“[H]ope that,” which is a passive and timid locution, and “hope to,” which is active and bold— a difference that bears crucially on the issue of our agency as we try to deal with humanity’s problems.
All media present an abstract and selective version of reality, but compared to print television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. . . . [At best], because it portrays the world in ever small “bites” of sound and image, television creates what is tantamount to a cartoon of reality.
Western psychiatric medicine is often hard to distinguish from pharmacology. Most antidepressants aim to suppress moods—to bring them into a narrow range of experience, removing both the highs and lows. We reduce symptoms of an affliction to make it invisible.
Alfred Whitehead has distinguished between the “speculative” reason which “Plato shared with God” and the “pragmatic” reason which “Ulysses shared with the foxes.”
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.
But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more. A lack of vasopressin explains not only my own irritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have every night.
I can attest to the accuracy of this observation based upon personal experience.
Voegelin fitted into no obvious partisan or intellectual pigeonhole. His underlying point about the hollowed-out middle of liberal-modern society was not original. Tocqueville, speaking a century before as a conservative liberal, had worried about the unhealthy coupling of undue personal liberty and collectivist tyranny. The thought was common currency for midcentury conservatives such as Jouvenel, Kolnai, and, in a quieter vein, Collingwood. Nor was Voegelin’s antipathy to ideology distinctive.
I'm not comfortable throwing Collingwood in with the conservatives. Collingwood was on the whole a classical (European) liberal, more a "conservative liberal" like Tocqueville.
Exporting maxims from where they worked to where they did not work was the second kind of reasoning Burke proscribed.
[Ernst] Cassirer’s search for the origin of the modern age in The Individual and the Cosmos, as with Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s works, indicates a loss. Cassirer sought to show, equally clearly but in a different way, the location of that loss later in the modern age. Intoxicated by the explanatory and predictive power of the natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the physical laws of nature assume an absolute determinative role as the forces behind all cosmic events—including humanity, as a purely material species. The problem of our freedom (of will) could then be solved only by extricating our essence from the world in the form of Cartesian philosophy of consciousness: the human being as a purely thinking entity separated from the body.
