Love opens the world to us, as it opens ourselves to the world, whereas hate, for [Max] Scheler, was a closing off, a shrinking away from things (it is unclear if Scheler ever read Swedenborg, but this seems very similar to Swedenborg’s distinction between the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’ mentioned earlier).
N.B. Max Scheler was highly praised by Ortega y Gassett, Heidegger, and later Pope John Paul II, and is not cited by Iain McGilchrist.
Complexity and simplicity are relative terms. However, complexity is surely, we imagine, a more unusual state of affairs arising out of the agglomeration of more simple elements – isn’t it? I believe that this is a mistake – one all too understandable, given our world view, but a mistake nonetheless. Rather, complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple (simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled)..
Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave, knew what he was talking about when he said in 1860, after an angry mob broke up an abolitionist meeting in Boston: “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.” (He added, significantly: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”)
I’d learned something about how the brain and nervous system encode sensations and emotions together. I now know that neural symbols are the underlying building blocks for everything that I think and experience. But I don’t have a new practice to put that knowledge into action. I want a technique that’s easy to learn but also triggers enough of a response that it keeps me attentive.
The three main building blocks of human experience are time, emotion and sensation. The brain must account for all three factors in order to encode information from the outside world.
Time strikes me as the odd man out, so to speak, in these three characteristics. The traditional third would be "intellect" or "reason." However, this is not to denigrate the function of time as a fundamental attribute of human experience. Cf. Iain McGilchrist on time in The Matter with Things.
The ‘so-called bodily pleasures’ are (ibid.) the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex. Now these according to Plato himself (Rep. 580 E) are the pleasures, or some of the pleasures, of ‘The Acquisitive’; and ‘The Acquisitive’ is one of the three ‘forms’ (εἴδη) or ‘parts’ (μέρη) which go to make up the mind (ψνχή).
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
― E. O. Wilson
RIP December 26, 2021 (from Tim Ferriss)
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or rights of property,” said James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10. John Adams echoed the sentiment: ““Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”
The best, in fact the only, way I can think of to get hold of the question is to look for a model, an example of a thinker who was not a professional, who in his person unified two apparently contradictory passions, for thinking and acting—not in the sense of being eager to apply his thoughts or to establish theoretical standards for action but in the much more relevant sense of being equally at home in both spheres and able to move from one sphere to the other with the greatest apparent ease, very much as we ourselves constantly move back and forth between experiences in the world of appearances and the need for reflecting on them.
Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, attention, concentration, life force, and volition.
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