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It has sometimes been said that what we feel is always something existing here and now, and limited in its existence to the place and time at which it is felt; whereas what we think is always something eternal, something having no special habitation of its own in space and time but existing everywhere and always.
For every selfish creep, there are many who use business entrepreneurship to make the world better in some way. Also, selfishness can be a good thing. Adam Smith was right that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest can, when directed through a well-functioning market, hugely benefit broader society. Modern market economies are prodigiously creative; and that creativity, when pointed in the right direction, can be an extraordinary force for good.
The fourth principle that should be at the center of any positive vision of the future and worldview is a strong commitment to a shared identity that encompasses not just all of humanity, but in some respects all life on the planet too. This is the matter of who we see as “we.”
Neuroscientists and lifelong meditators have long known that our minds slip from past to present to pondering the future, often without any obvious connection between reference points.
The important thing about positive feedbacks is that they are inherently unstable: they create self-reinforcing spirals of behavior, and can cause systems to become overextended or unbalanced.
Where the new way of knowing demanded that the observer remain detached, isolated from the observed, so as to capture it in complete ‘objectivity’, thereby making what was under observation an ‘object’ – denying it had any ‘inside’ – Goethe knew that such objectivity was impossible. Well before Werner Heisenberg, Goethe had grasped this central truth, that ‘the phenomenon is not detached from the observer, but intertwined and involved with him’.
“Socrates himself fell victim to the popular prejudice against philosophy.” There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions.
The Nazis distributed photographs of Hitler’s hands with the caption, “The Führer’s hands organize his speech.” Memorably, the philosopher Karl Jaspers asked his friend Martin Heidegger, Germany’s most influential philosopher, how he could support a philistine like Hitler. “Culture is of no importance,” Heidegger replied. “Just look at his marvelous hands.” The friendship did not last.
