Walt Whitman

Song of Myself

48
I find letters from God drop’t in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
and I leave them where they are,
For I know that whereso’ever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.

51
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and of my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Sartre

What is a thought? asks Sartre...It is bodily feelings, it is words that surge up and vanish, it is a story I tell myself later. When we look at it closely, meaning vanishes–as when we repeat a word over and over, or stare at our faces in a mirror. If we consider our lives from moment to moment we observe, as Roquentin does, how much of the sense of what we are doing has to be put in afterwards...

What he learns is this. We must live forwards, not backwards. Not only every generation, but every moment, is "equi-distant from eternity." We are not to live with our eye on History or on our biographer–to do so involves us in mauvaise foi and destroys the freshness and sincerity of our projects.

Iris Murdoch, "The Discovery of Things" from Sartre, on La Nausee


Character has no distinct existence except as an object of knowledge to other people. Consciousness does not know its own character–except in so far as it may consider itself reflectively from the point of view of another...This is why pure introspective description of onself does not reveal a character: Proust’s hero "has" no character which can be grasped directly.

Being and Nothingness, 416.

Edward W. Said

Jacoby keeps coming back to his idea of an intellectual, whom he describes as "an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one." All that we have now, he says, is a missing generation which has been replaced by buttoned-up, impossible to understand classroom technicians, hired by committee, anxious to please various patrons and agencies, bristling with academic credentials and a social authority that does not promote debate but establishes reputations and intimidates nonexperts. This is a very gloomy picture, but is it an accurate one? Is what Jacoby says about the reason for the disappearance of intellectuals true, or can we offer in fact a more accurate diagnosis?

...Being an intellectual is not at all inconsistent with being an acedemic...The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something that you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior--not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and able all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and "objective."

What I want to discuss are four pressures which I believe challenge the intellectual's ingenuity and will. None of them is unique to only one society. Despite their pervasiveness, each of them can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a speciality, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.

Representations of the Intellectual

Heidegger

Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy today. But--is there anything at all left today in which man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands "interest"?
Interest, interesse, means to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it. But today's interest accepts as valid only what is interesting. And interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment, and be displaced by sometihng else, which then concerns us just as little as what went before...

It is no evidence of any readiness to think that people show an interest in philosophy. There is, of course, serious preoccupation everywhere with philosophy and its problems. The learned world is expending commendable efforts in the investigation of the history of philosophy. These are useful and worthy tasks, and only the best talents are good enough for them, especially when they present to us models of great thinking. But even if we have devoted many years to the intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves ar ehtinking, or even are ready to learn thinking. On the contrary--preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly "philosophizing."

We still are not thinking. The reason is never exclusively or primarily that we men do not sufficiently reach out and trun toward what properly gives food for thought; the reason is that this most thought-provoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since turned away from man...

Once we are so related to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking--even though he may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever. All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. And as yet hidden history still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives.

Socrates and Alcibiades (by Hans Hoelderlin)

Why, holy Socrates, must you always adore
This young man? Is there nothing greater than he?
Why do you look on him
Lovingly, as on a god?

Who has the deepest has thought, loves what is most alive,
Who as looked at the world, understands youth as its height,
And wise men in the end
Often incline to beauty.


What is Called Thinking?

Augustine

And sometimes you cause me to enter into an extraordinary depth of feeling marked by a strange sweetness. If it were brought to perfection in me, it would be an experience quite beyond anything in this life. But I fall back into my usual ways under my miserable burdens. I am reabsorbed by my habitual practices. I am held in their grip. I weep profusely, but still I am held. Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be, but do not wish it. There I wish to be, but lack the power. On both grounds I am in misery.

...In my greed I was unwilling to lose you, and wanted to have you at the same time as holding on to a lie, in much the same way as no one wants to become such a liar as to lose all awareness of what the truth is. This is why I lost you: you do not condescend to be possessed together with falsehood.

Who could be found to reconcile me to you? Was I to beg the help of the angels? What prayer should I use? What sacred rites? Many have tried to return to you, and have not had the strength in themselves to achieve it, so I have been told. They have attempted these methods and have lapsed into a desire for curious visions, and have been rewarded with illusions. For in their quest they have been lifted up by pride in their high culture...They sought a mediator to purify them, and it was not the true one. For it was "the devil transforming himself into an angel of light."

Confessions X.66-67

Aldous Huxley, the Perennial Philosophy

O Friend, hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live: for in life deliverance abides.
If you bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death?
It is but an empty dream that the soul shall have union with Hum because it has passed from the body:
If he is found now, He is found then.
If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death.

Kabir


It is in virtue of his absorption in God and just because he has not identified his being with the inborn and acquired elements of his private personality, that the saint is able to exercise his entirely non-coercive and therefore entirely beneficent influence on individuals and even on whole societies. Or, to be more accurate, it is because he has purged himself of selfness that divine Reality is able to use him as a channel of grace and power. "I live, yet not I, but Christ–the eternal Logos–liveth in me." True of the saint, this must a fortiori be true of the Avatar, or incarnation of God...For, obviously, had Jesus remained content merely to have a personality, like the rest of us, he would never have exercised the kind of influence which he did exercise, and it would never have occurred to anyone to regard him as a divine incarnation and to identify him with the Logos. That he came to be thought of as the Christ was due to the fact that he had passed beyond selfness and had become the bodily and mental conduit through which a more than personal, supernatural life flowed down into the world.

Huxley


To have too much power over one’s fellows, to be too rich, too violent, too ambitious–all this invites punishments, and in the long run, we notice, punishment of one sort of another duly comes. But the Greeks did not stop there. Because they regarded Nature as in some way divine, they felt that it had to be respected and they were convinced that a hubristic lack of respect for Nature would be punished by avenging nemesis.

...Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave towards her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant. The spoils of recent technological imperialism have been enormous; but meanwhile nemesis has seen to it that we get our kicks as well as halfpence. For example, has the ability to travel in twelve hours from New York to Los Angeles given more pleasure to the human race than the dropping of bombs and fire has given pain? There is no method of computing the amount of felicity or goodness in the world at large. What is obvious, however, is that the advantages accruing from recent technological advances–or, in Greek phraseology, from recent acts of hubris directed Nature–are generally accompanied by corresponding disadvantages, that gains in one direction entail losses in other directions, and that we never get something except for something.

Whether the net result of these elaborate credit and debit operations is a genuine Progress in virtue, happiness, charity and intelligence is something we can never definitely determine. It is because the reality of Progress can never be determined that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to treat it as an article off religious faith. To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in their advance towards man’s final end...

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds, and spirit outside the self.

Huxley


The first step, then, is for the soul to put away outward things and look within so as to know its own real interest; so far all is right and natural; thus much is only a wise self love, which seeks to avoid the intoxication of the world.
In the next step the soul must add the contemplation of God, whom it fears, to that of self. This is a faint approach to the real wisdom, but the soul is still greatly self-absorbed; it is not satisfied with fearing God; it wants to be certain that it does fear him and fears lest it fear him not, going round in a perpetual circle of self-consciousness. All this restless dwelling on self is very far from the peace and freedom of real love; but that is yet in the distance; the soul must needs go through a season of trial, and were it suddenly plunged into a state of rest, it would not know how to use it.
The third step is that, ceasing from a restless self-contemplation, the soul begins to dwell upon God instead, and by degrees forgets itself in Him. It becomes full of Him and ceases to feed upon self. Sch a soul is not blinded to its own faults or indifferent to its own errors; it is more conscious of them than ever, and increased light shows them in plainer form, but this self-knowledge comes from God, and therefore it is not restless or uneasy.

Fenelon.


Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But "to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content," in the words of St John of the Cross, "with what it less than God." Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who "have ceased to cherish opinions" – even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the heart of God, into his hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.

To suppose that one can be saved by studying and assenting to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa.

Huxley


Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses.
And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though
I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that
I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would
be but another source of error. Better to desist and
strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will?

Chuang Tzu

Augustine

'Grant me Lord to know and understand.' Which comes first--to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you precedes calling upon you. But who calls upon you when he does not know you? For an ignorant person might call upon someone else instead of the right one.

Confessions, I.1

The house of my soul is too small for you to come to it. May it be enlarged for you. It is in ruins: restore it. In your eyes it has offensive features. I admit it, I know it, but who will clear it up? Or to whom shall I cry other than you?

I.6

If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say 'What is this?' So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable.

I.10

Myriad

"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." -- 2 Corinthians 3:6


The Parable of the Two Sons

28"What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work today in the vineyard.' 29" 'I will not,' he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. 30"Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, 'I will, sir,' but he did not go. 31"Which of the two did what his father wanted?" "The first," they answered.

Even when we act from cool and calculated self-advantage, our conception of where that advantage lies is shaped and sustained by our 'passion': sometimes passions of vanity, or of fear, or of how we stand in the eyes of others; sometimes deposits from memories of shameful failures or elating successes. This tradition provides a far richer account of motivation than does classical rational choice theory, whose 'economic man' is too often a horrible caricature of actual human agency.

-Simon Blackburn

If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: Don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.

-Albert Einstein