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March 30, 2008
seventh heaven
Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. 'Will you,' said Mercury, 'have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours we have in our chest of knick-knacks? So choose, but just one thing.' For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: 'Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.' Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, 'It has been granted you.'
--Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Diapsalmata)
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March 29, 2008
the fools
All the wise of every age are in agreement: it is foolish to wait for the fools to be cured of their folly! The proper thing to do is to make fools of the fools!
--Goethe, Kophtisches Lied (Lines 3-7)
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the slow arrow of beauty
§149
The slow arrow of beauty. - The noblest kind of beauty is not that which suddenly transports us, which makes a violent and intoxicating assault upon us (such beauty can easily excite disgust), but that which slowly infiltrates us, which we bear away with us almost without noticing and encounter again in dreams, but which finally, after having for long lain modestly in our heart, takes total possession of us, filling our eyes with tears and our heart with longing. - What is it we long for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful ourself: we imagine we would be very happy if we were beautiful. - But that is an error.
--Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
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March 28, 2008
eternity
It has been found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
My immortal soul, keep your vow despite the lonely night and the day on fire.
Thus you detach yourself from human approval, from common impulses! You fly off as you may…
-No hope, never; and no orietur. Knowledge and fortitude, torture is certain.
No more tomorrow, satiny embers, your own heart is the [only] duty.
It has been found again! – What? – Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
--Rimbaud - Faim
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March 26, 2008
the 19th century
Has an age ever seemed more remote from its immediate successor than the nineteenth century seems to us? The characters of Dickens, for all their vividness, might just as well have been crafted on some distant planet. The prose of the period, read under the harsh light of contemporary expression, could have come from Cicero’s Rome. Or, again, consider Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar, signaling from his flagship, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” and repeating over and over, as he lay dying, “Thank God I have done my duty.” To the modern ear such words have an ancient ring and call up something deep in the recesses of history.
--Prof. Daniel Robinson - Toward A Science of Human Nature
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pangs of conscience after social gatherings
Pangs of conscience after social gatherings. - Why after the usual sort of social gatherings do we suffer from pangs of conscience? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in discussing people we have spoken without complete loyalty or because we have kept silent when we should have spoken, because occasionally we have not leaped up and run off, in short because we have behaved in society as though we belonged to it.
--Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
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March 25, 2008
why we contradict
Why we contradict. - We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
--Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
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the redeeming man
But some time, in a stronger age than this mouldy, self-doubting present day, he will have to come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who is pushed out of any position 'outside' or 'beyond' by his surging strength again and again, whose solitude will be misunderstood by the people as though it were a flight from reality -: whereas it is just his way of being absorbed, buried and immersed in reality so that from it, when he emerges into the light again, he can return with the redemption of this reality: redeem it from the curse which its ideal has placed on it up till now. This man of the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision that makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness - he must come one day . . .
- But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point just one thing is proper, silence: otherwise I shall be misappropriating something that belongs to another, younger man, one 'with more future', one stronger than me - something to which Zarathustra alone is entitled, Zarathustra the Godless . . .
--Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
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March 24, 2008
he could not forgive, simply because he - forgot
To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes, and even his misdeeds seriously for long - that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall of the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he - forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual 'love for your enemies' is also possible here and here alone - assuming it is possible at all on earth.
--Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
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March 23, 2008
miracles and faith
It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: "My Lord and my God!" Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: "I will not believe until I see."
--Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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March 19, 2008
immortal mozart!
Immortal Mozart! You, to whom I owe everything, to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that overwhelmed my soul, the fear that gripped my inmost being; you, who are the reason I did not go through life without there being something that could make me tremble; you, whom I thank for the fact that I shall not have died without having loved, even though my love was unhappy.
--Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
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March 12, 2008
the childhood of the intellect
A lot of philosophers are sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its problems. Most of us find it hopeless some of the time, but some react to its intractability by welcoming the suggestion that the enterprise is misconceived and the problems unreal.
This is more than the usual wish to transcend one’s predecessors, for it includes a rebellion against the philosophical impulse itself, which is felt as humiliating and unrealistic. It is natural to feel victimized by philosophy, but this particular defensive reaction goes too far. It is like the hatred of childhood and results in a vain effort to grow up too early, before one has gone through the essential formative confusions and exaggerated hopes that have to be experienced on the way to understanding anything. Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
There is a persistent temptation to turn philosophy into something less difficult and more shallow than it is. It is an extremely difficult subject, and no exception to the general rule that creative efforts are rarely successful. I do not feel equal to the problems treated in this book. They seem to me to require an order of intelligence wholly different from mine. Others who have tried to address the central questions of philosophy will recognize the feeling.
--Thomas Nagel - The View From Nowhere
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March 11, 2008
the walls of our cage
My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to turn against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
--Wittgenstein - Lecture on Ethics
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March 5, 2008
the divine rights of the human
We support the well-being of matter, the material happiness of peoples, not because we are contemptuous of the spirit, like the French materialists, but because we know that the divinity of the human being is also revealed in his bodily appearance, that misery destroys and demeans the body, the image of God, and that the spirit is destroyed thereby as well. The great motto of revolution expressed by Saint-Just: “Bread is the right of the people” reads for us “Bread is the divine right of the human being.” We do not fight for the humans rights of the people, but for the divine rights of the human.
--Heinrich Heine - On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany
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indeed we must believe
But indeed we must believe that we have seen, when light suddenly dawns on the soul.
--Plotinus
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above and beyond knowledge
The source of everything “miraculous” is faith, and moreover a faith so bold that it seeks no justification from reason, it seeks no justification from any quarter; a faith that instead summons everything in the world to its own tribunal. Faith is above and beyond knowledge. When Abraham went to the Promised Land, explains the Apostle, he went not knowing himself where he was going. He had no need of knowledge, he lived by what he had been promised; the place where he arrived would be the Promised Land, simply because he had arrived there.
--Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy