Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Thoughts of the Day: Tuesday 29 September 2020

 


Protagoras, who was a lawyer and a teacher of courtroom argumentation, taught his students to argue both sides of a case and is reported as saying that “of everything two contradictory accounts can be given” (D.L. IX.51), that “Everything is true” (ibid.), and that refutation is impossible (D.L. IX.53)—in other words, that reality is indeterminate in relation to the concept systems embodied in language.

A little hunger turns on your body's repair mechanisms. So doing without the occasional feeding is a powerful way to slow aging.
The suspension of disbelief becomes a humble acceptance of whatever is going on as part of the zigzag workings of the Creative. These two attitudes combine in an unshakable modesty which exemplifies The Receptive. While they appear to be passive attitudes, they are not. The secret is that they perfectly arouse the powers of the Creative to work out all things correctly.
It is vitally important to realize that 'ordinary consciousness' is incomplete. In fact, to put it more emphatically, everyday consciousness is a liar.
All of us…are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it. -----Albert Camus
And back to the deeper dive with Hannah Arendt from her Essays in Understanding, and in particular and her "Understanding & Politics"
True understanding is distinguished from public opinion in both its popular and scientific forms only by its refusal to relinquish the original intuition. To put it in a schematic and therefore necessarily inadequate way, it is as though, whenever we are confronted with something frighteningly new, our first impulse is to recognize it in a blind and uncontrolled reaction strong enough to coin a new word; our second impulse seems to be to regain control by denying that we saw anything new at all, by pretending that something similar is already known to us; only a third impulse can lead us back to what we saw and knew in the beginning. It is here that the effort of true understanding begins.