Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 17 April 2021

 

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

In an essay aptly named “Success,” Emerson wrote: “To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus. And it would also become the guiding assumption of the whole of his late philosophy from 1929 onward, particularly in his second major work, Philosophical Investigations.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

While all of this positions Jung in the long stream of idealism, beginning with Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, and others, it suggests also that his insight is radically new because it brings to startled awareness a post-Kantian perspective that all that we experience is psychological, that is to say, that it is experienced intra-psychically however much it may be autonomously other. Said succinctly, Kant made phenomenology and depth psychology necessary.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

As Einstein said, common sense—non-weirdness—is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

In one sense language is wholly an activity of thought, and thought is all it can ever express; for the level of experience to which it belongs is that of awareness or consciousness or imagination, and this level has been shown to belong not to the realm of sensation or psychical experience, but to the realm of thought.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

The historian in re-enacting past thought, both theoretical and practical, subjects it to criticism, ‘forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it’ (IH 214).

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos

The [Chinese] government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 16 April 2021

 

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theoretical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology, than it ever had been before. Since, moreover, his springboard was not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically Hegel’s philosophy of history as Kierkegaard’s springboard had been Descartes’ philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the “law of history” upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

That is the essential thing: for Outsiders to stop seeing themselves as misfits and to take up their real work as  evolutionary  agents. To use the mind to increase the powers of the mind. To use our freedom to create more freedom. When we have done that, mankind will have taken the decisive step in its evolution and will become, as the Romantics knew we were long ago, “something closer to the gods.”

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Aletheia is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘disclosure’ or ‘unconcealedness’. Heidegger traced the word ‘phenomenon’ to the ancient Greek phainesthai, meaning ‘that which shows itself in the light’. This was in opposition to Kant’s belief that phenomena were representations that our cognitive apparatus makes of the verboten ‘thing-in-itself’ – thus opening a divide between knowledge and being – and positivism’s idea of truth as scientific fact expressed in logical propositions – so reducing truth to the limits of banal prose.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

But whereas knowledge of the here and now depends on our capacity to imagine what cannot but be there as much as on our perceptions of what is there, our knowledge of the past is different, since in the absence of any such entity as an observed past, the capacity to imagine the past, ‘we cannot but imagine what cannot but be there’, as Collingwood puts it, must assume greater importance.

Earning the Rockies

Robert D. Kaplan

Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Treitschke turned Karl Rochau’s 1853 coinage Realpolitik from a warning by liberals to themselves to heed actual circumstances into a right-wing call for the uninhibited use of national power. “The state,” for Treitschke, was not “a good little boy, to be brushed and washed and sent to school.” The state, as in Hegel’s thinking, was the most comprehensive frame of “ethical life,” the common, norm-governed life of people together in society. The frame rose from families, through law, commerce, and bureaucracy to the highest organs of state power. Hegel had divided them into crown, executive, and legislature, but Treitschke did not believe in the separation of powers.

Man's Search for Himself

Rollo May

Our task, then, is to strengthen our  consciousness  of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 5 April 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“[H]ope that,” which is a passive and timid locution, and “hope to,” which is active and bold— a difference that bears crucially on the issue of our agency as we try to deal with humanity’s problems.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

All media present an abstract and selective version of reality, but compared to print television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. . . . [At best], because it portrays the world in ever small “bites” of sound and image, television creates what is tantamount to a cartoon of reality.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Western psychiatric medicine is often hard to distinguish from pharmacology. Most antidepressants aim to suppress moods—to bring them into a narrow range of experience, removing both the highs and lows. We reduce symptoms of an affliction to make it invisible.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

Alfred Whitehead has distinguished between the “speculative” reason which “Plato shared with God” and the “pragmatic” reason which “Ulysses shared with the foxes.”

Buddha Takes No Prisoners

Patrick Ophuls 

First, the essential aim of all Buddhist practice is to develop undistracted awareness—that is, to arrive at the state of pure presence that the Buddha-to-be first experienced under the rose-apple tree as a child and that later became the key to his awakening.

Breath

James Nestor

But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more. A lack of vasopressin explains not only my own irritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have every night.

I can attest to the accuracy of this observation based upon personal experience.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Voegelin fitted into no obvious partisan or intellectual pigeonhole. His underlying point about the hollowed-out middle of liberal-modern society was not original. Tocqueville, speaking a century before as a conservative liberal, had worried about the unhealthy coupling of undue personal liberty and collectivist tyranny. The thought was common currency for midcentury conservatives such as Jouvenel, Kolnai, and, in a quieter vein, Collingwood. Nor was Voegelin’s antipathy to ideology distinctive.

I'm not comfortable throwing Collingwood in with the conservatives. Collingwood was on the whole a classical (European) liberal, more a "conservative liberal" like Tocqueville.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Exporting maxims from where they worked to where they did not work was the second kind of reasoning Burke proscribed.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[Ernst] Cassirer’s search for the origin of the modern age in The Individual and the Cosmos, as with Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s works, indicates a loss. Cassirer sought to show, equally clearly but in a different way, the location of that loss later in the modern age. Intoxicated by the explanatory and predictive power of the natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the physical laws of nature assume an absolute determinative role as the forces behind all cosmic events—including humanity, as a purely material species. The problem of our freedom (of will) could then be solved only by extricating our essence from the world in the form of Cartesian philosophy of consciousness: the human being as a purely thinking entity separated from the body.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 3 April 2021

 

Published in 2019

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

This will to power over nature is the essence of modern hubris—an overweening end that is pursued by excessively rational means and driven by irrational urges. René Descartes and Francis Bacon, two of the principal authors of the modern way of life, regarded nature as a hostile power to be dominated without ruth or scruple.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

To call Stalin’s rule an “alienation” seems to me a euphemism used to sweep under the rug not only facts, but the most hair-raising crimes as well. I say this to you simply to call your attention to how very much this jargon has already twisted the facts: To call something “alienation”—that is no less than a crime.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

What I have in mind is not so much a different state concept as the necessity of changing this one. What we call the “state” is not much older than the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the same thing is true of the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty means, among other things, that conflicts of an international character can ultimately be settled only by war; there is no other last resort.

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

I’m not sure if Norman Vincent Peale ever thought in this way or that he would have necessarily appreciated the connection, but his optimism about how to deal with recalcitrant facts has a certain postmodern ring to it, and seems to fit right into our increasingly post-truth world.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 2 April 2021

 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

And this case [that of Bertolt Brecht] is of concern to all citizens who wish to share their world with poets. It cannot be left to the literature departments but is the business of political scientists as well. The chronic misbehavior of poets and artists has been a political, and sometimes a moral, problem since antiquity. In the following discussion of this case, I shall stick to the two assumptions I have mentioned. First, although in general Goethe was right and more is permitted to poets than to ordinary mortals, poets, too, can sin so gravely that they must bear their full load of guilt and responsibility. And, second, the only way to determine unequivocally how great their sins are is to listen to their poetry—which means, I assume, that the faculty of writing a good line is not entirely at the poet’s command but needs some help, that the faculty is granted him and that he can forfeit it.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Even so, one can often see in medieval historians that a critical skill is not absent; it is just that it is not their practice to remold the stories they are preserving in the image of their own critical opinion. They will, for example, retail contradictory stories and perhaps note that one is “scarcely credible,” rather than excising one of them. Compared to modern historians, they prefer to present evidence rather than conclusions and leave evaluation to the reader.77 Their practice is perhaps more comparable to that of a present-day archivist than a historian.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In France, the idea that the left-right contest required a final victor proved tenacious. On the right, supporters of reaction, liberal monarchy, and autocracy all took the French state as a prize to be captured and used for the service, respectively, of the old order, propertied wealth, or that imagined being, the people, thought of as the sensible and propertied middle classes.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

This theory of knowledge is called ‘realism’; and ‘realism’ is based upon the grandest foundation a philosophy can have, namely human stupidity.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

If the analysis of these and similar actions shows that they are not logical, that the professed goals are either too vague or, if definite, are as a general rule not in accordance with the actions that are taken in practice, then [Alfredo] Pareto is right, and the reformers and rationalists and moralists are wrong. Rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily “rational animal.” When the reformers tell us that society can be improved by education, by increasing men’s knowledge, by projecting the correct program and then taking action to realize that program, they are wrong because men in society do not act that way. Their actions, their socially decisive actions, spring not from logical but from non-logical roots.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 1 April 2021

 

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

What is difficult is to keep the issue clearly before your mind: to recollect that the only admissible ground of inclusion in the ruling class is ability to do the required work; the only admissible ground of exclusion is inability to do it.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

A movement without leaders is a good idea in theory, but at some point you have to have a plan. How to make one wasn’t so clear. State power is a mix, first of the government proper in all its parts, but then also the military, finance, and the population’s support, and you need all of these working together to make any lasting progress.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

And history is a story which has many beginnings but no end. The end in any strict and final sense of the word could only be the disappearance of man from the earth.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In today’s economy, big is beautiful. Size allows companies to take advantage of the two dominant economic trends of our times—globalization and the Information Revolution. It is easier for Volkswagen and Ikea to enter the Chinese and Indonesian markets than it is for smaller firms. Large banks can find new customers across the globe, while regional ones cannot.

Breath

James Nestor

In the 1970s, Phil Maffetone, a top fitness coach who worked with Olympians, ultramarathoners, and triathletes, discovered that most standardized workouts could be more injurious than beneficial to athletes. The reason is that everybody is different, and everybody will react to training.

Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick J. Deneen

“To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.”