A two-hundred and fifty year-old industrial civilization is also entering its terminal phase. It is mostly failing to come to grips with the problems occasioned by its success, and it exhibits all of the major contradictions that have driven past civilizations toward decline and fall—ecological stress, overpopulation, resource exhaustion, excessive complexity, loosened morals, burgeoning indebtedness, social strife, blatant corruption, and political dysfunction.
Human beings are herd animals who find it hard to keep their heads when everyone around them is losing theirs. Indeed, to depart too far from what is “normal” risks being judged “crazy.”
And, as I've said before, the human herd (now worldwide) is spooked. Why? Like all worthwhile questions, there is no simple answer; there is no single cause.
The relationship comes before the relata – the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related. What we mean by the word ‘and’ is not just additive, but creative.
There is no one absolute truth about the world that results from this process, but there are certainly truths: some things we believe will be truer than others. A maximally open, patient, and attentive response to whatever-it-is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory, insensitive, or – above all – shrouded in dogma.
(Location 299)
By about 1920 this was my first principle of a philosophy of history: that the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.
Indeed, "the present" is the culmination of "the past," the entirety of the past; the present is a continuous breaker on the neverending wave of the past.
When the mind is mastered by the will, then may new territory be conquered.
This sounds easy & it isn't. For every will, per St. Augustine, there's a will-not; for Nietzsche will involves a command within the mind that may be ignored or disobeyed. Note WWA's use of the terms "mastery" & "conquered." Isn't will mastering the mind an indication of Nietzsche's will-to-power in its worst possible manifestation? Should we encourage the will to take precedence over thinking and judging? (See Arendt, The Life of the Mind, quoted below.)
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?
Pyrrhon, according to Timon, held happiness to be the goal of philosophy, and recommended that a person who would be happy should consider the following three questions: What is the nature of things? What is our position in relation to them? What, under the circumstances, should we do? The answers appear as a formulaic series of negations in the tradition of Democritean athambia and Cynic apatheia. Questions one and two are answered by three negative adjectives: Things are adiaphora, “nondifferent,” or “without distinguishing marks”; astathme-ta, “nonstable,” or “without fixed essence”; and anepikrita, “nonjudgeable,” or “unable to be reached by concepts.” As a result, Timon quotes, “Neither our perceptions nor our opinions are either true or false.”
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work. A key reason: Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot. The implications for motivation are vast. Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones.
But what they didn’t study was what a warrior he was in preparation. To exclude everything that was not the fight from consciousness was where the real fight was won.
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