Thoughts 8 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[R]everting to the example of relationships and the ‘things related’, relationship is the norm; isolation, if it could ever be wholly achieved (which it cannot), would be the limit case of interrelation. Or again, to continue the image of the ciné film: in the Newtonian universe, the natural state of any ‘thing’ is stasis. According to Newtonianism, motion is an aberration from this primal state of perfect inertia, requiring the equivalent of the projector (some energy conceived as added from outside) to set it going. However, nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation. Stasis is, in other words, the limit case of motion, in which it approaches . . . .

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

We could start with our own thought processes and their expression in language. The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical . . . .

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

Is the truth, or rather a knowledge of the truth, always advantageous to society? is falsehood, or nonsense, always harmful? To both of these questions, the facts compel us to answer, No. The great rationalistic dream of modern times, believing that social actions are or can be primarily logical, has taught the illusion that the True and the Good are identical, that if men knew the truth about themselves and their social and political life, then society would become ever better; and that falsehood and absurdity always hurt social welfare.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Science is a tool; it’s neither good nor bad. Such value judgments depend on the user. Science should and must be promoted, as it’s a primary driver of societal advancement. However, it’s also clear that the overtly political nature of the Flexner Report [1910 publication about standardization of medical education & limiting enrollments], and the effort of Big Business, Big Pharma, and now Big Medicine to capitalize on it, has left a big hole in the profession, which keeps expanding and threatens to engulf us all.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

The misdeeds of the West—the crimes of modernity—are also now part of the standard narrative. Indeed, within America’s education establishment the moral failures of Western civilization have become the main point of the story.

I suspect that this statement may prove an overestimation of the "woke" narrative in American education and culture; there's still, I suspect, a great deal of untempered celebration of the West and modernity in the culture as well. Also, some of the emphasis on the "woke" critique in our national dialogue is promoted by right-wing media that seeks to stoke the fires of the culture wars. But whatever the balance, the critique garners more (virtual) ink & attention these days.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Reasons must be in people’s minds to explain their behavior, but in some cases at least, they need not be in their minds to make their behavior either blameworthy or praiseworthy.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

“Something exists as the ground of all things and the ground notion is the most basic metaphysical notion across the world’s traditions,” suggests [Phillip] Clayton. “Something emerges out of it, which is influenced by that ground, but also brings about a fullness of experience that can’t be actualized apart from the evolutionary process.” This notion of “ground” has been championed by many philosophers and theologians over the years, including Schelling, but perhaps most notably twentieth-century protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who said that God was not a being but the ground of all being.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

So while our political system loves to use such distinctions as right versus left or conservative versus liberal as all-embracing categories when it comes to public values, “traditional,” “modern,” and “postmodern” are actually much better terms with which to analyze social and political movements in this country.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Two pioneering efforts to formulate a complex-systems approach to economics are Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006): and W. Brian Arthur, Complexity and the Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Kate Raworth also rethinks conventional economics in Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2017).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

[Sir Roger] Scruton’s human being is a socially rooted person, rich in sentiments that liberalism neglects: allegiance, piety, a sense of sacredness, and guilt. A British cultural critic in a line of conservative descent from Coleridge and Eliot, Scruton looked to a restoration of values that liberalism ignores. In liberal spirit, he thought, we ourselves, not politics or law, should bring that restoration about.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 19 January 2021

 

2020 publication

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master modernity, for the right was in telling ways the stronger contestant. It spoke for the powers of wealth and property—first, land against industry and finance, then for all three, and soon for small property as well as large. Conservatism, in addition, would rely well into the twentieth century on the organs of state and on society’s many corps—law, religion, armed forces, universities—which tended to a stand-pat conservatism in the everyday, prepolitical sense of wanting tomorrow to be like today and not forever changing the furniture.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Across the English Channel, George Orwell may have disliked what he saw, but he understood its power. Hitler, he said, “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.” The Nazis knew that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short-working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Truth is what we are compelled to admit by the nature either of our senses or of our brain. The proposition that everybody who is “was meant to be” can easily be refuted; but the certainty of the I “was meant to be” will survive refutation intact because it is inherent in every thinking reflection on the I-am.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

But the education [University of Wisconsin] further developed an already identifiable quality in him; it taught the students to think in terms of civilizations, not just in terms of governments. After all, governments come and go, but civilizations linger on. There were certain values, beliefs, qualities which would prevail, no matter what the outward form of the government. These were lessons which [John] Davies [State Department China expert caught up in McCarthyism] later applied to the contemporary world, and it would explain why his reporting was so profound; it was always touched with a sense of history. He saw something in a country and the society far deeper than the events of the moment. His reporting intuitively reflected the past as well as the present, and it marked him as no ordinary reporter or observer.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 28 November 2020

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

A more promising method of differentiating would be to distinguish exposition from argument, as a static from a dynamic aspect of thought. The business of St. Thomas himself is not to expound Thomism, but to arrive at it: to build up arguments whose purpose is to criticize other philosophical views and by criticizing them to lead himself and his readers towards what he hopes will be a satisfactory one.

Ever since Pythagoras (or so we are told) invented the word philosophy, in order to express the notion of the philosopher not as one who possesses wisdom but as one who aspires to it, students of philosophy have recognized that the essence of their business lies not in holding this view or that, but in aiming at some view not yet achieved: in the labour and adventure of thinking, not in the results of it. What a genuine philosopher (as distinct from a teacher of philosophy for purposes of examination) tries to express when he writes is the experience he enjoys in the course of this adventure, where theories and systems are only incidents in the journey.

History Man

Fred Inglis

[Quoting R.G. Collingwood] Biography, though it often uses motives of an historical kind by way of embroidery, is in essence a web woven of these two groups of threads, sympathy and malice. Its function is to arouse these feelings in the reader; essentially therefore it is a device for stimulating emotion, and accordingly it falls into the two main divisions of amusement-biography, which is what the circulating libraries so extensively deal in, and magical biography, or the biography of exhortation and moral-pointing, holding up good examples to be followed or bad ones to be eschewed. The biographer’s choice of his materials, though it may be (and ought to be) controlled by other considerations, is determined in the first instance by what I will call their gossip-value. The name is chosen in no derogatory spirit. Human beings, like other animals, take an interest in each other’s affairs which has its roots in various parts of their animal nature, sexual, gregarious, aggressive, acquisitive, and so forth. They take a sympathetic pleasure in thinking that desires in their fellow-creatures that spring from these sources are being satisfied, and a malicious pleasure in thinking that they are being thwarted.

I should add that Inglis goes on to criticize Collingwood's view, nothing several worthwhile examples of biography as history and art, not the least of which is Collingwood's own An Autobiography.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Over the course of human evolution, as each group of people became gradually aware of the enormity of its isolation in the cosmos and of the precariousness of its hold on survival, it developed myths and beliefs to transform the random, crushing forces of the universe into manageable, or at least understandable, patterns. One of the major functions of every culture has been to shield its members from chaos, to reassure them of their importance and ultimate success.

Escape From Freedom

Erich Fromm

We believe that the realization of the self is accomplished not only by an act of thinking but also by the realization of man’s total personality, by the active expression of his emotional and intellectual potentialities. These potentialities are present in everybody; they become real only to the extent to which they are expressed. In other words, positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.

She

Robert A. Johnson

When a westerner is touched by being in love, now one of the only ways we are visited by the gods anymore, a road of evolution can be traveled that has consciousness as its goal.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 13 October 2020

 

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

As the writer William Saroyan put it: “I resented school, but I never resented learning.”

9 Steps to Influence

Ehud Segev

Sherlock Holmes, said: “You see, but do not observe. The distinction is clear.”  Yes, the power of observation!

Extraordinary Lives

William Zinsser

“Let’s suppose I had never met Harry Truman and didn’t know anything about him and had never seen a photograph of him. How would you describe him to me?” There was a pause, and he said, “Complicated.” Of course, we are all more complicated than we appear. Everybody is hard to know, particularly someone in public life. But Harry Truman was a much more complicated and interesting person than most of us have been led to believe. He was far better educated, far more learned, far more placid, calm, conciliatory, thoughtful. He never raised his voice among those who worked for him. He was never known to dress anyone down in the White House, never known to fly off the handle or become abusive. He did not like confrontations. In his own family, he was known as “The Peacemaker.” (He came from a very, truly “feisty” family.)

Becoming Sherlock

Stefan Cain

Studies have shown that slowing down and focusing more attention on detail will actually train your brain to assimilate the good habit of becoming more observant and productive.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. —Neil Gaiman...

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Even in the personal sphere, where no universal laws can ever determine unequivocally what is right and what is wrong, man’s actions are not completely arbitrary. Here he is guided not by laws, under which cases can be subsumed, but by principles—such as loyalty, honor, virtue, faith—which, as it were, map out certain directions.