Below is a new venture. I'm attempting to keep track of some random quotes or thoughts that I think worth sharing and to post them on a monthly basis. I will attempt to keep them short, but as you'll see with one article by John Lukacs, I just couldn't relent from taking a number of quotes from an essay that he wrote. Unless otherwise attributed, what I'll refer as "thoughts" are my own, although I'm not sure I ever think any truly original thoughts. Fortunately, I'm not too carried away with the anxiety of influence. I can't afford to be.
10.16.14
Purification is the key to development of Equanimity.
Get rid of the junk & the “Buddha Mind" will appear. It’s hidden beneath the
grime of existence (karma).
And purification requires renunciation (forgoing
some things you enjoy).
Fangfu: “Freedom results from having no desires.”
Socrates Code @ 2005 (Kindle location). Extreme.
What’s
the point of meditation?
[M]any years of
intensive spiritual practice had succeeded in clearing [Buddha’s] mind, and one
day an early childhood memory bubbled up. Left to himself under a tree by the
side of a field in which his father was supervising the ritual plowing,
Siddhartha had relaxed into a state of pure presence— a condition of open,
amplified awareness in which he saw everything perfectly, just as it was.
Feeling with his whole body and mind the clarity, grace, and power of that
remembered state, Siddhartha knew he had found the way forward at last.
Patrick Ophuls, The Buddha Takes No Prisoners, p. 8.
How to get good at meditation:
So practice is
everything . Whatever your talent for meditation, you cannot succeed without
practicing ; whatever your lack of talent, you can succeed by practicing. If
you produce the perspiration, the inspiration will come—
Patrick Ophuls, The Buddha Takes No Prisoners, p. 50.
A real nugget about politics:
How Things Should Be
is the central question and struggle of politics. . . .
Tim Kreider, “Our
Greatest Political Novelist?”, New Yorker
10.20.14
Everything that we do, we do to change our state
of consciousness. ~Sam Harris
“Energy is eternal delight”—William Blake
11.18.14
But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the
purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and
not even certainty; it is understanding.
Below
is a case of my getting carried away with quotes from a single article, but it’s
John Lukacs, so I’m sure you’ll indulge me (or more likely ignore it). Anyway,
I’m leaving it in for your edification.
John Lukacs,
“Putting Man Before Descartes”, American Scholar, December 2008
Can we expect a
Jewish man to be objective about Hitler? Perhaps not. Yet we may expect him or
anyone to attempt to understand. And that attempt must depend on the how, on the very quality of his
participation, on the approach of his own mind, including at least a modicum of
understanding of his own self. After all, Hitler and Stalin were human beings,
so they were not entirely or essentially different from any other person now
thinking about them.
The ideal of
objectivity is the antiseptic separation of the knower from the known. Understanding
involves an approach to bring the two closer. But there is, there can be, no
essential separation of the knower from the known.
Words are not finite
categories but meanings—what they mean to us. They have their own histories and
lives and deaths, their magical powers and limits.
Historical
knowledge—indeed, any kind of human knowledge—is necessarily subjective. That
is what I tended to think in my early 20s. Soon I found that I was wrong.
Subjectivity is merely the obverse side of objectivism and objectivity; there
is something wrong with the entire Cartesian coin, of a world divided into
object and subject, because subjectivism as much as objectivism is determinist.
According to
subjectivism I can think and see in only one (my) way; he in another (his) way.
This is wrong, because thinking and seeing are creative acts coming from the
inside, not the outside. Which is why we are responsible both for how and what
we do or say as well as for how and what we think and see (or, for what we want
to think and for what we want to see).
This is how and why
the history of ideas is almost always woefully incomplete: not what but when it is that people are finally
willing to hear something.
the more objective
our concept of the mountain, the more abstract that mountain becomes.
What will, what must
endure is the piecemeal recognition that the division of the world into objects
and subjects belongs to history, as does every other human creation: that
whatever realities objectivity and its practical applications contained and may
still contain, they are not perennial, not always and not forever valid.
Knowledge, which is
neither objective nor subjective, is always personal. Not individual: personal.
The concept of the individual has been one of the essential misconceptions of
political liberalism. Every human being is unique, but he does not exist alone.
He is dependent on others (a human baby for much longer than the offspring of
other animals); his existence is inseparable from his relations with other
human beings.
Our knowledge is not
only personal; it is also participant. There is—yet there cannot be—a
separation of the knower from the known. We must see further than this. It is
not enough to recognize the impossibility (perhaps even the absurdity) of the
ideal of their antiseptic, objective separation. What concerns—or should
concern—us is something more than the inseparability; it is the involvement of the knower with the
known.
Detachment from
one’s passions and memories is often commendable. But detachment, too, is
something different from separation; it involves the ability (issuing from
one’s willingness) to achieve a stance of a longer or higher perspective. The
choice for such a stance does not necessarily mean a reduction of one’s
personal interest, of participation—perhaps even the contrary.
Did—does—matter
exist independent of the human mind? It did and it does; but, without the human
mind, matter’s existence is meaningless—indeed, without the human mind, we
cannot think of its existence at all. In this sense it may even be argued that
mind preceded and may precede matter (or what we see and then call “matter”).
Causality—the how
and why—has varied forms and meanings (Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas listed
four); but for centuries the terms of mechanical causality have dominated our
world and our categories of thinking. All of the practical applications of
science, everything that is technical, inevitably depend on the three
conditions of mechanical causality: (1) the same causes must have the same effects;
(2) there must be an equivalence of causes and effects; (3) the causes must
precede their effects. None of this necessarily applies to human beings, to the
functioning of their minds, to their lives, and especially to their history.
In life, in our histories,
there are effects that may, at times, even precede causes. For instance the
fear or anticipation that something may or may not happen may cause it to
happen (a view of “a future” may cause “a present”).
mechanical causality
is insufficient to understand the functioning of our minds and consequently of
our lives—and even the sense and the meaning of our memories. Every human
action, every human thought is something more than a reaction. (That is how and
why history never repeats itself.) The human mind intrudes into and complicates
the very structure of events.
It is arguable that
the two greatest intellectual achievements of the now-ended age of 500 years
have been the invention (invention,
rather than discovery) of the scientific method and the development of
historical thinking.
Consider how the
natural (natural here
means instinctive but not insightful) ability to operate devices is normal for
young, sometimes even very young, people who do not at all mind comparing or
even imagining themselves as akin to machines, unaware as they are of the
complexity and the uniqueness of human nature.
Machines may make
people’s physical lives easier, but they do not make their thinking easier. I
am writing not about happiness or unhappiness but about thinking. It is because
of thinking, because of the inevitable mental intrusion into the structure and
sequence of events, that the entire scheme of mechanical causality is
insufficient.
How much more timely
is Wendell Berry’s warning in 1999, exactly 250 years later: “It is easy for me
to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who
wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
At this stage of my
argumentation, someone may ask: Are these not merely the opinions of an
old-fashioned humanist? A poet or even a historian of a particular kind may see
the realities of the world otherwise from how (and why) a natural scientist may
see them. They represent Two Cultures, a humanistic and a scientific one. . . .
There may be dualities in our reactions, but—more important—there is increasing
evidence that, ever since Descartes and others, the dual division of the world
into objects and subjects, into known and knower, is no longer valid. And such
evidence is not only there in the so-called humanities, but, during the general
crisis at the end of the 20th century, in physics, too, involving the very
study of matter.
Energy may be
transformed into matter or heat or light; but energy is a potentiality. An
accurate definition or a measurement of the temperature of an atom is
impossible, because its very existence is only a probability.
But in history,
unlike in law, events and men may be tried and judged again and again. History
is subject to multiple jeopardy; it is potentially revisionable.
The historian must
always keep in mind the potentiality that this or that may have happened
otherwise.
the condition that
every historical actuality includes a latent potentiality (also, that human
characteristics, including mental ones, are not categories but tendencies).
What science amounts
to is a probabilistic kind of knowledge with its own limits, because of the
limitations of the human mind, including the mental operations and the personal
character of scientists themselves, which could range from sublime to fallible.
There is only one kind of knowledge, human knowledge, with the inevitability of
its participation, with the inevitable relationship of the knower to the known,
of what and how and why and when a man knows and wishes to know.
At the beginning of
the modern age, some five centuries ago, Bacon wrote: “Knowledge is power.”
Near the end of this age, we know, or ought to know, that the increase of
power—including mental power—tends to corrupt.
Because of this
recognition of the human limitations of theories, indeed, of knowledge, this
assertion of our centrality—in other words, of a new, rather than renewed,
anthropocentric and geocentric view of the universe—is not arrogant or stupid.
To the contrary: it is anxious and modest.
The known and
visible and measurable conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to our existence and to
our consciousness. The universe is such as it is because in the center of it
there exist conscious and participant human beings who can see it, explore it,
study it.
Keep in mind that
all prevalent scientific concepts of matter, and of the universe, are models. A
model is man-made, dependent on its inventor. A model cannot, and must not, be
mistaken for the world.
History (and our
knowledge of the world) swings back, but not along the arc where it once was.
Because of our present historical and mental condition, we must recognize, and
proceed from a chastened view of ourselves, of our situation, at the center of
our universe. For our universe is not more or less than our universe. That has been so
since Adam and Eve, including Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein,
Heisenberg, and my own dual, because human (opinionated as well as humble),
self.
Our thinking of the
world, our imagination (and we imagine and see together) anthropomorphizes and
humanizes everything, even inanimate things, just as our exploration of the
universe is inevitably geocentric. “Know Thyself” is the necessary fundament of
our understanding of other human beings, but we can never go wholly outside of
ourselves, just as we can never go outside the universe to see it.
The arguments of
creationism against evolutionism entirely miss this essential matter. The
language of those creationists and anti-Darwinists who proclaim the existence
of an Intelligent Design is ludicrous: it reduces God to a role model of a
rocket scientist or of a brilliant computer programmer. The matter is the
unavoidable contradiction not between Evolution and Creation but between
evolution and history. History, because in the entire universe we are the only
historical beings. Our lives are not automatic; we are responsible for what we
do, say, and think. The coming of Darwinism was historical; it appeared at a
time of unquestioned progress. But its essence was, and remains,
antihistorical. It elongated the presence of mankind to an ever-increasing
extent, by now stretching the first appearance of man on this earth to more
than a million years—implying that consequently there may be something like
another million years to come for us. Ought we not to question this kind of progressive
optimism, especially at a time when men are capable of altering nature here and
there and of destroying much of the world, including many of themselves?
11.30.2014
“Man … has no nature,” wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega
y Gasset. “[W]hat he has is …history…
. Man … finds that he has no nature other than what he has himself done.”
“The error of the old doctrine of progress lay in
affirming a priori that man progresses toward the better.”
Jose
Ortega y Gasset, quoted in the Introduction to The Remembered Past, “a
collection of Lukacs’s greatest writings on history, historians, and historical
knowledge”.
