A Moment in the Text

Walt Whitman

2005-02-13T14:25:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-02T06:06:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-02T18:25:00.000-08:00

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 All that we have now, he says, is a missing generation which has been replaced by buttoned-up, impossible to understand classroom technicians, hired by committee, anxious to please various patrons and agencies, bristling with academic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

2005-01-02T18:13:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-19T08:47:00.000-08:00

'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

2004-11-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

"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

Nozick, advising Christ

2004-10-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

There is a story told that Martin Buber once spoke to a group of Christians saying something like the following : We Jews and you Christians hold many beliefs in common. Both of us believe the messiah will come. You Christians believe he has been here before, so that he will be coming for a second time, while we Jews believe he will be coming for the first time. For the foreseeable future, there is much we can cooperate together on--and when the messiah does come, then we can ask him whether he's been here before.

There is only one thing to add to Buber's remarks. I would like to advise the messiah, when he comes and is asked the question whether he's been here before or not, to reply that he doesn't remember.

Philosophical Explanations, 597 footnote.

Cicero

2004-10-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

It must be understood that we are endowed by nature with, as it were, two personae, of which the communal one derives from the fact that we all participate in reason and in that superiority by which we excel over animals and from which is drawn all good and proper conduct and from which is found the method for ascertaining our duty. The other persona is that attributed to individuals as special to them (proprie)...

Everyone must hold firmly onto what is his own, so long as it is not vicious but special to him, so that that proper conduct which we are seeking may more easily be secured. For we must act in wuch a way that we in no way oppose universal nature, but, with that safeguarded, we follow our own special nature.

And this difference of natures has so much force that sometimes one man ought to commit suicide, while another in the same situation ought not. For was Marcus Cato in a different situation from the others who surrendered to Caesar in Africa? But perhaps with the others it would have been attributed to moral failure if they had killed themselves, because their lives had been less austere and their habits more easy-going. Since nature had conferred on Cato an incredible gravity, and he had strengthened it by unceasing consistency, and had always persisted in his resolved purpose, it was right for him to die rather than to look on the face of a tyrant.

...Each person must weigh what he has as his own peculiarity (quid quisque habeat sui), and must regulate that and not want to try how he would be suited by another's. For what suits each person best is what is most peculiar to him.

On Duties I. 107-113

Derrida

2004-10-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

I didn't tell you, no time, how it happened, the other day, the encounter with Socrates and Plato. The day before then, seminar at Balliol (...) if only you had seen the embarrassed silence, the injured politesse, and the faces of Ryle, Ayer, and Strawson, okay (...) I write you the letters of a traveling salesman hoping that you hear the laughter and the song.

Everything I say ...about survival as a complication of the life-death opposition proceeds from my unconditional affirmation of life. Survival, that is life beyond life, life more than life, and the discourse I hold is not mortification. On the contrary, it's the affirmation of a living being who prefers living, and hence, surviving, to death, because survival is not only or simply what is left, it's the most intense life possible. I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and pleasure. Enjoyment and weeping over stalking death are the same thing for me. When I recall my life, I have a tendency to think that I have had the good fortune to love even the unhappiest moments of my life and to bless them. Almost all of them, with one exception. When I remember happy times, I bless them also, of course, at the same time they hurl me towards thoughts of death, toward death, because it's the past, over...

Interview, August 18, 2004.

John Clare

2004-10-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

I Am

...And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest...

Ovid

2004-10-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

Saepe mero volui flammam compescere, at illa
crevit, et ebrietas ignis in igne fuit.

I often wished to suppress the flame with wine,
but it grew, and drunkenness was a fire within a fire

Heroides 16.231f.

Descartes

2004-10-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

In order to be free, there is no need for me to be inclined both ways; on the contrary, the more I incline in one direction - either because I clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts - the freer is my choice. Neither divine grace nor natural knowledge ever diminishes freedom; on the contrary, they increase and strengthen it. But the indifference I feel when there is no reason pushing me in one direction rather than another is the lowest grade of freedom; it is evidence not of any perfection of freedom, but rather of a defect in knowledge or a kind of negation. For if I always saw what was true and good, I should never have to deliberate about the right judgement or choice; in that case, although I should be wholly free, it would not be possible for me ever to be in a state of indifference.

Meditation IV.58

Santayana

2004-09-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

If philosophers must earn their living and not beg...it would be safer for them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a black skull-cap and white beard at the door of some unfrequented museum, selling the catalogues and taking in the umbrellas; these innnocent ways of earning their breadcard in the future republic would not prejudice their meditations and would keep their eyes fixed, without undue affection, on a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their business to understand. Or if, being mild and bookish, it is thought they ought to be teachers, they might teach something else than philosophy; or if philosophy is the only thing they are competent to teach, it might at least not be their own, but some classic system with which, and against which, mankind is already inoculated...At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. It is not easy for him to shout, or address a crowd; he must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching stars that move slowly and in courses that it is possible though difficult to foresee; and he is crushing all things in his heart as in a winepress, until his life and their secret flow out together.

Santayana, ibid., on the Academic Environment

On William James, by Santayana.

2004-09-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

...in the midst of this routine of the class-room the spirit would sometimes come upon him, and, leaning his head on his hand, he would let fall golden words, picturesque, fresh from the heart, full of the knowledge of good and evil. Incidentally there would crop up some humorous characterisation, some candid confession of doubt or of instinctive preference, some pungent scrap of learning; radicalisms plunging sometimes into the sub-soil of all human philosophies; and, on occasion, thoughts of simple wisdom and wistful piety, the most unfeigned...that anybody ever had.

Character and Opinion in the United States

Wallace Stevens: Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

2004-09-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

III.
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
And gives a candid kind to everything.

We say: at night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy

Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

VII.
After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthy birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,

As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

The book, hot for another accessible bliss:
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degree of perception in the scholar’s dark.

Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

2004-09-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation. Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as , it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.

The Categorical Imperative of logotherapy: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.

The Phaedo

2004-09-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

...if the soul is polluted and impure when it leaves the body, having always been associated with it and served it, bewitched by physical desires and pleasures to the point at which nothing seems to exist for it but the physical, which one can touch and see or eat and drink and make use of for sexual enjoyment, and if that soul is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid that which is dim and invisible to the eyes but intelligible and to be grasped by philosophy--do you think such a soul will escape pure and by itself?
Impossible, he said.

Orthodoxy: G.K. Chesterton

2004-09-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."...
I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?...I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable... Facts and history utterly contradict this view....Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic; I only say that this danger does lie in logic, and not in imagination... The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite... The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.

...Maniacs are commonly great reasoners. The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick...It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities...He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice...Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections... The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Take the case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen... the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything with the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

Ch II, The Maniac.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery of jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that out thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner of later ask yourself the question, " Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic by as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, " I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.

If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat...

When Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote–Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche... I thought all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this the great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. She was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

Ch III, The Suicide of Thought

Locke and Lewis

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He that...will consider the Immensity of this Fabrick and the great variety ... may be apt to think that ... there may be other, and different intelligible beings, of whose Faculties, he has as little Knowledge or Apprehension, as a Worm shut up in one drawer of a Cabinet, hath of the Senses or Understanding of a Man.

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.ii.3

[Reply to the dream sceptic]. He may please to dream that I make him this answer: 1. That 'tis no great matter, whether I remove his Scruple or no: Where all is Dream, Reasoning and Arguments are of no use, Truth and Knowledge nothing. [And 2. Fire hurts, of which he writes]... this certainty is as great as our Happiness or Misery, beyond which, we have no concernment to know, or to be.

He that in the ordinary Affairs of Life, would admit of nothing but direct, plain Demonstration, would be sure of nothing, in this world, but of perishing quickly.

Essay IV.ii.14

Why believe in a plurality of worlds? Because the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to think that it is true.

Maybe the very idea of accepting controversial ontology for the sake of theoretical benefits is misguided -- so a skeptical epistemologist might say, to which I reply that mathematics is better known than any premise of skeptical epistemology.

David Lewis, Plurality of Worlds, 3-4.

Nagel and Augustine

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...if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty. To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicism, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment. Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get.

What really happens in the pursuit of objectivity is that a certain element of oneself, the impersonal or objective self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one’s creaturely point of view, is allowed to predominate. Withdrawing into this element one detaches from the the rest and develops an impersonal conception of the world and, so far as possible, of the elements of self from which one has detached. That creates the new problem of reintegration, the problem of how to incorporate these results into the life and self-knowledge of an ordinary human being. One has to be the creature whom one has subjected to detached examination, and one has in one’s entirety to live in the world that has been revealed to an extremely distilled fraction of oneself.

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Introduction.

I could produce many arguments to show that absolutely nothing in human society will be safe if we decide to believe only what we can regard as having been clearly perceived.

Augustine, De Utilitate Credendi, Ch 15.

Nietzsche

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Most people are nothing and are considered nothing until they have dressed themselves up in general convictions and public opinions – in accordance with the tailor philosophy: clothes make people. Of the exceptional person, however, it must be said: only he that wears it makes the costume; here opinions cease to be public and become something other than marks, finery, and disguises.

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, aph. 325.

As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion.

N., The Wanderer and his Shadow, aph. 297.

There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can’t hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit it at all. 326.

We should not let ourselves be burnt for our opinions: we are not that sure of them. 333.

Laughter means: being schadenfroh*, but with a good conscience.
*The word is famous for being untranslatable: it signifies taking a mischievous delight in the discomfort of another person.

N., The Gay Science, aph. 200.

No victor believes in chance. 258.

...does a matter necessarily remain ununderstood and unfathomed merely because it has been touched only in flight, glanced at, in a flash? Is it absolutely imperative that one settles down on it? That one has brooded over it as over an egg? Diu noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At least there are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly – that must be surprised or left alone. 381.

It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer desires from his nourishment – and I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more than to be a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his “service to God.”

One must be skilled in living on mountains – seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself.

The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect – what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! ... What in us really wants truth? ... Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?

Preface to the AntiChrist.

...”Will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place, unknown to the pestilent accuracy of the geographer, in which to lay their plots?

1894, H. Rider Haggard (mystery writer).

“The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in.” A.C.Doyle

T. Merton and T. Mann

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False solitude is built on...awareness of unrealized possibilities of relationships with others. One prefers to keep these possibilities unrealized (hence, false solitude is a short-circuit of love).

Thomas Merton, journal.

For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him – even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why – he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality.

Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain, 31.