Thoughts for the Day: 14 December 2020

 

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Sometimes components in a highly connected system are tightly coupled. This means that a change in one component has rapid, multiple effects on other components of the system. The change branches out through the web of components, producing distant and often unexpected results.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

C. D. Broad, who had paraphrased Bergson’s ideas about the eliminative function of the brain. Broad had written that “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” Were the brain not to reduce or “edit” this universal awareness—or “cosmic consciousness,” as the psychologist R. M. Bucke, a little known secret teacher, called it—we would be swamped, Broad said, with a “mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge.” As it is, our inner editor does a very good job of providing us with only that very small selection of reality “which is likely to be practically useful.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[C]ompared to even a few decades ago, our species now has a much greater ability to innovate in answer to our problems. That’s because human social systems— whether community associations, municipal councils, societies, or planet-spanning institutions and corporations— are all instances of what scientists call “complex adaptive systems.” They learn and adapt by exploiting the power of combination— a power that’s essential, as we’ve seen, to our recursive imaginations— as they join together bits and pieces of existing ideas, institutions, technologies, and practices in new ways to meet new challenges.

Our modern global connectivity gives us the potential to supercharge this “combinatorial innovation.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but, on the contrary, felt engaged to destroy. My way of solving this problem has given rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did—and what I might have done anyway because of my previous training and the way of my thinking—was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of anti-Semitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Inference in history proceeds not from data given in advance, but from secure answers to productive questions.

Thoughts of the Day: Sunday 13 December 2020

Ol' Nic: Machiavelli

Apologies to the Grandchldren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

William Ophuls

Niccolò Machiavelli:

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Current deficiencies of character, both as an idea and in behavior, result from epistemology, the study of how we know. If the character of the knower is irrelevant to knowing, or even interferes with truest knowing, then character does not belong within philosophy’s purview. Then knowledge and the methods of gaining knowledge can proceed unhampered by the character of the knower and by issues of value that are inescapably implied by the idea of character. Result: knowledge without value; valueless knowledge, which is euphemistically dubbed “objectivity.” 

When philosophy ignores the relevance of character for the value of knowledge, moral decline follows, and moral resurrection depends on philosophical correction. The righteous and the right who complain of moral decline in society look to “the family” for cause and cure. They should perform their postmortems more incisively. Then they would take their laments to philosophy and cut the overburdened, guilt-plagued families some slack. 

The epistemological fault, in brief, is this. To know the world “out there,” philosophy constructed a knowing subject “in here.” As the world was conceived to be, ultimately, a characterless abstraction of space, time, and motion, so the knower had to be equally transcendent and objectified, that is, shorn of characteristics. The method of knowing the world had to be purified; otherwise our human observations would be all-too-human, qualified by individual subjectivity, merely anecdotal, therefore unreliable, therefore untrue. The ideal human as knower of truth must be a vacant mirror of purified consciousness. Some thinkers would discard “consciousness” altogether. They call it the ghost in the machine; they assert that the relation between consciousness and brain is an insoluble problem, or that the problem results from the wrong question. They are right—so long as consciousness is undefiled by qualities, a sheer abstraction. To conceive of consciousness as energy aware of itself makes matters worse. It defines the one abstraction by means of three others: energy, awareness, and self.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

If you want to make a convincing argument for just about anything, the best tactic usually relies on triggering visceral and emotional details rather than employing logic and abstract reasoning. In other words, I’m much more likely to capture your attention if I start a chapter of my book with an anecdote about a minefield in India or someone swimming with sharks than with a drab academic summary of neurological vocabulary.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

Man controls his physical environment by means of his physical powers. He controls his inner world by means of his mental powers—‘intentions’. His future evolution depends upon increased ability to use ‘intentions’, these mental pseudopodia that determine his thoughts, moods, ideas, emotions, insights. The intentions do not create ideas or insights; they only uncover meaning. They could be compared to the blind man’s fingers that wander over Braille. But this image fails to bring out the most important aspect of the intentions: their power to penetrate into meaning.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 11 December 2020

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We moderns are just as religious as our premodern ancestors, but we have chosen to worship two savage gods—Moloch and Mammon.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Nature Resilient was the next mental model—one that, [C.J. "Buzz"] Holling argues, dominates ecology today and represents a major step forward. An eco-system is resilient, in this view, if the relationships among its organisms persist even in the face of sharp shocks from outside.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[S]ince it’s impossible to separate economics from modern medicine, it’s also important to note that Western treatment for chronic illnesses often requires that patients continue to take expensive medicine their whole lives. In these cases, the disease is much more profitable than a cure.

Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger

Because British foreign policy grew out of open debates, the British people displayed extraordinary unity in times of war. On the other hand, so openly partisan a foreign policy made it possible—though highly unusual—for foreign policy to be reversed when a prime minister was replaced.

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.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The perfect concreteness of pure justice, of absolute right, is unattainable in the sphere of law, for law regarded as an objective reality over against the individual already shows the mark of that last abstraction which divides subject from object. Society, as distinct from the individual, is already an abstraction, and as such cannot have that claim upon the individual which is possessed only by an absolutely concrete principle. Law is not the will of the individual himself; it is a command laid upon him from without, and therefore his obedience to it is always tainted with utilitarianism. Hence all those utilitarian degradations of law to which we have referred are in a sense inevitable. For law—and the same, we shall see, is true of history as a whole—is an incomplete realization of concrete thought: it is essentially a step, but an imperfect step, from abstract to concrete, from utility to responsibility. The very externality of law to the agent binds it down to the world of abstract or scientific thought, and necessitates a contradiction by which, on the one hand, the law itself claims to embody right, while on the other the individual conscience claims to defy the law in the name of right.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 11 December 2020

 

What is political imagination? If we say the other fellow’s point of view, the emphasis is first on point, on something spatial. Difference between understanding and imagination: I understand something or somebody directly, if I understand something, I always understand it within a wider horizon of things which I take for granted. I isolate the thing I understand and put myself into a direct relationship to it.

If I understand somebody, I understand him in a direct relationship, within the framework of the world, but still him directly isolated from all others. If I want to understand him, I first must know from which point of view he sees things, and that means where he is located in the world. I must imagine the world from his point of location. Example: the table between us.

Imagination is the prerequisite of understanding: You should imagine how the world looks from the different point of view where these people are located. The assumption is: It is the common world of us all and that what is between you and this other location like the table separates you and bind you to him at the same time. That is the meaning of ONE world.

--Hannah Arendt (lecture notes from a 1955 class she taught courtesy of Samantha Rose Hill @ her Illuminations site here (a must for any student of Arendt's work).

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel put it magnificently: “Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The American Republic is the only political body based on the great eighteenth-century revolutions that has survived 150 years of industrialization and capitalist development, that has been able to cope with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and that has withstood all temptations, despite strong and ugly racial prejudices in its society, to play the game of nationalist and imperialist politics.

Thoughts for the Day: 10 December 2020

 

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (Principles of History, 73).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

And third, once we have come up with a good design for an institution, we still face the often huge challenge of overcoming political opposition to it, or (to put it differently) devising the political bargain among different interest groups that will actually allow the institution to be created.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

And what we can do for our memories of the past, we can also do for our visions of the future: we can insert sequences of our imagined future consciousness into our present consciousness.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Hitler biographer Alan Bullock has written, “despite the Gestapo and the concentration camps,” his power “was founded on popular support to a degree, which few people cared, or still care, to admit.”

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Quite simply, the Nazi movement was built on Hitler’s oratory. There are numerous testimonies to the otherworldly spell he could weave with his words. Hanfstaengl declared, “He had the most formidable power of persuasion of any man or woman I have ever met, and it was almost impossible to avoid being enveloped by him.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge. Preliminary understanding, which is at the basis of all knowledge, and true understanding, which transcends it, have this in common: They make knowledge meaningful.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

In other words, there are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are factual truths, those engendered by sheer brain power and expressed in a specially designed sign language not excluded, and only factual statements are scientifically verifiable. Thus the statement “A triangle laughs” is not untrue but meaningless, whereas the old ontological demonstration of the existence of God, as we find it in Anselm of Canterbury, is not valid and in this sense not true, but it is full of meaning. Knowing certainly aims at truth, even if this truth, as in the sciences, is never an abiding truth but a provisional verity that we expect to exchange against other, more accurate verities as knowledge progresses.

Thoughts of the Day: 9 December 2020

 

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The activity of consciousness, we have seen, converts impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination. Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience, the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous: they stand for the same thing, namely, the level of experience at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experience of this kind there is a distinction between that which effects the conversion and that which has undergone it. Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second. Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness. This makes good the suggestion t. . . that imagination is a distinct level of experience intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of purely psychical experience. As we should now restate that suggestion: it is not sensa as such that provide the data for intellect, it is sensa transformed into ideas of imagination by the work of consciousness.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

TMT [Terror Management Theory] proposes that fear of death is a primordial feature of the human mind. As early humans evolved their extraordinary intelligence, they started to use symbols in their minds to represent abstract ideas, like the ideas of the self and the future. Then . . . they combined these two symbols in particular to imagine the self in the future. This recursive self-awareness— consciousness of one’s consciousness through time— was a source of both awe and dread: awe, because it helped give these early humans a sense of agency and, with it, feelings of power and possibility; and dread, because it made them aware that their selves were subject to the inexorable degradation of time. “The most fateful consequence of mental time travel,” the psychologist Michael Corballis writes, “may be the understanding that we will all die.”

The Age of the Crisis of Man

Mark Greif

An empty discourse is one that behaves as if it wishes to be filled with a single inductive or deductive answer-a definitive argument meant to persuade all hearers and end inquiry through complete satisfaction-but in fact generates the continuation of attempts, or tacitly admits to unanswerability.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But what, exactly did he mean? What are “institutions”? Experts have suggested dozens of definitions, but I have always found the one offered by Douglass North, a Nobel prize–winning economic historian, most useful. Institutions, he says, are “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Counter-education interiorizes and individualizes, as Ficino said, the uniformities of education. Individualizing education, i.e., lodging learning within someone’s soul, requires eros, not because individualizing favors one student over another, the so-called “teacher’s pet,” but because eros kindles each person’s particular style of desire.

Thoughts of the Day: Tuesday 8 December 2020

 

Collingwood in his younger days

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The historian who handles history as if it were mere drama is in a state of deadly sin, but unless he is enough of an artist to see the dramatic force of it, unless he is cunning in the use of words, a clear and an eloquent writer, easily moved by pity and sympathy, unless the deeds of the past speak with a trumpet tongue to his heart and kindle within him a poet’s ardour—without all this, he will never be an historian.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

In his assessment of Black Monday [the American stock market collapse of October 1987], Michael Rosen writes: That which appears objective—the naturalness of organizations, the structuring of hierarchies, the immutability of economic laws, the stability of order—is illusory, where fronts are maintained through the management of common backstages of meaning. Nevertheless, at times disorder raises its head, the mask of everydayness fades, we peer over the edge into the abyss of uncharted terror.

My review of The Ingenuity Gap here.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

The great task of a life-sustaining culture, then, is to keep the invisibles attached, the gods smiling and pleased: to invite them to remain by propitiations and rituals; by singing and dancing, smudging and chanting; by anniversaries and remembrances; by great doctrines such as the Incarnation and by little intuitive gestures—such as touching wood or by fingering beads, a rabbit’s foot, a shark’s tooth; or by putting a mezuzah on the doorpost, dice on the dashboard; or by quietly laying a flower on a polished stone.

All this has nothing to do with belief, and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present. So do folktales, like that of the woodsman who dropped his ax and its cutting edge, going deeper and deeper to keep close to that smiling.

We the Planet

Walter Truett Anderson

Another piece of this modern creation story is the Anthropocene dialogue that has been taking form ever since George Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature in the 19th century. It tells us (1) that we are indeed Earth’s gardeners, (2) that the gardening didn’t just get started with industrial civilization, and (3) that we have pretty well trashed the garden, particularly in the recent centuries when we no longer had the excuse that we didn’t know the effects of our actions.

I find this metaphor--that we are the gardeners--and trustees--of Planet Earth to provide the best guide to how we should conduct ourselves as individuals and as a species.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Worst of all, the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal had demonstrated that a cynical mentality of advertising and public relations—so central in persuading Americans to desire more and more in a nightmarish pattern of meaningless consumerism—had invaded the realm of politics like some lethal disease.

My review here.

Thoughts of the Day: Monday 7 December 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

It’s worth recalling that technological change generally happens more slowly than we expect, while social change can happen astonishingly fast. As noted earlier, the most visible aspect of such fast change is usually a major institutional shift— the collapse of the apartheid regime or the sudden demise of Soviet communism, for instance, or more recently the legalization of gay marriage in many Western countries. But those shifts occurred only because substantial worldview change had already taken place under the surface, often— as in the cases of apartheid and gay marriage— due to the efforts and courage of many, many people at all levels of society.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Every revolution, in Kissinger’s view, tossed up its Kerenskys—sane, reasonable, well-meaning idealists with no grasp of the realities of power. For them, good intentions were a substitute for weapons (whereas hard-headed Marxists from Regis Debray to Mao Zedong believed power came out of the barrel of a gun). Inevitably, they ended up being devoured.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Barely fifteen years ago, it was widely believed that societies wired together by the internet and the web would become progressively smarter over time— that a higher collective intelligence could emerge from rapid flows of immense amounts of information and a flattening of knowledge hierarchies as everyone gained direct access to previously inaccessible expertise. Since then, we’ve learned some harsh lessons. Instead of creating a digital environment that draws us together and makes us smarter, the companies at the core of the social media revolution— Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like— have used the vast amounts of data they harvest about our preferences and behaviors to create an emotional environment that tends to pull us apart and make us dumber.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

These two elements, sensuous and emotional, are not merely combined in the experience: they are combined according to a definite structural pattern. This pattern can be described by saying that the sensation takes precedence of the emotion.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

HUME ONCE REMARKED that the whole of human civilization depends upon the fact that “one generation does not go off the stage at once and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies.” At some turning-points of history, however, at some heights of crisis, a fate similar to that of silkworms and butterflies may befall a generation of men. For the decline of the old, and the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an “empty space,” a kind of historical no man’s land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of “no longer and not yet.”

Are we there--in the "no longer & not yet"--now?

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Compared to an object of contemplation, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it “slips away.”