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| R.G. Collingwood at middle-age |
High-grade thinking means thinking energetically instead of idly: thinking hard instead of allowing your mind to drift.
The point to which I refer is concerned with the significance of time. Modern cosmologies are in general based on the idea of evolution, and represent the development not only of one natural species or order as a development in time, but also the development of mind from nature as a development in time.
Once when he [Gottfried Lessing] was attempting to explain to himself the source of “tragic pleasure,” he said that “all passions, even the most unpleasant, are as passions pleasant” because “they make us . . . more conscious of our existence, they make us feel more real.” This sentence strikingly recalls the Greek doctrine of passions, which counted anger, for example, among the pleasant emotions but reckoned hope along with fear among the evils.
I always mention that there is a vital tension between philosophy and politics. That is, between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being, there is a tension that does not exist in natural philosophy, for example.
[German philosopher Karl] Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.
Now, thirty years later, the most recent unbiased review of this evidence [claiming that saturated fat is unhealthy]—from the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization founded to do such impartial reviews—concluded that clinical trials have failed to demonstrate any meaningful benefit from eating low-fat diets and so, implicitly, any harm from eating fat-rich foods. The Cochrane review described the evidence as only “suggestive” that avoiding saturated fat specifically might avert a single heart attack, and said it’s even “less clear” whether this would lengthen anyone’s life.
Where the doubting game tests an idea by helping us see its weaknesses and shortcomings, the believing game tests an idea by helping us see the strengths of competing ideas.
Curiosity creates possibilities; the need for certainty narrows them. Curiosity creates energy; the need for certainty depletes. Curiosity results in exploration; the need for certainty creates closure. Curiosity creates movement; the need for certainty is about replaying events.
