“No passion,” said Edmund Burke, the English statesman and philosopher, “so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.”
Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.---Goethe.
That people can be persuaded by factual or scientific arguments to change their minds is demonstrably false. Confirmation bias—we take in information that supports our existing beliefs and mostly ignore or reject the rest—is only one of the many tricks the human mind plays on itself. Hence we respond to new facts in less-than-rational and often sub-optimal ways.
First, the essential aim of all Buddhist practice is to develop undistracted awareness—that is, to arrive at the state of pure presence that the Buddha-to-be first experienced under the rose-apple tree as a child and that later became the key to his awakening.
Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (PH 73).
At the same time, bad decisions, or politically objectionable decisions, are not sufficient grounds for impeachment, even if much of the nation is up in arms. The United States, unlike some other democracies, does not allow votes of no confidence.
The history of philosophy transpired in this two-limbed kind of development in both Greece and India, despite the modern idea that Greek thinkers were primarily realistic and logical, while Indian thought was supposedly limited to transcendentalist and intuitive modes. In fact, neither of these ancient cultures was as limited as that. The Greeks quite as much as the Indians had philosophical schools with mystical and transcendentalist orientations; conversely, the various trends of pluralism, naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and protoscientific rationalism unfolded in the Indian schools as well as in the Greek.
