Thoughts for the (Happy Mother's) Day: Sunday 9 May 2021

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Parmenides put it more pithily: “Thinking and being are one and the same.” So consciousness is intrinsic to life. Comparatively weak in the most primitive organisms, it gradually grows stronger and more intelligent as nervous systems become more complex, until it evolves into symbolic and self-reflexive thought.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Philosophy and religion are old enemies of probability. Philosophers from the earliest times have wished to distinguish themselves from the spinners of mere rhetoric by offering certainty. Parmenides distinguished sharply between truth, associated with Being, and the opinion of men, called “likely” and associated with non-Being. Logical reasoning is intended, by Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and their followers, to establish the foundations of knowledge beyond all doubt, and correspondingly likelihoods are banished as other people’s business.

Technopoly

Neil Postman

The point to be stressed here is that any educational institution, if it is to function well in the management of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning, must have the means to give clear expression to its theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that. Associations do not imply cause and effect or represent (as Stephen Jay Gould later put it) any “magic method for the unambiguous identification of cause.”

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 8 May 2021

 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason, have refused to “act in concert.”

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Strictly speaking, only knowing can have a goal, and Broch was always primarily concerned with a highly practical goal, whether ethical, religious, or political. Thinking does not have a real goal, and unless thinking finds its meaning in itself, it has no meaning at all. (This, of course, applies only to the activity of thinking itself, not to writing down thoughts, an act that has far more to do with artistic and creative processes than with thinking in itself. The writing down of thoughts has in fact both goal and purpose; like all producing activities, it has a beginning and an end.)

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Through those changes, the idea property has kept its role in conservative thought as a stabilizer of society providing people—to use Hegel’s term—with “personality,” a capacity for effective action in civic life they would otherwise lack.

The Complete Works of William Walker Atkinson

William Walker Atkinson

Memory for names may be developed just as one would develop any other faculty of the mind, or part of the body, i. e., by Attention and Practice.

Out of Character

David DeSteno, Piercarlo Valdesolo

When we act hypocritically, then, it's often not that we're ignoring or deliberately disregarding our beliefs and morals; it's merely that our short-term concerns have momentarily triumphed.

Inadequate Equilibria

Eliezer Yudkowsky

A “Nash equilibrium” is what happens when everyone makes their best move, given that all the other players are making their best moves from that Nash equilibrium—everyone goes to Craigslist, because that’s their individually best move given that everyone else is going to Craigslist. A “Pareto optimum” is any situation where it’s impossible to make every actor better off simultaneously, like “Cooperate/Cooperate” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma—there’s no alternative outcome to Cooperate/Cooperate that makes both agents better off. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a coordination problem because the sole Nash equilibrium of Defect/Defect isn’t Pareto-optimal; there’s an outcome, Cooperate/Cooperate, that both players prefer, but aren’t reaching.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

The program of a political party declares in favor of “law and order.” But what law and order, and whose law and order? All sovereignty, the Constitutions say, is vested in the people. But the most liberal parliament and the most despotic Bonapartist equally claim to respect the principle of popular sovereignty.

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

Kurt Vonnegut 

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 7 May 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In their different modes, Hodge and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne were conservative counterinstances to the callow picture of the early American national spirit as liberal, democratic, and optimistic.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

[Gustav] Le Bon divided crowds into heterogeneous (with mixed membership) or homogeneous (the same sort of members). The first kind could be “anonymous” (street crowds) or “non-anonymous” (juries or parliaments, both prone to groupthink). Homogeneous crowds included sects and castes (for example, priests, judges, military officers, or factory workers), as well as social classes (the peasantry, the middle-classes). When crowd-thinking seized a social caste, it tended to crystallize and last. The caste then listened only to itself and sought to capture authority in order to control the masses.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Communicability itself therefore becomes one of the central issues of this philosophy. In [Karl] Jaspers’s view, communication is the pre-eminent form of philosophical participation, which is at the same time communal philosophizing whose purpose is not to produce results but to “illuminate existence.” The similarity of this method to Socrates’s maieutic method is obvious, except that what Socrates would have called maieutic method, Jaspers calls appeal.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

“There is only one way to avoid criticism. Do nothing. Be nothing. Say nothing.” —Aristotle

"My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing."

— Ernest Hemingway

The quickest to be offended are the easiest to manipulate. (Anon.)

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done."

— Steve Jobs

"Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil."

— Hannah Arendt

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 30 April 2021

 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear is always connected with isolation—which can be either its result or its origin—and the concomitant experiences of impotence and helplessness.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Character reintroduces Fate into psychology. Substitutions for character eliminated this ancient connection. “Ego,” “personality,” “self,” “agent,” “individual” reduce psychology to the study of human behavior—to processes, functions, motivations—and omit the fateful consequences implied by the idea of character. Psychology shorn of fate is too shallow to address its subject, the soul.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Inserting a wedge requires learning the language that your body uses to communicate information about the environment. Its syntax and grammar aren’t made of words; they’re sensation, emotion, and keen observation of the links between your mind and the external world.

Essential Spirituality

Roger Walsh

 Zen practitioners recite: Innumerable labors brought us this food, We should recall how it came to us.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 29 April 2021

 

Exploring the history of inquiry in the West 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Statistical significance arguments. If on a certain hypothesis a certain result would be unlikely, then the occurrence of that result tells against the hypothesis. Of this kind are arguments ruling out the hypothesis of chance: a sequence of 1,000 heads when tossing a coin is possible but very unlikely if the tossing were random, so if such a result occurs, one rules out the hypothesis of chance and looks for some explanation of the regularity, such as a bias in the coin. Such arguments occurred in Aristotle, Cicero, the Talmud, and occasionally thereafter. There was never any attempt to quantify how unlikely the result was on the hypothesis.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Nyanaponika Thera noted, “cautious and intelligent use … of one’s own introspective observations … though far from infallible, may well lead to important and reliable conclusions.” Whether the Hellenistic philosophers meditated or not, their self-observation was sensitive and accurate, as is showed by the fact that they describe the process virtually identically with the abhidharma [a tradition of Buddhist description of operations of the mind] except for a tendency to see as aspects of a single complex stage what the abhidharma sees more minutely as successive simple stages.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

When we stop thinking for ourselves we are in a trance. Trance is the default setting of a mind that's not working consciously. Sometimes, when purposeful, this is healthy at other times it's incredibly unhealthy.

Perennial Seller

Ryan Holiday

"Lots of people," as the poet and artist Austin Kleon puts it, "want to be the noun without doing the verb." To make something great, what's required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can't not.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 28 April 2021

 

An outstanding consideration of Keynes & his legacy

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Keynes was also convinced that the economic problem of the twentieth century was not scarcity but mismanagement. Depressions were caused not by production shortfalls but by financial instability and uncertainty. The British general strike of 1926 and the rise of Hitler had been driven by desperate people seeking radical solutions to intractable domestic misery.

Isn't the second sentence the key to understanding some of the despair of the Great Depression and others before & since? Nothing happened, such as a war or natural disaster, to cause such to cause the disaster. I was simply a failure of a purely human (as opposed to natural) system.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now." [Emerson]

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

So now I just do it. Because it’s on this structure I call a calendar.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

How do I distinguish between waiting (listening inside for inspiration) and procrastination?

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Since Bergson, the use of the sight metaphor in philosophy has kept dwindling, not unsurprisingly, as emphasis and interest have shifted entirely from contemplation to speech, from nous to logos. With this shift, the criterion for truth has shifted from the agreement of knowledge with its object—the adequatio rei et intellectus, understood as analogous to the agreement of vision with the seen object—to the mere form of thinking, whose basic rule is the axiom of non-contradiction, of consistency with itself, that is, to what Kant still understood as the merely “negative touchstone of truth.”

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

It has been common to see, in consequence of the (true) ellipse theory and the (false) Platonic solids theory, two Keplers, or at least two opposing aspects of Kepler’s thought—one, rationalist and looking forward to modern scientific method, with its curve fitting and hypothesis testing; the other backward looking and “mystical,” misled by all manner of unlikely Pythagorean speculations. Kepler’s works reveal no such split. The difference between the two theories is simply that the ellipse theory turned out to be right, the solids theory wrong. Kepler’s manner of thinking, and of argument, is the same in both cases and is the one that lies at the bottom of the success of modern mathematical science. It involves finding the harmonies of the world, to use Kepler’s words, or in the language of a more pedestrian century, argument from concomitant variation.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

The point is not that . . . slogans, ideals, programs, and declarations do not influence action. Under certain circumstances they undoubtedly do, and tremendously. But they are not and cannot be part of logical or rational action.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 27 April 2021

"Hannah Arendt Cheat Sheet" by Samantha Rose Hill

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

And since thinking, the silent dialogue of me with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body—“never am I more active than when I do nothing” (Cato)—the difficulties created by metaphors drawn from the sense of hearing would be as great as the difficulties created by the metaphor of vision. (Bergson, still so firmly attached to the metaphor of intuition for the ideal of truth, speaks of the “essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition” without being aware of the contradiction between the quiet of contemplation and any activity, let alone a violent one.

"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." — Hannah Arendt

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Along with this “will to the now,” there is a kind of hoarding of the past, an “archive mania” which, paradoxically, denies the past its true character. In its hands the past becomes a mere source of “information.” Unlike true historical scholarship, there is no discrimination between what is worthy of being saved and what is not, what tells a story and what does not. Like Jorge Luis Borges's unfortunate character Funes the Memorius, today's “information junkies” are either unable or unwilling to forget anything.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Evolution has a broad and general tendency to move in the direction of: increasing complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos.

Book by Book

Michael Dirda

Benedict Spinoza: “Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.”—“I have laboured carefully, when faced with human actions, not to mock, not to lament, not to execrate, but to understand.”