We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature.”
“[T]o commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.” [Quoting Patriarch Bartholomew]
[Patriarch Bartholomew] asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion.”
And now from some other folks
[A]s we try to improve the efficiency and performance of . . . systems, we tend to erode the very characteristics that make them highly reliable. And as these systems become more automated and complex and contain more unknown unknowns, we frequently don’t understand them well enough to maintain their reliability.
Like Nietzsche, Heidegger saw that the West was heading into an age of nihilism and that the history of Being would end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a price tag. It was out of what Heidegger called the “destruction of metaphysics,” his attempt to undo the damage, that movements like deconstructionism and postmodernism emerged.
[Hans] Morgenthau was not championing “irrationalism,” as some of his critics charged. Rationality was required for the solution or, more accurately, the management of social problems even if people were behaving irrationally. Human interactions could be understood through reason, which could encompass un-reason (just as un-reason could encompass reason), but it was a mistake to project reason as a template onto nonrational reality itself by developing mechanical equations to explain and predict behavior. Each situation was unique, to be interpreted according to its own particularity and evaluated on its own terms.
Liberal education, [Leo Strauss] said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.
The exact observational methods of science are all contrivances for limiting these erroneous conclusions as to direct matters of fact.
The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action.
“When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached,” wrote the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his great 1877 essay, The Fixation of Belief, “a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”
Your Life claimed that the secret to longevity rested in breathing through the nose as well as a healthy dose of temperature variation. Catlin encouraged people to train themselves to sleep with their mouths closed, arguing that the nose is a natural filter of pathogens.
