July 2012
229 posts
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“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are...”
– Martin Heidegger (via ludimagister)
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I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Postponement
Pascal’s wager is so uninteresting. Like all bets, it lives in the future. It is just another presentiment, just another theology of postponement, in which the present is disowned.
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
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Imitation V
I have sold myself to no man; I bear the name of no master. I give much credit to the judgment of great men; but I claim something also for my own.
Seneca, Epistulae, XLV
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Imitation IV
[I]mitation is suicide…
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
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Imitation III
I feel like a copy. (Like an imperfect copy; and my imperfection is my salvation.)
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
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Imitation II
Everything in the world can be imitated except truth. For truth that is imitated is no longer truth.
Hasidic saying
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Imitation I
There are many people who arrive at the result of their lives like schoolboys; they cheat their teacher by copying the answer from the key in the arithmetic-book, without bothering to do the sums themselves.
Søren Kierkegaard, Diaries
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I do not maintain that the body is not to be indulged at all; but I maintain that we must not be slaves to it. He will have many masters who makes his body his master, who is over-fearful in its behalf, who judges everything according to the body.
Seneca, Epistulae, XIV
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'We repeat history—or we do not repeat it...'
Surely it is foolish to hate facts. The struggle against the past is a futile struggle. Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom. I know all this. And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept. This is not merely an emotional matter. The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return. If the past were really past,...
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Our motto, as you know, is “Live according to Nature”; but it is quite contrary to nature to torture the body, to hate unlaboured elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that is not only plain, but disgusting and forbidding. Just as it is a sign of luxury to seek out dainties, so it is madness to avoid that which is customary and can be purchased at no great price. Philosophy...
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“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the...”
– Jorge Luis Borges (via dustyshelf)
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Sunday poem: John Freeman
CHILDHOOD CALLS
Come over, come over the deepening river, Come over again the dark torrent of years, Come over, come back where the green leaves quiver, And the lilac still blooms and the grey sky clears. Come, come back to the everlasting garden, To that green heaven, and the blue heaven above. Come back to the time when time brought no burden And love was unconscious, knowing not love.
...
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Sunday poem: Octavio Paz
GIRL
Between the afternoon, resisting, and the night, gathering, the gaze of a young girl. She abandons her notebook and writing, all of her being in two fixed eyes. On the wall the light cancels itself. Does she see her end or her beginning? She’ll say she sees nothing. The infinite is transparent. She’ll never know what she saw.
Octavio Paz...
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Sunday poem: Rainer Maria Rilke
The child at the mirror surprises himself and moves on; and no one ever knows what the reflection offers him.
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by A. Poulin, Jr.)
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Sunday poem: Friedrich Hölderlin
When I was a child, A god often rescued me From the shouts and rods of men And I played among trees and flowers, Secure in their kindness, And the breezes of heaven Were playing there too. And as you delight The hearts of plants When they stretch toward you With little strength, So you delighted the heart in me, Father Helios, and like Endymion I was your favourite, Moon. Oh, all You friendly And...
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Sunday poem: W.S. Merwin
FINALLY
My dread, my ignorance, my Self, it is time. Your imminence Prowls the palms of my hands like sweat. Do not now, if I rise to welcome you, Make off like roads into the deep night. The dogs are dead at last, the locks toothless, The habits out of reach. I will not be false to you tonight. Come, no longer unthinkable. Let us share Understanding like a family name. Bring Integrity as a...
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“I acquire no understanding of myself except as I take account of objects, of the...”
– José Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy? (via poeticsofdeath)
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Philosophy as self-inquiry III: δόξα
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the Athenians: ‘[S]urely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.’ For Socrates, the fundamental philosophical problem is to mistake belief (doxa) for knowledge (episteme), and that this knowledge is an objective, final, irreducible fact. Once one possesses the correct ‘facts of the matter,’ the issue is resolved,...
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“Never confuse yourself by visions of an entire lifetime at once, That is, do not...”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Book VIII (via meditationsof)
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I was given it It was enough I lay down my lone chopsticks
Santoka
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…Reducing my desires, I shall enlarge my small income better than if I joined Alyattes’ kingdom to the plains of Mygdon. Those who seek a lot lack a lot. All is well for the man to whom the god with a frugal hand has given enough.
Horace, Odes, Book III.16
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[O]ur age suffers not from new vices but from vices that have been handed down all the way from antiquity, and it is not in our age that avarice first pried into the veins of earth and rock searching for treasure poorly hidden in the darkness.
Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, Book IV
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Needs and wants V
Our needs are few; our wants are many.
Sheng Yen
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Needs and wants IV
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Needs and wants III
Surely luxurious living fosters injustice because it also fosters greed. A person who lives extravagantly cannot help but spend a lot and therefore cannot want to spend little. Furthermore, because he wants many things, he can’t refrain from trying to acquire them, and when he sets out to acquire them, he can’t help grabbing for too much and being unjust. No one can acquire many...
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Needs and wants II
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear.
E.F. Schumacher
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Needs and wants I
To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed upon those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply...
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Talk about the weather
It is incredible that at Cleonae there were “hail-officers” appointed at public expense who watched for hail to come. When they gave a signal that hail was approaching, what do you think happened? Did people run for woolly overcoats or leather raincoats? No. Everybody offered sacrifices according to his means, a lamb or a chicken. When those clouds had tasted some blood they...
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Can I haz reading skillz?
What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first “day,” then a second and a third “day”—evening and morning—without the sun, the moon, and the stars? And that the first “day”—if it makes sense to call it such—existed even without a sky? Who is foolish enough to believe that, like a human gardener, God planted a garden in Eden in the East and placed in it a tree of life, visible and...
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Carpe fragum!
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little...
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“The Geschick of being: a child that plays. […] It plays, because it plays. The...”
– Martin Heidegger (via ludimagister)
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Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits, But our unfurnished eyes—
Emily Dickinson
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The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead us into error, nor directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by pre-conceived opinion, by prejudice, which was a pseudo a priori stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land, so that the sail and rudder labour in vain.
Arthur...
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And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.
Socrates, in Plato’s Apology
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Philosophy as self-inquiry II: σοφία
As Pierre Hadot has discussed repeatedly, philosophia in the ancient Greco-Roman world was not only a matter of intellectual speculation. A crucial factor defining someone as a philosopher was not just dealing with abstract speculation, but also daily praxis. To be sure, philosophical discourse was an important aspect of philosophia, but it was incomplete if it remained only speculative:...
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Philosophy as self-inquiry I: φιλοσοφία
Implicit in the Socratic philosophical enterprise (as depicted by Plato) is a critique of a fundamental error perpetuated by human beings: doxa (δόξα), or ‘opinion,’ or ‘belief.’ The implicit concern of Socrates is the inherent form of belief—it is this form which leads one further from truth, regardless of its content. Thus belief is has two characteristics antithetical to philosophia...
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Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.
William Carlos Williams, The Orchestra
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the short night a firefly weaves among stars
~elegus
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Josquin Desprez (c. 1440-1521) Dulces exuviae ...
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ludimagister:
“Our life is like a journey on which, as we advance, the landscape takes a different view from that which it presented at first, and changes again, as we come nearer. This is just what happens—especially with our wishes. We often find something else, nay, something better than what we are looking for; and what we look for, we often find on a very different path from that on which we...
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[T]here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
