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.”

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 6 December 2020

 

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King (@StephenKing)
From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Working With Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman

The new measure [of job suitability & performance] takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.

The Anatomy of Peace

The Arbinger Institute

"Seeing an equal person as an inferior object is an act of violence, Lou. It hurts as much as a punch to the face. In fact, in many ways it hurts more. Bruises heal more quickly than emotional scars do.

Three conditions are indeed indispensable to the working of a liberal dynamic society. People must believe strongly enough in truth and fairness; they must trust that their opponents effectively share these ideals; and these ideals must in fact be valid. The great moral and material achievements of modern liberal societies testify convincingly that they fulfilled the first two conditions and that they rightly relied on the presence of the third. There is ample evidence also that whenever any part of a society denies the effectiveness of these ideals in public affairs, it cuts itself off from the rest and engages it in mortal combat.

--Michael Polanyi

The utilitarian theory that social harmony is based on mutual interests is false; mutual interests can be discovered and brought into operation only on the grounds of existing social harmony. This is the principle on which a progressive liberal society actually works. … The beliefs of liberalism are ancient, but their acceptance has recently passed through a deep crisis. In earlier days it was thought that a belief in reason and justice was self-evident. But today we have learned that it is not. Modern man can hold this belief only as an act of faith, as I do myself.

--Michael Polanyi

A tip o' the hat to Nicholas Gruen for both Polanyi quotes.

I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann

Martin Buber, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Humans sense the world in two different processes: perception, or signals that come in from the outside world; and conception, or internal understandings that define the world from the inside.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Pyrrhon, according to Timon, held happiness to be the goal of philosophy, and recommended that a person who would be happy should consider the following three questions: What is the nature of things? What is our position in relation to them? What, under the circumstances, should we do? The answers appear as a formulaic series of negations in the tradition of Democritean athambia [imperturbability: a calm and unruffled self-assurance] and Cynic apatheia [“being without passions”]. Questions one and two are answered by three negative adjectives: Things are adiaphora, “nondifferent,” or “without distinguishing marks”; astathme-ta, “nonstable,” or “without fixed essence”; and anepikrita, “nonjudgeable,” or “unable to be reached by concepts.” As a result, Timon quotes, “Neither our perceptions nor our opinions are either true or false.”

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 5 December 2020

 

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The intellect, the organ of knowledge and cognition, is still of this world; in the words of Duns Scotus, it falls under the sway of nature, cadit sub natura, and carries with it all the necessities to which a living being, endowed with sense organs and brain power, is subject.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

All the metaphysical questions that philosophy took as its special topics arise out of ordinary common-sense experiences; “reason’s need”—the quest for meaning that prompts men to ask them—is in no way different from men’s need to tell the story of some happening they witnessed, or to write poems about it In all such reflecting activities men move outside the world of appearances and use a language filled with abstract words which, of course, had long been part and parcel of everyday speech before they became the special currency of philosophy. For thinking, then, though not for philosophy, technically speaking, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition. In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence; so long as we are with him we do not think either of him or about him; thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

All of the self-justifying explanations by the supporters of the [Vietnam] war—selfishness, cowardice, decadence, ignorance, Communist sympathies—were excuses that failed to confront the basic challenge that the protesters (and [Hans] Morgenthau too) were raising about the war, namely that the very reasons the United States had become involved in Vietnam, the Domino Theory and the doctrine of a monolithic Communism, were fundamentally false and had no application to the world as it actually existed.

Writing Down the Bones

Natalie Goldberg

PUSH YOURSELF BEYOND when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our minds don’t have direct control over every autonomic process. We can’t just think the word “adrenaline” and trigger the hormonal release we want. But we can put ourselves in situations that trigger that same predictable hormonal release. When we choose stressors, we choose our biological reactions. The same goes for the immune system: We can’t think it into action, but we can certainly change the environment that the immune system responds and reacts to.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 5 December 2020

 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Our supply of ingenuity, I soon recognized, involves both the generation of good ideas and their implementation within society.

My review (posted earlier today).

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

No mere oppression, therefore, but the total and reliable domination of man is necessary if he is to fit into the ideologically determined, factitious world of totalitarianism.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

I’m sure people are reacting, at least in part, to the early hints of the enormous social earthquakes our societies will likely undergo in coming decades, as hard-to-see, slow-moving, and diffuse tectonic stresses steadily build in force, cross social boundaries and scales, and combine to multiply their effects. Four* of those stresses seem to be having an outsized impact on people’s moods, especially in the West.

The four stresses of the apocalypse: (1) widening economic inequality and increasing economic insecurity, (2) increasing migration and refugees, (3) climate change & its effects on people's feelings of security, possibilities, and hope, and (4) "normative threat," i.e., changes in culture (norms, beliefs, shared values) caused by rapid urbanization and increased informational connectivity (primarily).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“Well, stress affects sleep and the arousal system, and the arousal system involves the frontal lobes. Sleep deprivation reduces metabolic uptake in the frontal lobes, throwing off one’s ability, not to do common tasks, but to do frontal-lobe-type tasks that involve sequencing and shifting among problems. Amy Arnsten at Yale and other researchers have also found that stress significantly impairs working memory, which is a critical function of the frontal lobes. Working memory is often called ‘scratch-pad’ memory—it’s a bit like the RAM in our personal computers—and it helps us govern our behavior.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But it’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

It is a curious situation, and not without interest as illustrating the way in which modern irrationalism, wishing to destroy the spirit of scientific inquiry, but wishing at the same time to go on enjoying the technical benefits conferred by modern natural science, converts the desire for these benefits into a motive for refusing to draw the logical conclusion from its own premisses.

My review here.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

Like the Gnostic demiurge and Iain McGilchrist’s overconfident left brain, it [the deficient mode of rational-mental consciousness (Gebser)] believed it was self-sufficient and ignored any idea that its perspective was only partial, and that, no matter how much it denied it, it was inextricably linked to another perspective, radically other than its own but equally necessary. By the nineteenth century and the triumph of scientific materialism, this deficient mode could lay claim to more or less dominance, with the church ceding more and more ground and with Romantic poets noisily but ineffectively sounding warnings about its debilitating effect on the soul.