Thoughts for the Day: Monday 31 May 2021--Memorial Day

 

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

History, so far from depending on testimony, has therefore no relation with testimony at all. Testimony is merely chronicle. So far as anyone speaks of authorities or of accepting statements or the like, he is talking of chronicle and not of history. History is based on a synthesis of two things which only exist in that synthesis: evidence and criticism.

N.B. As a lawyer with a fair amount of trial work under my belt, this reluctance to accept testimony as a form of evidence puzzles me. Of course, testimony can prove unreliable for reasons intentional (to wit, lying) and through inadvertence (faulty memory; see the work of psychologist Elizebeth Loftus). But this is why we cross-examine testimony. The historian can, in her own way, cross-examine past "testimony." Some testimony may also be hearsay, but that doesn't necessarily equate with unreliability.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Immediacy perception gives us the bare facts, the discreet things that populate our awareness, the surface of Bergson’s analysis and the ‘granulated’ bits and pieces of Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘cerebral’ consciousness.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

It was not until the post-war years [referring to WWI], which brought a willingness to tear down outmoded intellectual structures, that Germany would offer a soil in which Kierkegaardian thought could take root. Nietzsche and the so-called life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), Bergson, Dilthey, and Simmel had prepared the way for Kierkegaard in Germany. In Nietzsche, systematic philosophy saw its fundamental tenets threatened for the first time, for Nietzsche’s destruction of old psychological assumptions revealed the extra-philosophical, psychic, and vital energies that actually motivated philosophers to philosophize.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The counterargument, which I’m defending, is Astwood’s belief that those who fatten easily are fundamentally, physiologically and metabolically different from those who don’t.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 30 May 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As recent storms and quakes demonstrate, “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” (Will Durant, 1946).

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.

1984

George Orwell

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Our supply of ingenuity, I soon recognized, involves both the generation of good ideas and their implementation within society.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from practical activity, thus presents characteristics of both kinds. It is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus

Gary Lachman

The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley

 

1999 publication

In this relatively short, easy-to-read book, Peter Kingsley sets forth findings from archeology and classical tests that paint a very different portrait of one of the founders of Western metaphysical thinking, Parmenides. Kingsley's tale of discoveries and insights supports his contention that Parmenides and those around him were profoundly concerned with healing and a deeper form of knowledge than simply rational thought. "Dying before you die" is the title of one of the chapters, and it's a familiar refrain to me, having recently read Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Code, in which "dying before you die" was the dominant motif throughout his account of his search through ancient sources. (In fact, I'd taken a stab at Kingsley's book many years ago, but it didn't stick, but Muraresku's praise for Kingsley's work brought me back to it.) 

I'm not a classicist and I'm not in any way qualified to shift through the evidence that might counter Kingsley's contention that Parmenides was first and foremost a healer. I get the impression that such a contention is outside the mainstream of thinking in the classics, at least when Kingsley first promoted this thesis. But having read a bit in this area, including Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life and The Present Alone is Our Happiness, Thomas McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought, and Muraresku's recent book, I'm not surprised that the roots of classical philosophy are found in mysticism, that is religious, spiritual, and healing practices that arise from deep within the cultural tradition. In short, I suspect that Kingsley is on the right track. 

I noted in perusing some other reviews, I find that some reviewers noted the very simple style in which this book is written. This is true, it is an easy read, especially given the subject matter. But while Kingsley writes simply, he thinks deeply. I found myself racing through the book while noting many gems of insight and argument as I went, so don't let the simplicity of the prose deceive you. Also, he doesn't use footnotes, but he has a section of references at the end of the book for each chapter for those who want to take a deeper look. It's especially useful if you read French, German, and Italian in addition to English and have access to an academic library! 

Kingsley has made a fascinating argument here, and I'm looking forward to reading his Reality, which appears to be a sequel of sorts (originally published in 2004 with a revised and updated version published in 2020). I also look forward to reading the "prequel," Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition  (1995), which may not prove such an easy read given that it's published by OUP.  

Kingsley is onto something here, and I look forward to continuing the journey with him. 

 

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 29 May 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

In the 1930s, Lippmann saw himself participating in an ideological project to redefine liberalism for an age of political and economic turmoil—the same project that Keynes had attempted a dozen years earlier in The End of Laissez-Faire. And it made sense to group Hayek, Mises, and Keynes together. They all still called themselves liberals and considered themselves inheritors of the same Enlightenment intellectual tradition. They were all anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet and had come of age believing that free trade and the gold standard were essential to the preservation of individual liberty. But this shared tradition had been fracturing for years, and with Roosevelt the breach became irreparable.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Lack of curiosity and lack of empathy have always been defining characteristics of the official authorities on obesity and weight control and of most of the self-appointed (lean) authorities.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Public health and medical authorities have slowly come to accept what research and physician iconoclasts had argued as early as the 1960s, that heart disease is a complex process and the end result of a metabolic disruption that manifests itself throughout the human body. We cannot ascertain whether we will live a long and healthy life from a single number and a single biological entity. (The measures that are best at doing that, in any case, are far better indicators than LDL cholesterol.) For most of us, the primary sign that we’re at high risk of heart disease or premature death from any chronic disease, including cancer, is not whether our LDL cholesterol is elevated, but whether we have the cluster of metabolic disorders now known as metabolic syndrome, which itself seems to be a consequence or manifestation of insulin resistance.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In a backward rural South, impoverished white elites under a Democratic Party flag divided poor blacks against poor whites, enjoyed unbreakable majorities in state legislatures, and resisted democratic liberalism until the 1960s, when a South grown richer gave in to a combination of federal pressure and pragmatic calculation. Cultural conservatives in the South—for example, the Southern Agrarians (to be noted later)—defended the region’s “higher” values against the crude “materialism” of the North. Theirs was an example of the “withdrawal” strategy taken by critics of liberal modernity on the right who chose to resist in books rather than politics.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

[Abraham Maslow] accepted Freud’s clinical method without accepting his philosophy. Man is driven by sexual urges, dominance urges, territorial urges; but these are only the lower part of the picture. Shaw had always asserted that there are saintly men and women in whom the sex-drive has been transcended; but in the Freudian era, this was taken for old-fashioned idealism. But it is a logical consequence of Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of values’ theory. The ‘transcendent’ urges—aesthetic, creative, religious—are as basic and permanent a part of human nature as dominance or sexuality. If they are less obviously ‘universal’, this is only because fewer human beings reach the point at which they take over.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Fraternity, which the French Revolution added to the liberty and equality which have always been categories of man’s political sphere—that fraternity has its natural place among the repressed and persecuted, the exploited and humiliated, whom the eighteenth century called the unfortunates, les malheureux, and the nineteenth century the wretched, les misérables.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

But, assuming that non-logical conduct is, on the whole, predominant in those actions that affect the course of history, we may legitimately wonder why this has not been widely recognized.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Perhaps most important, politics itself has been taken over by markets. In a 1993 essay, the political scientist Robert A. Dahl explained why almost all democratic countries had chosen not to organize themselves as purely market-driven but instead left a large role for the state. He pointed out that there were many things in society that one would want to insulate from market forces—politicians’ and citizens’ votes, for example. But even those have now become a tradable good, with money dominating politics to the extent that the rich—companies and people—can effectively buy votes, writing and rewriting rules to suit them.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 27 May 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

The social cost of carbon was finally getting injected into the price of fossil fuels, and that old saying, ridiculed by the fossil fuels industry for decades, was suddenly becoming the obvious thing, as being the most profitable or least unprofitable thing: Keep it in the ground.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

All these tangible and intangible flows still course through every country on the planet, yet no one nation can shape them on its own. Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable.

Fat Chance

Robert H. Lustig

Sugar covers up the inequities of foods, making not-so-tasty food seem like it is worth eating. Bottom line, you can make pretty much anything taste good with enough sugar.

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

Although  strategic planning is billed as a way of becoming more future oriented, most managers, when pressed, will admit that their strategic plans reveal more about today’s problems than tomorrow’s opportunities.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 25 May 2021

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

– Albert Einstein

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Taxes are interesting. They are one way governments guide a society and fund governmental activities, more the former than the latter. They are as old as civilization. An ancient manifestation of the power of the state. It’s possible that both debt and money were invented in the earliest cities, specifically in order to enable and regularize taxation. Both of them being forms of IOU.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The metaphor achieves the “carrying over”—metapherein—of a genuine and seemingly impossible metabasis eis alio genos, the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances, and this can be done only by analogies. (Kant gives as an example of a successful metaphor the description of the despotic state as a “mere machine (like a hand mill)” because it is “governed by an individual absolute will. . . . For between a despotic state and a hand mill there is, to be sure, no similarity; but there is a similarity in the rules according to which we reflect upon these two things and their causality.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, moreover, becomes pointless when the selection of victims is completely free from all reference to an individual’s actions or thoughts. Fear, though certainly the all-pervasive mood in totalitarian countries, is no longer a principle of action and can no longer serve as a guide to specific deeds. Totalitarian tyranny is unprecedented in that it melds people together in the desert of isolation and atomization and then introduces a gigantic motion into the tranquillity of the cemetery. No guiding principle of action taken from the realm of human action—such as virtue, honor, fear—is needed or could be used to set into motion a body politic whose essence is motion implemented by terror.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Metaphysics is for us the name of a science, and has been for many centuries, because for many centuries it has been found necessary, and still is found necessary, to think in a systematic or orderly fashion about the subjects that Aristotle discussed in the group of treatises collectively known by that name.

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova

Their [confidence mens'] genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 25 May 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney,

We always have one choice in the face of life’s obstacles. We can follow reactions that are already hardwired into our body’s physiological responses, or, for better or worse, resist those urges and will ourselves onto a different path. Either way, life’s challenges—the crests and valleys of that turbulent ocean—are the stakes that define what we’re made of. The decisions we make in the face of death are what make us real.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

In Kierkegaard’s view, philosophy is so caught up in its own systematics that it forgets and loses sight of the actual self of the philosophizing subject: it never touches the “individual” in his concrete “existence.” Hegel indeed trivializes this very individual and his life, which are for Kierkegaard the central concern.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

And in other cases in which the evidence to be evaluated is strictly numerical, as in evaluating business prospects given financial information, it appears that human judgment is competitive with the most sophisticated mathematical methods.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The Internet was meant to be the ultimate equalizer, providing small start-ups access to customers everywhere. And there is some truth to this idea. But the larger truth is that far from being a platform that has enabled competition, the Internet by nature encourages the creation of monopolies on a scale rarely seen in history.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 24 May 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment Keynes had described in The General Theory might be described as the commonsense regulation of inflation and employment, rather than the nefarious planning that Hayek excoriated. Glass-Steagall’s government-mandated breakup of the American investment houses was just a responsible antitrust action to restore competitive banking. Social Security and public works spending were inoffensive elements of the basic social guarantee.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

As to the certainty or otherwise of their methods, the Empirics, though apparently not admitting the fallibility in principle of induction from what has been seen “very many times,” did admit to making mistakes because their experience was limited. They hastened to add, of course, that the Dogmatists did too, without admitting it. Dogmatism, they said, could at best only reach the level of plausibility and likelihood.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Humanitas is never acquired in solitude and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the “venture into the public realm”—in the course of which he risks revealing something which is not “subjective” and which for that very reason he can neither recognize nor control. Thus the “venture into the public realm,” in which humanitas is acquired, becomes a gift to mankind.