Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 18 September 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Commanding hope has three components— honest, astute, and powerful hope— that combine to help create this virtuous circle.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

What does the world around me mean? What does its imagery symbolically represent? What is it saying?

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The majority of the executive positions would be held by non-Nazi conservatives, who would be in charge of foreign policy, finance, labor, and agriculture. “We’re boxing Hitler in,” said the leader of one right-wing party. “We’ve hired him for our act,” said Papen, who was slated to become vice chancellor. Such statements reveal not only an inane optimism in the light of what was to come but also a foolish arrogance that was blind to the way power functioned in a mass democracy.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

For Kant, God is an “Idea of reason” and as such for us: to think God and speculate about a hereafter is, according to Kant, inherent in human thought insofar as reason, man’s speculative capacity, necessarily transcends the cognitive faculties of his intellect: only what appears and, in the mode of it-seems-to-me, is given to experience can be known; but thoughts also “are,” and certain thought-things, which Kant calls “ideas,” though never given to experience and therefore unknowable, such as God, freedom, and immortality, are for us in the emphatic sense that reason cannot help thinking them and that they are of the greatest interest to men and the life of the mind.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“Brainwashing,” George Romney would call it [information from the Administration about the Vietnam War] in 1968, and be immediately jumped on by all sorts of people, like Robert Kennedy, who had been brainwashed themselves and never known it or admitted it.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 12 June 2012

 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

A different kind of humanistic project in history is that of Machiavelli’s Discourses. He attempts to make history a science by extracting maxims from history: generalizations that are summaries of and lessons taught by the many individual events of the past. A typical example is “Dictatorship is advantageous in times of emergency.” Naturally, there are continual problems with the wealth of counterexamples to the maxims; Machiavelli attempts to explain them away individually, rather than saying that the maxims only hold true for the most part. His advice on what action to take in case of doubt is unhelpful: “In all discussions one should consider which alternative involves fewer inconveniences and should adopt this as the better course; for one never finds any issue that is clear cut and not open to question." To consider only the payoff, and not the probability of occurrence, will not lead to a satisfactory decision theory.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

Courtesy of the competition delusion, the internet was colonised largely for institutional and private benefit.

The Immortality Key

Brian C. Muraresku 

The women and their Eucharist had to go. It may have started by altering John’s Gospel and getting rid of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But the campaign against women and drugs would last for a very long time. As we will see toward the end of this investigation, it is a war that still very much continues to this day.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Cognition and creation are not only identical in the divine act of intuitus originarius (Kant); this identity is a demonstrable fact, independent of all revelation and present in man’s “duty of creation,” in which he must “endlessly repeat the creation of the universe,” a duty which can be proven by logical-positivist arguments. This is the logos which will take the place of mythos in a “future unitary science” and which will restore a world out of joint to the orderliness of a “system,” will lead man lost in anarchy back to the constraints of necessity.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Weaver was writing in the same monitory spirit as Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and Victor Klemperer’s study of fascist discourse, Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947). Taking their speeches as his material, Weaver disapproved of Burke’s rhetorical overkill, argumentative fluidity, and sense of expediency; he praised Lincoln’s lawyerly insistence on clearly stated definitions and principles.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Liberals, to put it in summary terms, took society to be competitive and conflicted. They distrusted power and questioned customary authority. They believed in human progress and social equality, with its requirement of civic respect for all. They had high expectations of political action.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 23 February 2021

  

The Future of History

John Lukacs

Sociology, with all of its limitations, can be serious and valuable: an exhaustive (and sometimes comprehensive) study of a society or of a definite portion of it.

sng: Sociology is anantomy to history's physiology; structure vs. process; narrative vs. analysis. Of course, many of the most important thinkers imcorporate and blend these dichotomies in their work.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

THE IDEA THAT our mind does not only depict or reflect reality but also independently lends it a format was of course the central idea of Kant’s critical philosophy and his so-called Copernican revolution.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

In Aion, Jung presented the idea that the archetypes evolve, and that we were currently caught in the shift from one “psychic dominant” to another—rather as Jean Gebser believed that we are moving from one “consciousness structure” to another. The new age, for Jung, would be one that would “constellate the problem of the union of opposites” and this would come about through the “individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit.”

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

A representation may be a work of art; but what makes it a representation is one thing, what makes it a work of art is another’ (PA 43).

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

There are two distinct types of feedback processes:  reinforcing  and balancing.  Reinforcing  (or amplifying) feedback processes are the engines of growth. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that  reinforcing  feedback is at work.  Reinforcing  feedback can also generate accelerating decline—a pattern of decline where small drops amplify themselves into larger and larger drops, such as the decline in bank assets when there is a financial panic.

The best response is often "You're probably right."

Nothing is gained by arguing with someone over something that doesn't matter.

--Farnum Street blog

“I come from a family where my grandparents fled anti-Semitism and persecution. The country took us in and protected us. And I feel an obligation to the country to pay back. And this is the highest, best use of my own set of skills to pay back. And so, I want very much to be the kind of attorney general that you’re saying I could become. I’ll do my best to try to be that kind of attorney general.”

--Attorney General nominee Judge Merrick Garland

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 18 January 2021

 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, the inspiring principle of action in tyranny, is fundamentally connected to that anxiety which we experience in situations of complete loneliness. This anxiety reveals the other side of equality and corresponds to the joy of sharing the world with our equals.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The chief point with respect to the “scientific attitude” seems to be that it belongs to the very essence of science, which is primarily interested in facts, that our factual information is not only limited but that the answers to the most important factual questions concerning the human condition as well as the existence of Being in general are beyond factual knowledge and experience.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

You will recall Kant’s opinion that the touchstone for determining whether the difficulty of a philosophical essay is genuine or mere “vapors of cleverness” may be found in its susceptibility to popularization. And Jaspers, who in this respect, as indeed in every other, is the only successor Kant has ever had, has like Kant more than once left the academic sphere and its conceptual language to address the general reading public.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Certainly, for Collingwood, human actions take place in contexts, and reference to context is often necessary to understand and get a feel for what is going on, but the relation between action and context is not like the relation between the instance and the law which governs it.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Shame is one of the “gifts reserved for age,” according to Eliot. He goes on to describe shame as

… the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue. [Eliot, Four Quartets, IV.2]

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 6 January 2021

 

David Sloan Wilson, biologist & economics thinker

The Invisible Hand Is Dead! - Evonomics

evonomics.com

Or, as another Wilson (Edward O.) and I put it in a 2007 article, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

--David Sloan Wilson

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

“Oceania is at war with Eurasia. It has always been at war with Eurasia,” Orwell tells us at the start of 1984—although, of course, as in Vladislav Surkov’s “nonlinear war,” here the sides change according to the directives of Big Brother. With [Alexander] Dugin, however, they remain stable, although for Oceania we should read the Atlanticists; the maritime character is the same. Eurasia has always been at war with the Atlanticists, and if the way in which Dugin’s meme has gone from simulacrum to reality is any gauge, some of the most exciting stages in this battle are to come.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

In Collingwood’s view, historical facts are significant only as answers to questions.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Men, though they are totally conditioned existentially—limited by the time span between birth and death, subject to labor in order to live, motivated to work in order to make themselves at home in the world, and roused to action in order to find their place in the society of their fellow-men—can mentally transcend all these conditions, but only mentally, never in reality or in cognition and knowledge, by virtue of which they are able to explore the world’s realness and their own.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Since the rise of the scientific approach in the humanities, that is, with the development of modern historicism, sociology, and economics, such questions [the traditional questions regarding the nature of this form of government and the principle which sets it in motion] have no longer been considered likely to further understanding; Kant, in fact, was the last to think along these lines of traditional political philosophy. Yet while our standards for scientific accuracy have constantly grown and are higher today than at any previous time, our standards and criteria for true understanding seem to have no less constantly declined.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

I share Wittgenstein’s mistrust of deceptively clear models: and, as Waismann said, ‘any psychological explanation is ambiguous, cryptic and open-ended, for we ourselves are many-layered, contradictory and incomplete beings, and this complicated structure, which fades away into indeterminacy, is passed on to all our actions.’

The Way to Love

Anthony De Mello

This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?

Thoughts of the Day: Monday 12 October 2020

 

Willpower

Roy F. Baumeister, John Tierney

No matter what you want to achieve, playing offense begins by recognizing the two basic lessons from chapter 1: Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things. Each day may start off with your stock of willpower fresh and renewed, at least if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast. But then all day things chip and nibble away at it. The complexity of modern life makes it difficult to keep in mind that all these seemingly unrelated chores and demands draw on the same account inside of you.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

The problem with a purely material and rational society is captured by two well-known Biblical sayings: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” and “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The Presence of the Infinite

Steve McIntosh

Premise 8: The project of evolving consciousness through services of goodness, teachings of truth, and creations of beauty is facilitated and empowered through the use of evolution’s own method of development—the ongoing dialectical synthesis of existential polarities.

The Gardens of Democracy

Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

Just because you don’t immediately, or perhaps ever, see the virus of behavior leap from host to host doesn’t mean it isn’t leaping. It is, relentlessly. Most people are wired for strong reciprocity, which means we repay good with good and bad with bad, and are willing to repay bad with bad even at some personal cost, just to reinforce group norms.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Sextus describes the work of collecting and opposing arguments as a therapy used to cure the disease of opinions. He was a medical doctor as well as a philosopher, and his view of philosophy was essentially therapeutic. He was a professional purveyor of Skeptic remedies, a practicing Skeptic doctor, who engaged in philosophy not to seek the truth, but to help people see the limitations of their points of view.

And Hannah Arendt for the finale:

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Kant’s famous categorical imperative—“Act in such a way that the maxim of your action could become a universal law”—indeed strikes to the root of the matter in that it is the quintessence of the claim that the law makes upon us. This rigid morality, however, disregards sympathy and inclination; moreover, it becomes a real source for wrongdoing in all cases where no universal law, not even the imagined law of pure reason, can determine what is right in a particular case.

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 23 September 2020

Nota Bene: Today, I'll only quote from one piece of writing, the source of our "deeper dive" with Hannah Arendt. I'll be quoting again from Arendt's "Understanding & Politics," published in 1953 in Partisan Review. I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but in reviewing my notes, these remarks near the conclusion of the essay struck me as quite striking. I'll add some comments after the quotes: 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

If we wish to translate the biblical language [King Solomon's prayer for an "understanding heart"] into terms that are closer to our speech (though hardly more accurate), we may call the faculty of imagination the gift of the “understanding heart.” In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real. In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real.

. . . .

True understanding does not tire of interminable dialogue and “vicious circles,” because it trusts that imagination eventually will catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth. To distinguish imagination from fancy and to mobilize its power does not mean that understanding of human affairs becomes “irrational.” On the contrary, imagination, as Wordsworth said, “is but another name for . . . clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude, Book XIV, 190–92).

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.

. . . .

Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only so far as our understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 322-323). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

SNG: What caught my eye is Arendt's emphasis on "imagination" as an essential faculty of mind is so widely shared by other significant thinkers. Upon reading this, one thinks of Kant, Coleridge (who shares Kant as a common ancestor with Arendt), Owen Barfield, R.G. Collingwood, and the thinkers and commentary in Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. And this is a shortlist. All of these thinkers--and many others--realize that we can't gain understanding without the use of imagination. And we need imagination and understanding more than ever--even more than knowledge--as much as we sorely need further knowledge to address our current challenges.

Thoughts of the Day: 11 September 2020

 "Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive."

— Zadie Smith

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Edmund Morris

“THEODORE,” THE BIG MAN SAID, eschewing boyish nicknames, “you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

C.G. Jung

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs—only, and this is decisive, Kant’s spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy. Hegel’s spectator exists strictly in the singular: the philosopher becomes the organ of the Absolute Spirit, and the philosopher is Hegel himself. But even Kant, more aware than any other philosopher of human plurality, could conveniently forget that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it.