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"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."
– Anaïs Nin
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'The mystical is an irreducible, primordial phenomenon, a basic, primordial givenness that cannot be traced back to or derived from some other phenomena, such as colours, sounds, values, and so on.'
– Gerda Walther
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The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philosophy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
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"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates....
-R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
'For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?
This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'
-Plotinus
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Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
-William Blake
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“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
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"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates....
-R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
'For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?
This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'
-Plotinus
Awesome quotes as usual! Love that first one.
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"How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home?"
- Zhuangzi
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intellligence by means of our language".
- Wittgenstein
"Whatever happens at all, happens as it should."
- Marcus Aurelius
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"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.
Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."
-JRR Tolkien
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"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.
Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."
-JRR Tolkien
People do terrible things to each other when it all falls apart Slade.
But it's always the same things.
That's what makes our job easier.
-Grant Morrison, The Filth
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“Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution
=-=-=
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
-Gerard Manley Hopkin
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‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.’
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Here, however, lies the task of any philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even if they are catastrophic. The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes.
—Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
From the beginning you beings are deluded
Because you do not recognize
The awareness of the ground
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We are entering a new era of paranoid warfare in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. It is only with this thoroughgoing "dematerialization" -when Marx's famous thesis from The Communist Manifesto, that in capitalism "all that is solid melts into air;' acquires a much more literal meaning than the one he had in mind, when our material social reality is not only dominated by the spectral or speculative movement of Capital but is itself progressively "spectralized" (the "Protean Self" replacing the old self identical Subject, the elusive fluidity of its experiences superseding the stability of owned objects), in short, when the usual relationship between solid material objects and fluid ideas is inverted (objects are progressively dissolved in fluid experiences, while the only stable things are virtual symbolic obligations)-its only at this point that what Derrida called the spectral aspect of capitalism is fully actualized.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
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I forgot to note that the above quote, and Less than Nothing was published in 2012. Seems pretty precinct, or at least, an accurate surmising of where we were going then.
This brings us to Hegel's basic criticism of Kant, of his insistence on the limitation that our tinitude imposes on our knowledge. It is that, beneath Kant's modesty, there is a hidden arrogance: when Kant claims that we humans, constrained by our finite Understanding, cannot ever come to know the totality of the universe, he continues to represent this infinite task as one that another, infinite, Understanding would be able to accomplish, as if the problem is simply one of extending or extrapolating our capacity to infinity, rather than changing it qualitatively. The model for such false reasoning is the well-known naturalist-determinist idea that, were an infinite mind able to know extensively all the atoms in the universe, their position, force, and movement, it would be able to predict their future behavior with the utmost precision-as if the very notion of a finite mind extended to infinity were not in itself nonsensical. When we represent to ourselves a mind able to grasp infinity, the image we refer to is that of a mind somehow able to count an infinite number of elements in the same way we are able to count a finite number of them. In a wonderfully vicious image, Hegel likens Kant's notion of an infinite mind to the way a poor church organist tries to explain God's greatness to a simple peasant: "In the same way you know every individual in our village by name, God intimately knows every single fly among the infinite number of flies that buzz around the globe . . "
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
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In his reading of Histoire de la folie, Derrida focused on these four pages on Descartes which, for him, provided the key to the entire book. Through a detailed analysis, he tries to demonstrate that, far from excluding madness, Descartes pushes it to an extreme: universal doubt, where I suspect that the entire world is an illusion, is the greatest madness imaginable. Out of this universal doubt the cogito emerges: even if everything is an illusion, I can still be sure that I think. Madness is thus not excluded by the cogito: it is not that the cogito is not mad, but the cogito[ is true even if I am totally mad. Extreme doubt, the hypotheSiS of universal madness, is not external to philosophy, but strictly internal to it, a hyperbolic moment, the moment of madness, which grounds philosophy. Of course, Descartes later "domesticates" this radical excess with his image of man as a thinking substance, dominated by reason; he constructs a philosophy which is clearly historically conditioned. But the excess, the hyperbole of universal madness, is not itself historical; it is the excessive moment which grounds philosophy in all its historical forms. Madness is thus not excluded by philosophy: it is internal to it. Of course, every philosophy tries to control this excess, to repress it-but in repressing it, it represses its own innermost foundation: "Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness."
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
This book is a flat gold mine of Bakker tangential thought. Why does Akka relate the Outside as "madness?" For likely the exact reason given by Derrida and related above to us by Žižek.
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All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "I will." "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and thou shalt not stop me." Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the THING he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
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All the will-worshippers, ... The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
This one appears incomplete. I enjoyed where it was going, but not sure what the conclusion/insight is - or is it simply to judge the will-worshippers as misguided? Where/how should we guide instead? It's one thing to illuminate logical fallacy with a position/point of view, but what supersedes the fallacy? Or is what Chesteron is saying that Free Will is no more limiting than everything else and not worthy of special focus?
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All the will-worshippers, ... The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
This one appears incomplete. I enjoyed where it was going, but not sure what the conclusion/insight is - or is it simply to judge the will-worshippers as misguided? Where/how should we guide instead? It's one thing to illuminate logical fallacy with a position/point of view, but what supersedes the fallacy? Or is what Chesteron is saying that Free Will is no more limiting than everything else and not worthy of special focus?
Seems less about free will [than critiquing] this idea of the lone iconoclast "willing" themselves into breaking all social contracts/expectations.
If I understand him correctly he is also critiquing "will worship" as excessive hedonism toward whatever one desires.
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"A fool is the one who gives up everything for an idea. The wise fool is the one
who knows that he never had anything to give up in the first place."
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"The head is the head of a serpent,
From his nostrils mucus trickles,
His mouth is beslavered with water;
The ears are like those of a basilisk,
His horns are twisted into three curls,
He wears a veil in his head band,
The body is a suh-fish full of stars,
The base of his feet are claws,
The sole of his foot has no heel,
His name is Sassu-wunnu,
A sea monster, a form of Ea."
- R. C. Thompson's Translation. 1
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This one appears incomplete. I enjoyed where it was going, but not sure what the conclusion/insight is - or is it simply to judge the will-worshippers as misguided? Where/how should we guide instead? It's one thing to illuminate logical fallacy with a position/point of view, but what supersedes the fallacy? Or is what Chesteron is saying that Free Will is no more limiting than everything else and not worthy of special focus?
Well, the main thrust, to me, was this part: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice."
That was the part that Žižek quoted which made me go and look up the source. I think Chesterton's point is that, in a sort of Hegelian way, the "will" is not "positivity" in-itself, rather, the will is the (negative) discriminatory, limiting factor.
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Seems less about free will [than critiquing] this idea of the lone iconoclast "willing" themselves into breaking all social contracts/expectations.
If I understand him correctly he is also critiquing "will worship" as excessive hedonism toward whatever one desires.
Yes, but what is the better road to doing what we want to do. I'm not arguing for the will-worshipers, I agree with what he's saying about it, but what now? Too often I find clever fellows are on to something, but the conclusion is error ( e.g. I find a lot of what Nietzsche wrote profound, or at least interpretations of his works, I don't know German - but some of his conclusions lead to destruction for both the uber man and the herd - so what then, Nietzsche is just coffee table reading? ). So I agree with you Sci, my point is if any action is limitation, what then? It's like he took too broad a brush so his point is irrelevant because no one is simply going to sit and do nothing until they whither away. He could've made his point for all actions of will, not just pick on the will-worshipers.
Well, the main thrust, to me, was this part: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice."
That was the part that Žižek quoted which made me go and look up the source. I think Chesterton's point is that, in a sort of Hegelian way, the "will" is not "positivity" in-itself, rather, the will is the (negative) discriminatory, limiting factor.
So we're better off without it ( will )? We have more options if we don't willfully act? I get it, but what now? Since I'm typing this, I limited myself against all other possible action - clever, but how is this useful?
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So we're better off without it ( will )? We have more options if we don't willfully act? I get it, but what now? Since I'm typing this, I limited myself against all other possible action - clever, but how is this useful?
I don't think we are better or worse off with or without "will" though. I don't think is the point at all.
As his example of marriage proposes, the notion that the will should "dispose" of the injunction "thou shall not" is, in his estimation, nonsense. Why? Because the very limitation of "I shall X" is a implicit "I shall not A, B, C, D, E, F" (and so on).
So, this "will-worship" that he talks about is really a misapplication of some "positive" notional "freedom" that doesn't really exist. Not in the sense that whose who used it seem to want it to be. You can't get rid of the "shall not" any more than you can do everything at once.
So, what he seems to be to be advocating is to embrace limit (and the implicit sacrifice it entails) and not be injective against limitation. I'd also note, that personally, I'd think this should not be taken as being against the notion of transcending limitation. Rather, it's more about taking account of the constitutive role of limitation in creativity (i.e. a notional freedom).
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Such a notion of Absolute Knowing is grounded already in Hegel's definition of Self-Consciousness, in the passage from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness (in the Phenomenology). Consciousness first experiences a failure to grasp the In-itself: the In-itself repeatedly eludes the subject, all content supposed to pertain to the In-itself reveals itself as having been put there by the subject itself, so that the subject becomes increasingly caught up in the web of its own phantasmagorias. The subject passes from the attitude of Consciousness to that of Self-Consciousness when it reflexively assumes this failure as a positive result, inverting the problem into its own solution: the subject's world is the result of its own "positing.'
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
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'Like a geometer, who sets himself to measure, in radii, the exact circumference of the circle, and who cannot find, by thought, the principle he lacks, so was I, at this new sight: I wished to see how the image fitted the circle, and how it was set in place, but my true wings had not been made for this, if it were not that my mind was struck by lightning, from which its will emerged.
Power, here, failed the deep imagining: but already my desire and will were rolled, like a wheel that is turned, equally, by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.'
-Paradiso
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The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages; for they are periods of harmony, periods of the missing opposition.
G.W.F. Hegel - Lectures on the Philosophy of History
-
'Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic.'
– Prof. Sewall G. Wright
=-=-=
"This path to the primordial religious experience is the right one, but how many can recognize it? It is like a still small voice, and it sounds from afar. It is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure; a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God's sake alone, without assurance and without sanction."
-Carl Jung
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"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."
-Thomas Nagel
-
"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."
-Thomas Nagel
Articulated much better than I ever could, but I've felt this way for some time. Though trying may not be a waste of time, we may learn a lot with robotics that could be a boon for humanity. But the idea we can make a computer ( or anything ) conscious beyond the good old fashion way will likely never happen.
I've had this idea for a somewhat scifi story/movie/something ( I'm a shit writer, so it'll forever rot in my head ) whereas we did fail to generate artificial intelligence from hard machines, but we made some ground with soft machinery and succeeded in creating a brain from scratch as a brain ( meaning wholly organic with exact bio materials as a human brain ) and a consciousness shows up ( emerges? ). From there we figure out how to disable the mechanism that allows us to forget and then build another brain and we ask the "person" who shows up where they came from. A lot of details have to be worked out, like is it an infantile consciousness that arrives and we have to wait for it to grow up, learn language, does disabling forgetfulness drive it insane, etc. But I think it could be suspenseful story building up to "summoning" a consciousness that will remember where it came from. So if my story is "true", what's showing up would be a soul.
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A lot of details have to be worked out, like is it an infantile consciousness that arrives and we have to wait for it to grow up, learn language, does disabling forgetfulness drive it insane, etc. But I think it could be suspenseful story building up to "summoning" a consciousness that will remember where it came from. So if my story is "true", what's showing up would be a soul.
Very Hegelian, I like it. I love Hegel's line from The Phenomenology, "Wir sehen hiermit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes." (So, again, we see language as the Dasein [being-there] of Spirit.)
Yet one cannot maintain that the sensible is injected by me into things like some sort of perpetual and arbitrary hallucination. For there is indeed a constant link between real things and their sensations: if there were no thing capable of giving rise to the sensation of redness, there would be no perception of a red thing; if there were no real fire, there would be no
sensation of burning. But it makes no sense to say that the redness or the heat can exist as qualities just as well without me as with me: without the perception of redness, there is no red thing; without the sensation of heat, there is no heat. Whether it be affective or perceptual, the sensible only exists as a relation: a relation between the world and the living creature I am. In actuality, the sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property: it is the very relation between the thing and I. These sensible qualities, which are not in the things themselves but in my subjective relation to the latter – these qualities correspond to what were traditionally called secondary qualities.
-Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
For Sci (just being a QM quote) and Wilshire (a quote about things in themselves). Mostly though, a quote for me, that someone actually intelligent spells out my vague notion about a relationality.
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Thus, one could say that up until Kant, one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation. Prior to the advent of transcendentalism, one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was ‘Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?’ But ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation? The question is no longer ‘which is the proper substrate?’ but ‘which is the proper correlate?’
-Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
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"You're saying that evil is a means to an end, never an end in itself. But what if evil was more than just a label for antisocial behavior? What if evil was a real force working in the world, capable of drawing people to its service?"
-Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys
=-=-=
"We stood facing each other like two libertines...I think it was then that I told him truly why I was not on his side -
Because the Good was more of an Adventure."
-Calasso, Ruins of Kasch
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"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
-
"Being clever's a fine thing, but sometimes a boy just needs to get out of the house and talk to some girls...GAMBLE A STAMP, I CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE A REAL MAN!"
-Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo
-
“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell
-
“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell
"We can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world.'
– RG Collingwood
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In one of the Agatha Christie stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as the beautiful woman he had previously met on a trans-Atlantic voyage, she has merely disguised herself to hide her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, remarks sadly that if a beauty can make herself appear ugly, then the same can also be done vice versa. What then remains in man's infatuation beyond deception? Does this insight into the unreliability of the beautiful woman not Signal the end oflove? "No, my friend;' replies Poirot, "it announces the beginning of wisdom:' In other words, such skepticism, such awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, misses the point, which is that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which appears: no matter how fr agile and deceptive it may be at the level of substantial reality, what transpires in/through the moment of Beauty is an Absolute-there is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it. Therein resides Plato's deep insight: Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances (Plato was well aware that this hidden reality is that of ever-changing corrupting and corrupted matter); Ideas are nothing but the very form of appearance, this form as such- - or, as Lacan succinctly rendered Plato's point, the supra-sensible is appearance as appearance. For this reason, neither Plato nor Christianity are forms of Wisdom-they are both anti-Wisdom embodied.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
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We don’t see the instantaneous locations of objects and infer movement. We see movement. The movement is part of the immediate uninferred contents of our perceptions. To have an experience that represents an object as in motion, the content of the experience must have temporal breadth; it must span a temporal interval. To see the force of this remark, we distinguish a changing representation from a representation of change. The first requires two experiences with different contents. The second requires a single experience whose content spans that of a pair of instantaneous experiences and compares them with one another. A movie screen that displays a different image at different moments doesn’t represent change. The image on the screen at any given moment only displays an instantaneous state of the environment. Representing change requires having contents that span a finite interval and compare experiences at different moments. The fact that change is something that we see directly—that is, that change is represented in the immediate uninferred contents of sensory experience—means that synthesis is integrating over time, not just across modalities. Concepts of space and time are constructed together by the mind as part of a unitary framework in which we and the objects of sensory attention are simultaneously located and related to one another. The concepts of things as objects of perception and one’s self as subject of experience are stabilized out of regularities over an extended stream of experiences, and they embody presumptions about the way things hang together over time.
Jeanne Ismael - How Physics Makes Us Free
A pretty good description of the Kantian perspective on how/why space and time are something like a priori categories of mind, and so the (sort of) "beginning" of Transcendental Idealism.
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In one of the Agatha Christie stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as the beautiful woman he had previously met on a trans-Atlantic voyage, she has merely disguised herself to hide her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, remarks sadly that if a beauty can make herself appear ugly, then the same can also be done vice versa. What then remains in man's infatuation beyond deception? Does this insight into the unreliability of the beautiful woman not Signal the end oflove? "No, my friend;' replies Poirot, "it announces the beginning of wisdom:' In other words, such skepticism, such awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, misses the point, which is that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which appears: no matter how fr agile and deceptive it may be at the level of substantial reality, what transpires in/through the moment of Beauty is an Absolute-there is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it. Therein resides Plato's deep insight: Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances (Plato was well aware that this hidden reality is that of ever-changing corrupting and corrupted matter); Ideas are nothing but the very form of appearance, this form as such- - or, as Lacan succinctly rendered Plato's point, the supra-sensible is appearance as appearance. For this reason, neither Plato nor Christianity are forms of Wisdom-they are both anti-Wisdom embodied.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
I was following until the last line, where did the critique of Christianity come from and how is its Anti-Wisdom nature equal to Plato?
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I was following until the last line, where did the critique of Christianity come from and how is its Anti-Wisdom nature equal to Plato?
Zizek is a classic rambler. It's hard to disentangle just what he is getting at there, but I don't think he is equating the two, just likening.
If I had to take a stab at trying to unravel what he is likening though, it's that both apart from the wisdom that, in Zizek's words there, "is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it."
Also, there is a lot more to Zizek's take on Christianity than I can rightly, or even try, to summarize in a concise way unfortunately. Maybe in time I can, once I read more and more of his stuff.
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“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell
"We can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world.'
– RG Collingwood
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma. ... Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
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"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
-Gilles Deleuze
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"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
-Gilles Deleuze
"It is a time of false leaders, false nations and false gods. Men will come to convince you there is no evil, nor is there good. They will make one the other and destroy both. They will use the word "peace" to mean war. They will use the word "freedom" to mean slavery. They will blind you to what you know to be true until you no longer trust yourself.
You must not listen.
Comfort is not safety. Comfort is a thing to fear. All that challenges you is not your enemy. The firm hand strikes, but it can also hold you at the cliff. The soft hand comforts, but you will slip through its grasp. Civilization will teach that comfort is the only goal. Comfort of body. Comfort of mind. This is the path of defeat. This is the banishment of your own power. Those who wrap you in comfort seek to destroy you. They will praise you when you fear the world. They will hunt you when you hunt your fear. Be naked in the coldest day of winter so that you can love the warmth of the sun. Lay your body on stone so you can love the embrace of hay. Let adversity teach you. The hands of the forger must be firm and relentless, for the most important moment of the sword is the moment of tempering. This is tamashii o ireru. This is when the soul is put into the blade. What you choose will forge you.
And no sword can be forged twice."
-Bryan Hill, Fallen Angels #3
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“I am drawn to the idea that relational properties do need an intrinsic ground, and this tends to lead towards a panpsychist picture because the only intrinsic nature we have access to is qualitative consciousness itself.”
- William Seager
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“Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.”
― Michael Cisco, The Traitor
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“Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.”
― Michael Cisco, The Traitor
'This man who has come, this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and rites, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl's, who bedecks himself with bones, who laughs and cries for no reason - Why should I give She-Who-Is to someone who, every time I see him, seems to me the opposite of everything I wanted to be myself, of everything I wanted life to be?
Why did I compose so many rites, so many words, why did I generate She-Who-Is, just to have everything stolen from me one day by the one who is its living negation?"
-Daksha speaking of Shiva in Roberto Calasso's Ka
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“Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.”
― Michael Cisco, The Traitor
'This man who has come, this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and rites, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl's, who bedecks himself with bones, who laughs and cries for no reason - Why should I give She-Who-Is to someone who, every time I see him, seems to me the opposite of everything I wanted to be myself, of everything I wanted life to be?
Why did I compose so many rites, so many words, why did I generate She-Who-Is, just to have everything stolen from me one day by the one who is its living negation?"
-Daksha speaking of Shiva in Roberto Calasso's Ka
KAPELA: Just look above you. Do you see? That is called the immense board of lights. And there is the Great Black and, strewn across it, small and surrounded and vulnerable and brave, there is the Great White.
COMMUTER: Oh. Oh, yeah. Of course. Hah. You know, that's perfect. That's really perfect. And the Great White... I mean, there's so much more black. A-are we losing?
KAPELA: No. Once there was only black. We are winning.
-Alan Moore, Top 10
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“Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.”
― Michael Cisco, The Traitor
'This man who has come, this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and rites, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl's, who bedecks himself with bones, who laughs and cries for no reason - Why should I give She-Who-Is to someone who, every time I see him, seems to me the opposite of everything I wanted to be myself, of everything I wanted life to be?
Why did I compose so many rites, so many words, why did I generate She-Who-Is, just to have everything stolen from me one day by the one who is its living negation?"
-Daksha speaking of Shiva in Roberto Calasso's Ka
KAPELA: Just look above you. Do you see? That is called the immense board of lights. And there is the Great Black and, strewn across it, small and surrounded and vulnerable and brave, there is the Great White.
COMMUTER: Oh. Oh, yeah. Of course. Hah. You know, that's perfect. That's really perfect. And the Great White... I mean, there's so much more black. A-are we losing?
KAPELA: No. Once there was only black. We are winning.
-Alan Moore, Top 10
Yajnavalkaya said: I know that for many of you the real torment is that you must abandon your dear bodies. You imagine, not unreasonably, that the happiness of a disembodied spirit has something dreary about it. But that is not the case. After death, you will find yourself wandering through a haze, shouting without being heard, but all at once it will be you who hear. You will become aware that someone is following you, like an animal in the forest, only now in the darkness of the heavens. The person following you is your oblation, the being composed of the offering you made in your life. In a whisper, he will say to you: 'Come here, come here, it is I, your Self.' And in the end you will follow him.
-Calasso, Ka: Stories of Mind & the Gods of India
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Want to take over the world?
Think again.
The world's a holy place.
You can't just fuck around with it.
Those who try to change it destroy it.
Those who try to possess it lose it.
~Lao Tzu
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The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.
-William Blake
But once one finds oneself in the cavern, escape is only viable if one accepts that, whilst in it, one must act by the rules of the cavern; by the terms of Urizen, the guarding demiurge, for as long as he calls the shots and is looking; for ignoring the reality of the cavern's dominance only ensures that one remains locked in it forever, banging one's heads against the rocks. The path to breaking the incantation -- to Blake's freedom -- entails a form of sincere cooperation that precedes the final betrayal; the betrayal that brings meaning back to absurdity. But since Urizen polices from within, one's left hand must not know what one's right hand is doing, and one must sincerely feel loyalty towards the demiurge.
-Benardo Kastrup
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I once asked the lama of Enche what would be the post-mortem subjective visions of a materialist who had looked upon death as total annihilation.
"Perhaps," said the lama, "such man would see apparitions corresponding to the religious beliefs he held in his childhood, or to those, familiar to him, held by the people among whom he has lived. According to the degree of his intelligence and his post-mortem lucidity, he would, perhaps, examine and analyse these visions and remember the reasons which, during his life-time, made him deny the reality of that which now appears to him. He might, thus, conclude that he is beholding a mirage. "A less intelligent man in whom belief in total annihilation was the result of indifference or dullness, rather than of reasoning, will, perhaps, see no vision at all. However, this will not prevent the energy generated by his past actions from following its course and manifesting itself through new phenomena. In other words, it will not prevent the rebirth of the materialist."
-Alexandra David-Neel
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-Alexandra David-Neel
Nice!
Time dependent limerick from PK Dick, as recounted by Tim Powers ->
The version for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays was:
Determinist forces are wrong,
And irresistibly strong;
While of God there's a dearth,
For He visits the Earth
But not for sufficiently long.
And the version for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays differed in the last three lines:
Determinist forces are wrong,
And irresistibly strong;
But of God there's no dearth,
For He visits the Earth,
But just for sufficiently long.
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Thought I already posted this but Search says, "Not yet" ->
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.
The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
-
Thought I already posted this but Search says, "Not yet" ->
You did post this before ( you are most memorable ;) ), but that's ok, this is a good one and deserves repeating.
-
It is good enough to be worth two whole Db entries, 8)
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Don't trust our search function, sci. Also, I searched "Italo Calvino" who has apparently come up a number of times on the forum. Interesting.
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Don't trust our search function, sci. Also, I searched "Italo Calvino" who has apparently come up a number of times on the forum. Interesting.
If I can't trust Search...how I can trust anything my senses tell me?!
"You've become lost in Game disguised as Everything...try to Remember."
-Grant Morrison, Invisibles
=-=-=
Stone whispers
Patience
But we take chisel in hand
Child begs
Not yet
But the sands have run out
Sky cries
Fly
But we hold our ground
Wind sings
Free
But roots bind us down
Lover sighs
Stay
But we must be gone
Life pleads
Live
But death is the dream
We beg
Not yet
But the sands have run out
Stone whispers
Patience…
-Steven Erikson
-
What if we posit that “Things-in-themselves” emerge against the background of the Void of Nothingness, the way this Void is conceived in quantum physics, as not just a negative void, but the portent of all possible reality? This is the only true consistent “transcendental materialism” which is possible after the Kantian transcendental idealism. For a true dialectician, the ultimate mystery is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there nothing rather than something?”
-Slavoj Žižek
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/670930011972436003/687942816646561812/unknown.png)
- 14th Dalai Lama
For the precise reason that without this primordial antagonism we could not explain the minimal distinction between the void and its vibrations, between the nothing and the ontologically incomplete realities barely distinguishable from it—in short, how the symmetries between particles and forces could have been broken in the first place.
- Slovaj Žižek
-
FB, you're on Less Than Nothing now? It is a pretty good book.
-
What if we posit that “Things-in-themselves” emerge against the background of the Void of Nothingness, the way this Void is conceived in quantum physics, as not just a negative void, but the portent of all possible reality? This is the only true consistent “transcendental materialism” which is possible after the Kantian transcendental idealism. For a true dialectician, the ultimate mystery is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there nothing rather than something?”
-Slavoj Žižek
Every now and then I suspect Zizek is more than a cranky slob. ;-)
=-=-=
"What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever."
-Wittgenstein
"you have a home for sure merlinus. as to the worthiness of my mind --"
theo stares squarely into the smoky crystal of the traveler's eyes.
"i must warn you now your gold cannot buy my mind. i am an acolyte.
i go every day at noon to the church to keep up my studies for the priesthood.
if you stay with us, you can bet i will do my best to win you to our Savior.
please, take your coins back and move out now if that offends you."
Merlinus squeezes his hand with genuine affection and promises him,
"Nothing done with love offends me."
Theo smiles widely, teeth white and even as truth, his heart glad with
the innocent pride that faith brings.
--Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn
-
A voice claps through their souls, so loud it draws blood through the
pores of their skin.
The Gates are no longer guarded.
Mimara is also on her knees, also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow
find her purse, begin fumbling, pinching the Chorae that nearly killed
the Wizard. She cringes beneath the looming aspect, a child beneath a
collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs against the piercing pleas of
little mouths, the moaning masses of the damned....
And somehow lifts her Tear of God.
She knows not what she does. She knows only what she glimpsed in the
slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat of light and revelation. She
knows what she saw with the Judging Eye.
The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand
and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the
eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind.
"I guard them!", she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached
Seal. "I hold the Gates!"
-The Judging Eye
-
"The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality--the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical--as compatible with each other, and embrace them simultaneously."
- Wolfgang Pauli
-
"Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it." –Andrew Boyd
-
'There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.'
– Jorge Luis Borges
'Men ... think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.'
– Charles Mackay
"...I just had the most awful, amazing dream. I was so far away, in the dark.
Then I saw your grave.
I...I read the inscription...and that's when I knew everything would be okay.
That's when I woke up."
-Lois to Clark, Superman Beyond: 3D
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‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.’
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
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‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.’
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
And do you understand why this is?
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"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
And do you understand why this is?
My guess would be the fear of being alone is often confused for love?
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"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
And do you understand why this is?
My guess would be the fear of being alone is often confused for love?
If your happiness is dependent on another, that is not love. Happiness independent on whose around ( "allowing" you to be alone ) frees you to love others, proper.
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"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."
-Thomas Nagel
“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”
-Douglas Adams
“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
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In front of the bear that has just been cut into pieces, the hunter murmurs a prayer of vertiginous sweetness:
“Allow me to kill you even in the future.”
Roberto Calasso, The Celestial Hunter
=-=-=
Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality?
In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.
-Hans Hoffman
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“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell
"We can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world.'
– RG Collingwood
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma. ... Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
“The physical world is only known as regards certain abstract features of its space-time structure—features which, because of their abstractness, do not suffice to show whether the world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind.”
- Bertrand Russell
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I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.
— Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1967)
The theory has, indeed, two powerful bodies of fact in its favour, and only one thing against it. First, in its favour are all the marvellous agreements that the theory has had with every experimental result to date. Second, it is a theory of astonishing and profound mathematical beauty. The one thing that can be said against it is that it makes absolutely no sense!
— Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose (1986)
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"The Greeks had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as such--instead, depth psychology & psychopathology. Therefore, psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress."
-James Hillman
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"The Greeks had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as such--instead, depth psychology & psychopathology. Therefore, psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress."
-James Hillman
La Lune au plain de nuict sur le haut mont,
Le nouueau sophe d’un seul cerueau la veu:
Par ses disciples estre Immortel semond,
Yeux au mydi, en seins mains corps au feu.
—Nostradamus, Quatrain 4, 31
The Moon in the full of night over the high mountain,
The new philosopher sees this with a unique brain:
By his disciples summoned to be immortal,
Eyes to the zenith, hands in the breasts of burning bodies.
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'Materialism ... is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself in his calculation.'
– Schopenhauer
“It is an odd sort of intellect which ranks matter before itself and attributes real being to matter but not to itself.” -Plotinus
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"Given the opportunity, humanity will use science to explain themselves out of existence entirely."
- Francis Buck
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"Let me tell it to you like this; inside one's head there is a brain. Now that brain is blind, deaf, and dumb. It can only go about animalistic procedures, and it has no real knowledge of what it feels like. For an illustration let us say that the very high entity so-and-so wanted to experience what it was like to be burned. Well, in his own body he would not be able to get down to the rough, crude vibrations necessary for one to feel the burn, but in this lower entity body—yes, burns can be felt, so the super-entity enters the substitute body and then the necessary conditions occur and perhaps the super-entity can get to know what it is like through the experience of its substitute. The body can see, the brain cannot.”
- Tibetan Sage
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"Let me tell it to you like this; inside one's head there is a brain. Now that brain is blind, deaf, and dumb. It can only go about animalistic procedures, and it has no real knowledge of what it feels like. For an illustration let us say that the very high entity so-and-so wanted to experience what it was like to be burned. Well, in his own body he would not be able to get down to the rough, crude vibrations necessary for one to feel the burn, but in this lower entity body—yes, burns can be felt, so the super-entity enters the substitute body and then the necessary conditions occur and perhaps the super-entity can get to know what it is like through the experience of its substitute. The body can see, the brain cannot.”
- Tibetan Sage
Nice, to me, these are notions of "extended mind" and "embodied consciousness," which I think I am with. But I always fail going full panpsychist though.
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And where was Atman to be found...but in one's own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself?
But where, where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part?
-Herman Hesse
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And where was Atman to be found...but in one's own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself?
But where, where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part?
-Herman Hesse
Any manifestation, any functioning, any witnessing, can only take place in duality. There has to be a subject and an object, they are two, but they are not two, they are two ends of the same thing. When consciousness stirs, duality arises. There are millions of objects, but each object,when it sees another, assumes the subjectivity of the Absolute ....
-Nisargadatta Maharaj
Each one of us, as a phenomenon, is merely an appearance in the consciousness of those who perceive us, and, therefore, what we appear to be is a phenomenon — temporal, finite and perceptible to the senses, whereas what we are, what we have always been and always will be, without name and form, is the noumenon — timeless,spaceless imperceptible being.
-Ramesh Balsekar
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...there’s no such thing as “technology” in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification, used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential members and groups within the political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of the public. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.
Greer, John Michael. The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil . Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.
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...there’s no such thing as “technology” in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification, used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential members and groups within the political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of the public. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.
Greer, John Michael. The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil . Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.
"Which is greater, the tears you have shed while transmigrating across lives & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — or the water in the four great oceans? Which is greater, the blood you have shed from having your heads cut off while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time, or the water in the four great oceans?
From an in-construable beginning comes lifetimes of transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating and wandering on. Just as a stick thrown up in the air lands sometimes on its base, sometimes on its side, sometimes on its tip; in the same way, beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, transmigrating and wandering on, sometimes go from this world to another world, sometimes come from another world to this.
Long have you thus experienced suffering, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabrications, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released."
-Siddhārtha Gautama
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"The meaning of the water bearer for Aquarius is that the star sign can carry the emotions of others and not be influenced by them. This has to do with their quest for higher truth. They are able to carry emotions to reach an understanding of the truth. Aquarius bears the water, it can carry the water, or it can pour out the water with their mind. Aquarius has the ability to do this because carrying or transmitting water, which represents our emotions, happens through language. And, the Air signs, such as Aquarius, represent language. Aquarius is able to express emotions but it’s not the emotions -- or the 'water' -- itself."
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"The meaning of the water bearer for Aquarius is that the star sign can carry the emotions of others and not be influenced by them. This has to do with their quest for higher truth. They are able to carry emotions to reach an understanding of the truth. Aquarius bears the water, it can carry the water, or it can pour out the water with their mind. Aquarius has the ability to do this because carrying or transmitting water, which represents our emotions, happens through language. And, the Air signs, such as Aquarius, represent language. Aquarius is able to express emotions but it’s not the emotions -- or the 'water' -- itself."
I am very curious about this turn toward the Zodiac...I kinda feel like there are RPG aspects to the Zodiac that haven't been properly explored/exploited...
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Hah, in a way the Elder Scrolls games do this (can't remember exactly, there's definitely part of your characters build that involves an element of this). But, I actually think you're spot on in regards to IRL application. I've never thought of it in the RPG context but it totally fits. I definitely could see that part of the (at least western) Zodiac was/is like having a "class" in life of sorts, albeit an entirely optional one lol (of course in the past it was likely to have been taken much more seriously, depending on the individual).
This also makes me think of the Tibetan Lamas, who are alleged to have incredibly complex astrology with individual horoscopes being a massive undertaking. And since everything in Tibetan Buddhism is turned up to 11, they also claim that the zodiacs used by most of the world are all useless, since the skies they're based on are ancient and don't actually correspond with present times. The Tibetans update theirs...which, while interesting, does not actually explain how one can determine with great accuracy when and where someone will be reincarnated lol. (Not to mention the reincarnation itself)
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"For all that modern Western civilization draws from ancient Greece, there is a subtle yet profound difference in their perspective of history. The Classical Greek worldview may be characterized by appreciation for the beauty of the human body and mind, and crucially, a preference for the local and the present moment. The Greeks, as yet untainted by the traumas of Roman Catholic oppression, were a fundamentally ahistorical people. That Classical culture -- not unlike the Hindhu or Far East even today -- did not feel so strongly a pang of anxious, borderline existential terror when confronted with a new, previously undocumented event or discovery. But when Christian ideology permeated Western thought, this natural flexibilty was utterly lost. History became a largely fixed narrative, tweaked gingerly here or there but never radically renovated, and so it was rendered intrinsically dogmatic. And yet to this very day, when the West has by all appearances become secular, rational, and scientifically-minded, there remains a deeply ingrained and vestigial mindset of the Biblical historical predisposition, a useless relic that has yet to be cast aside for no other reason than that too few even recognize that it still lingers at all. Should one dare to point out this tragic irony, the proposition is met inevitably with outright denial, unthinkingly bereft of introspection or self-awareness, and in-so evoking the very same non-scientific, irrational, childlike attitude that is otherwise so easily recognized as the identifying characteristic of the staunch, Abrahamic worldview in any other context."
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"For all that modern Western civilization draws from ancient Greece..."
Who are you quoting? Yourself?
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;)
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"This idea that we travel through our lives as a group with several people that we have this core connection to, led by perhaps one bodhisattva, working on issues within our core character through the different lifespans, returning to the bardo, and then spinning out again. Beautiful."
-Years of Rice & Salt
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"Man fears Time -- Time fears the Pyramids."
- Arabian Proverb
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2:1 - Wherefore are the Kings of thy nations, those who allege rulership over other Men, just as these same Men do allege rulership over the beasts of the land and the trees of the forest? Wherefore are the High Priests of thy wretched temples, who mock the birds of the air, or the misers, the moneylenders, who hoard all the precious gems and fine metals? Not a one of these worked for earnest betterment of their fellow man, and so it is they have vanished from the earth, gone below into the Pit that is the Dragon's Maw, and their souls given to my cruelest and most cunning daughter, and in wrath did she Judge. Know thee now righteous fear at last? Now, in the claws of the Black Lioness, She: my most clever and carnivorus daughter, that Mistress-of-Ashes, whose name Men know as Annhilation?
2:2 - And lo! see how others now arisen come to take their place...Will they recall their forerunners whose labours were beyond measure? Nay. This is the land where man wages war forever on his kinsmen without worthy cause, over and again. They do not learn even when my Laws have been set in the foundations of the world's beginning and although they may be allowed to bend, only my by hand can they be broken.
2:3 - See now how this land is burnt down? The souls are gathered as wheat from harvest and facing up like their forefathers did to that snarling visage of the Lioness, my daughter: the Lady-of-the-Crowns, Anaretar! whose eyes are lightning and whose roar is thunder, before which such wicked souls are stricken dumb, deaf, blind. Before her they know not how to atone; so it is that they are all of them eternally Damned.
- Divine Laws, the Enchiridion.
"At the background of the Cosmos are the eternally spinning spheres of the Dau-Dei, expressed in the World as the primordial twins, as the Ensifera -- Sword-Bearer. Forever do they dance in perfect discord, and constantly they are at play as the life-breath of Creation. Therefore the Ensifera is not any special person, not confined to any specific country, race nor by any border. This is the highest secret of the Metaphysique, and it is full of science. In the formula of the Twins, the primeval human is qualified by the same quality as the God."
- The Book of Singularities
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"The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life."
-Goethe
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Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.
Soren Kierkegaard - Sickness unto Death
EDIT: Wow, can't believe that actually worked. Are posts maybe OK now? Maybe I'll try a real Hegel quote and see...
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There is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness come to be for it; I, which is the object of its concept, is in fact not object; the object of desire, however, is only independent, for it is the universal indestructible substance, the fluid essence equal-to-its-own-self. When a self-consciousness is the object, the object is just as much I as object.—With this, we already have before us the concept of spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is, this absolute substance which, in the perfect freedom and independence of its opposition, viz. of diverse self-consciousnesses that are for themselves, is the unity of these self-consciousnesses: I that is We, and We that is I. It is in self-consciousness, as the concept of spirit, that consciousness first has its turning-point, where it leaves behind the colourful semblance of the sensory here-and-now and the empty night of the supersensible Beyond, and steps out into the spiritual day of presence.
G.W.F. Hegel - The Phenomenology of Spirit
(https://i.imgur.com/P8aOnye.png)
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Bravo.
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Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
-Emerson
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Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
-Emerson
Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
—Erwin Schrödinger
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"...after so many names and so many unnamings, so many disappointments, so many dullings and dyings, what we nickname God must seem obscure and impossible.
That does not mean It will ever have been captured by the names of what has died."
-Catherine Keller
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"At a time when over the whole world a nameless drama is taking place and when men are fighting each other without any idea why because they’ve never had the courage to go down into the depths of the drama of their consciousness, this is not the time to destroy a spirit who has never had any other idea than to bring to light the drama of his consciousness in order to teach others to recognize all their own interior enemies so as to destroy them.
The enmity that each man harbours in himself, of himself towards himself."
-Antonin Artaud
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In the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what the event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence.
-Karen Armstrong
Myths are things that never happened but always are.
-Sallustius
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"The values of contemporary capitalism are drawn out into a suffocating eternity: it was always like this, and it always will be; the Flintstones and the Jetsons were, after all, basically the same people. But meanwhile those strange shapes and patterns on the cave walls still glimmer, beckoning us in — if we knew how to understand them — to a world impossibly different to our own."
-Sam Kriss
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"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
-Gilles Deleuze
"Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it's permitted, but no one is capable of it anymore. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom."
–Oswald Spengler
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"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!
MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."
-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma
=-=-=
One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
-Qalandar
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"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!
MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."
-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma
=-=-=
One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
-Qalandar
Above all, some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved -- they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices..... On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form.
Here -- not with the ax, not with the bow -- man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds -- the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
-Loren Eisley, 'The Inner Galaxy'
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"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
- Viktor Frankl
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"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
- Viktor Frankl
This is a particularly good one, Sci :)
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"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
- Viktor Frankl
This is a particularly good one, Sci :)
Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.
'Why talk about the "laws of nature" when what we mean is the characteristic behaviour of phenomena within certain limits at a given stage of development in a given epoch—so far as these can be ascertained?'
– A. N. Whitehead
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Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.
Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic ;).
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Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.
Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic ;).
The Bakker Appendix N would be an interesting list...
"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces, who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
-William S Burroughs
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Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.
Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic ;).
The Bakker Appendix N would be an interesting list...
"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces, who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
-William S Burroughs
From today onward
May I be willing
To live with chaos and confusion
And that of all other sentient beings
May I be willing
To share our mutual confusion
And work incessantly and humbly
To help and elevate everyone without exception
-Tibetan Prayer
=-=-=
“Once, St. Teresa was amorously complaining to God in
prayer about her sufferings & trials. The Lord told her:
“Teresa, so do I treat My friends!” conveying the purificatory character of suffering.
But Teresa answered boldly: “That’s why you have so few (friends)”
-Raimon Panikkar
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Sobriety is a farce. No matter how drunk you get, there will always be someone stupider than you sober. So why be sober?
- Goathead Keene
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Sobriety is a farce. No matter how drunk you get, there will always be someone stupider than you sober. So why be sober?
- Goathead Keene
Didn't Tool write a song about this? ;-)
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“What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly”
― Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
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Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Only the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world.”
-Karl Jaspers
=-=-=
"As properly unconditional, the subject is a free being. It is truly present as the self-conscious Existenz which in action finds itself in its objectivity but cannot be derived from objective being, no more than that being can be derived from it."
— Karl Jaspers
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‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.’
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving."
-bell hooks
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"Let them not be another's servant, who can be their own masters"
-Paracelsus
"For heaven is man, and man is heaven, and all men are one heaven, and heaven
only one man."
– Paracelsus
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'The idea of ... empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience in which there is no room for any sort of dichotomy.'
- Daisetsu T. Suzuki
"The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."
~ D Suzuki
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“...there is a certain place in any discussion of any one thing in existence where knowledge ends and the Great Vacuum extends on out into infinity.”
-Ray Bradbury
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Every social order has contradictions that create points that appear impossible to inhabit from within the order itself and enjoyment derives from these contradictions because they provide avenues for people to transcend the limits that the society lays down. So we're not just confined to the possibilities that the social order offers us and makes available to us, so to enjoy then is to do something like eclipse the given possibilities that the social order has available and the contradictions of every social order, you could say, create openings to enjoy, openings to go beyond what's been authorized.
-Todd McGowan
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“How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley
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"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of (original) sin."
-J V Neumann
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"Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call for truth that prompted the artist to the creative act"
Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time.