Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 11 July 2021

 

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

The cliff edge our civilization is moving toward is the end destination of “an increase in technological feasibility inversely proportional to man's sense of responsibility.” [Quoting Jean Gebser.]

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

A stimulus is nothing else than a suggestion for a mental act (or any other kind of act), and an enriched consciousness contains its own suggestions within itself.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

Byzantine art was monotonously sensuous even as it was austere, and with an irresistible splendor that “dumbfounded,” revealing a civilization that encompassed at once stirring liturgies and fierce doctrinal debates over the nature of Christ and the possession of the True Cross.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Broadly speaking, working with the immune system and our inner worlds means paying more attention to the bounty of sensations that are available to us. This includes the five main senses—sight, smell, touch, taste and sound—but also the interoceptive sense that we develop when we quiet the outside world and look inward.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

Huizinga: “There is in our historical consciousness an element of great importance that is best defined by the term historical sensation. One might also call it historical contact. … This contact with the past, a contact which it is impossible to determine or analyse completely … is one of the many ways given to man to reach beyond himself, to experience truth. The object of this feeling is not people as individuals. … It is hardly an image which our minds forms. … It if takes on a form at all this remains composite and vague: an Ahnung [sense] of streets, houses, as sounds and colours or people moving or being moved. There is in this manner of contact with the past the absolute conviction of reality. … The historical sensation is not the sensation of living the past again but of understanding the world as one does when listening to music.” (The Task of Cultural History, VII, 71).

Compare and contrast Huizinga's position with Collingwood's injunction for "re-enactment" of the historical past.

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Even when he was employed by the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1950s and 1960s, working with some of the finest minds in the foreign policy establishment, Kissinger felt a “European” superiority to the optimistic Americans, who tended to believe that peace was the normal state of affairs in the world, that the United States represented a universal prototype, that every problem had a solution, and that the solution was always the same: democracy, and then more democracy.

This America

Jill Lepore

To be a nationalist at the end of the eighteenth century meant to believe in a slew of revolutionary liberal ideas: that the peoples of the world are naturally divided into nations, that the most rational means of government is national self-rule, that nations are sovereign, and that nations guarantee the rights of citizens.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 11 February 2021

 

First published in 1961

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Thinking, as Arendt experiences it, is an inner silent dialogue, which may reach conditional conclusions but whose real result is a proliferation of distinctions made by conversing with a thinking partner. To be conscious of thought as a conversation is rare, due both to its silence and its lightning-like speed, but to Arendt the dialogic character of the activity of thinking is what human consciousness (con-scientia) is.

--Jerome Kohn, "Introduction"

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

All modern scientific work rests on the absolute presupposition that nature is one and that science is one: that the different realms of nature are in part governed by one and the same code of absolutely identical laws, the laws of mathematics, and in part by special codes which do not differ radically among themselves but are so linked together by analogies and similarities that they may be regarded as so many local variants of laws which in spite of these variations can still be called ‘laws of nature’; while the various sciences that investigate the various realms of nature are not independent sciences but only modifications of one and the same thing, a single thing which we call by the single name of natural science.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation of humankind ‘has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

A nonplussed Hayek told an interviewer, “Milton [Friedman's] monetarism and Keynesianism have more in common with each other than I have with either.” For Hayek, who believed that depressions simply had to burn themselves out, even monetary therapy was dangerous.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

I say to some extent, because although (theoretical physicist John Archibald] Wheeler and the scientists who follow his lead use the term ‘participation’ they do not share [Owen] Barfield’s, [Colin] Wilson’s and others’ belief that our own volition – our will – can increase our participation. Theirs is a ‘participatory universe’ but, like earlier scientific models, it is a passive one. That our consciousness participates in the universe is for them as much a ‘law’ as is gravity. For people like Barfield, the idea is to consciously increase our participation, and hence freedom. And by consciously increasing our participation, we do not then gain greater control over the things that make up our world, but of our picture of that world, just as while I cannot control what takes place in a television programme I am watching, I can control the quality of the picture on the screen; i.e., increase or decrease the focus, clarity, and so on.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 11 Nov. 2020

 

Has the gun (see last entry below)

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

Later on Harlow and various of his students [performed] a brilliant series of experiments which showed that monkeys would work hard and persistently to solve simple puzzles without any external reward; that is, just for whatever satisfactions are inherent in the puzzle-solving itself.’

What implication does the above observation have for neo-classical (or neoliberal) economic theories?

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

This is the real significance of spoiltness; it is nothing less than the human condition itself—another name for ‘original sin’. Kierkegaard saw that the basic problem is that all men are bored. First Adam was bored to be alone, so Eve was created; then Adam and Eve were bored, so they had Cain and Abel; then all the family were bored, so Cain killed Abel . . . Human history is seen as a flight from boredom, and from the low mental pressures associated with it. But boredom is another expression of spoiltness; it is a refusal to make any mental effort without the reward of an external stimulus. Adler’s analysis of spoiltness comes very close to the borders of a truly evolutionary psychology; but he halted there.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

History in which all other branches of the humanities are comprehended presupposes a secure method of “hermeneutics,” the establishment of a science and art of interpretation. At the core of historical science as of history itself lies for him [Dilthey] the problem of understanding. . . . History becomes for Dilthey a series of objectified experiences which we can understand insofar as we can “re-live” (nacherleben, Hodges’ translation) them. Understanding, interpretation, hermeneutics are the art of deciphering signs of expression.

Does anyone else perceive shades of R.G. Collingwood in this quote, or am I seeing things again?

Compare the above with the following from Collingwood re Dilthey:

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

[Dilthey] raises the question how the historian actually performs the work of coming to know the past, starting as he does simply from documents and data which do not by themselves reveal it. These data, he replies, offer him only the occasion for reliving in his own mind the spiritual activity which originally produced them. It is in virtue of his own spiritual life, and in proportion to the intrinsic richness of that life, that he can thus infuse life into the dead materials with which he finds himself confronted. Thus genuine historical knowledge is an inward experience (Erlebnis) of its own object, whereas scientific knowledge is the attempt to understand (begreifen) phenomena presented to him as outward spectacles. This conception of the historian as living in his object, or rather making his object live in him, is a great advance on anything achieved by any of Dilthey’s German contemporaries.

So am I imaging things? 

The Square and the Tower

Niall Ferguson

“For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.” [The statement "Everyone else has dug" is a riff on Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad & the Ugly wherein Clint Eastwood, holding the only loaded gun, tells Eli Wallach that "in this world there's two kinds of people . . . Those with loaded guns. And those who dig. You dig."]