• Anyone who listens to a child's crying and understands what he hears will know that it harbours dormant psychic forces, terrible forces different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain, and lust for destruction. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feel like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this 'solution' had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has not been discovered seems fortuitious in relation to how things were then.
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Man has to awaken to wonder-and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any.
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Kleist wrote somewhere that what the poet would most of all like to be able to do would be to convey thoughts by themselves without words. (What a strange admission.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Nothing we do can be defended absolutely and finally. But only by reference to something else that is not questioned. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Perhaps the inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Working in philosophy-like work in architecture in many respects-is really more a working on oneself. ON one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Ramsey was a borgeois thinker. I.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state-or at least he did not like doing so-but on how this state might be reasonably organized. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one in part disquieted him and in part bored him.
[Substitute Rawlsians for Ramsey] [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
What I do think essential is carrying out the work of clarification with COURAGE; otherwise it becomes just a clever game. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The delight I take in my thoughts is delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living? [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Don't play with what lies deep in another person! [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
I think I summed up my attitude towards philosophy when I said philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
the edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
language-I want to say-is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I could either have to go mad or change myself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
And it could say something to me only if I lived completely differently. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
a philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
people are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect as ill. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Christianity is not based on historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life...there is nothing paradoxical about that! [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
This message (the Gosepls) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly).
And it could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
You must say something new and yet it must all be old. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
'thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for." [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
In a scientific perspective a new use is justified by a theory. And if this theory is false, the new extended use has to be given up. But in philosophy the extended use does not rest on true or false beliefs about natural processes. No fact justifies it. None can give it any support. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
wanting to think is one thing; having a talent for thinking another. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
that man will be revolutionary who can revolutionize himself. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Hate between men comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don't want anyone else to look inside us, since it's not a pretty sight in there.
Of course you must continue to feel ashamed of what's inside you, but not ashamed of yourself before your fellow-men. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
For if a man feels lost, that is the ultimate torment. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The human being is the best picture of the human soul. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
A hero looks death in the face, real death, no just the image of death. Behaving honourably...means rather being able to look death itself in the eye. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
One of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (or the direction of your life.)
Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned round. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The truly apocalypitc view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absured, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion.) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Wisdom is grey. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superflous. (for this reason I could never found a school.) [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
It strikes me that religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence although its belief, it's really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Bach said that all his achievement were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength.
Endurance of suffering isn't rated highly because there is supposed not to be any suffering-really it's out of date. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The 'cussedness' of things is a stupid anthropomorphism. Because the truth is much graver than this fiction. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength... [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.
It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete a tete. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
It is difficult to know something and to act as if you did not know it. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems....
[Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
I should like to say that in this case too the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life.
Practice gives the words their sense. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Perhaps one could 'convince someone that God exists' by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the 'existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts....Experiences, thoughts, -life can force this concept on us. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
So if you want to stay within the religious sphere you must struggle. [Wiitgenstein, Culture and Value]
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Eliot
• Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
[T.S. Eliot]
• This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
[Eliot]
• There are two ways to victory, to strive bravely or to yield. How much pain the last will save us we have not yet learned. [-Thoreau]
• "It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying." [-Proust]
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
[T.S. Eliot]
• This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
[Eliot]
• There are two ways to victory, to strive bravely or to yield. How much pain the last will save us we have not yet learned. [-Thoreau]
• "It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying." [-Proust]
castoriadis
• "The psyche is not a well-oiled, rational mechanism. The psyche is essentially radical imagination, a perpetually surging flux of representations, desires, and affects. " [Castoriadis]
• "This creativity of the human imagination is at the root of the most severe psychical and political problems...the human psyche is amoral, but also asocial and acosmic. This also means that as such, left to itself, it is radically unfit for life..." [Castoriadis]
• "...the radical imagination is what distinguishes human psyche from animal psyche. The radical imagination makes the psyche capable of producing those representations, those phantasms, which are not the outcome of perceptions...."[Castoriadis]
• "This creativity of the human imagination is at the root of the most severe psychical and political problems...the human psyche is amoral, but also asocial and acosmic. This also means that as such, left to itself, it is radically unfit for life..." [Castoriadis]
• "...the radical imagination is what distinguishes human psyche from animal psyche. The radical imagination makes the psyche capable of producing those representations, those phantasms, which are not the outcome of perceptions...."[Castoriadis]
rilke
• "Who, if I screamed out, would hear among the hierarchies of angels? [1st Elegy]
"But this, though: death, all of death, even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently and without rancor, this is beyond description." [4th Elegy]
"But death we alone can see; the free animal always has its demise behind it and God before, and when it walks it walks into eternity, like the flowing of a spring" [8th Elegy]
"for close to death, we stop seeing death, and stare beyond, perhaps with the vast gaze of animals. Lovers, if the other were not there, obstructing the view, come near to it and marvel..." [8th Elegy]
"But for the animal, its being is infinite, unfettered, unconcerned with its own condition, pure as its outward gaze. And where we see future, it sees everything, and itself is everything, foerver healed." [8th Elegy]
"Here all is seperation, there it was breath. After the first home, the second seems a hybrid place, wind-blown"
"O Bliss of the tiny creature who remains forever in the womb that bore it....for womb is all." [8th Elegy]
"Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, linger-, so we live, forever taking our leave." [8th Elegy]
"...then why do we have to be human-and avoiding destiny, long for destiny?...oh not because there is happiness, that rash profit taken just prior to the impending loss..." [9th elegy]
"...us, the most fleeting. Once for everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too, only once. Never again. But to have been, this once, if only this once: to have been of the earth can never be taken back" [9th Elegy]
"...best of all, hold on to all of it forever...Ah, but into that other relation, what can we carry over? Not the power to see, learned here so slowly and none of the things that happened here. Not one. The pain, then. Above all the sadness, and the long experience of love-only what is unsayable." [9th Elegy]
"let me, one day, emerging from this grim vision, sing jubilation and praise to assenting angels." [10th Elegy]
"Let my streaming face make me more shining; let my simple tears flower. How dear will you be to me then, you nights of affliction." [10th Elegy]
"Children play, and couples hold each other, -off to the side, it gets more serious, on the patchy grass, and dogs do what is natural." [10th Elegy]
"But this, though: death, all of death, even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently and without rancor, this is beyond description." [4th Elegy]
"But death we alone can see; the free animal always has its demise behind it and God before, and when it walks it walks into eternity, like the flowing of a spring" [8th Elegy]
"for close to death, we stop seeing death, and stare beyond, perhaps with the vast gaze of animals. Lovers, if the other were not there, obstructing the view, come near to it and marvel..." [8th Elegy]
"But for the animal, its being is infinite, unfettered, unconcerned with its own condition, pure as its outward gaze. And where we see future, it sees everything, and itself is everything, foerver healed." [8th Elegy]
"Here all is seperation, there it was breath. After the first home, the second seems a hybrid place, wind-blown"
"O Bliss of the tiny creature who remains forever in the womb that bore it....for womb is all." [8th Elegy]
"Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, linger-, so we live, forever taking our leave." [8th Elegy]
"...then why do we have to be human-and avoiding destiny, long for destiny?...oh not because there is happiness, that rash profit taken just prior to the impending loss..." [9th elegy]
"...us, the most fleeting. Once for everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too, only once. Never again. But to have been, this once, if only this once: to have been of the earth can never be taken back" [9th Elegy]
"...best of all, hold on to all of it forever...Ah, but into that other relation, what can we carry over? Not the power to see, learned here so slowly and none of the things that happened here. Not one. The pain, then. Above all the sadness, and the long experience of love-only what is unsayable." [9th Elegy]
"let me, one day, emerging from this grim vision, sing jubilation and praise to assenting angels." [10th Elegy]
"Let my streaming face make me more shining; let my simple tears flower. How dear will you be to me then, you nights of affliction." [10th Elegy]
"Children play, and couples hold each other, -off to the side, it gets more serious, on the patchy grass, and dogs do what is natural." [10th Elegy]
misc
• Any kind of polemics fail from the outset to assume the attitude of thinking…thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever speaks for a subject. [Heidegger]
• Michel Foucault: I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.
• "Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!" [-Heidegger ,History Concept of Time]
• 'words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power...words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men...Thus we shall not deprecate the use of words among men." [Freud]
• '...we assume it is in their power not to be ignorant, since they have the power of taking care.' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch. 5]
• '...the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.' [Kierkegaard]
• 'I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real' [Meillassoux]
• El hombre, dicen, es un animal racional. No sé por qué no se haya dicho que es un animal afectivo o sentimental. Y acaso lo que de los demás animales le diferencia sea más el sentimiento que no la razón. Más veces he visto razonar a un gato que no reír o llorar. [-Unamuno]
• Y toda esa trágica batalla del hombre por salvarse, ese inmortal anhelo de inmortalidad que le hizo al hombre Kant dar aquel salto inmortal de que os decía, todo eso no es más que una batalla por la conciencia. [-Unamuno]
• "Deep down I have probably never drawn great enjoyment from fiction, from reading novels, for example, beyond the pleasure takin in analyzing the play of writing, or else certain naive moments of identification."..."telling or inventing stories is something that deep down does not interest me particularly." [Derrida, This Strange Institution Called Literature]
• 'There are validity claims and they should be taken seriously. But...the difficulty is precisely that before we can debate these claims, we must be able to hear them and that before these claims can claim anything, they need quite literally to be understood...Validity does not come apart from meaning.' [Viskar]
• 'good entertaining ends without detaining' [Odysseus]
• 'Men's lives are short. The hard man and his cruelties will be cursed behind his back, and mocked in death. But one whose heart and ways are kind-of him strangers will bear report to the wide world' [Odysseus]
• "and death is less bitter than to live on and never have the beauty that we came here laying siege to so many days' {suitors, Odyssey, Bk XXI]
• Rage-Goddess, sing the rage...
• "for this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have been done" [Aristotle, NE, BkVI]
• Michel Foucault: I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.
• "Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!" [-Heidegger ,History Concept of Time]
• 'words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power...words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men...Thus we shall not deprecate the use of words among men." [Freud]
• '...we assume it is in their power not to be ignorant, since they have the power of taking care.' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch. 5]
• '...the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.' [Kierkegaard]
• 'I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real' [Meillassoux]
• El hombre, dicen, es un animal racional. No sé por qué no se haya dicho que es un animal afectivo o sentimental. Y acaso lo que de los demás animales le diferencia sea más el sentimiento que no la razón. Más veces he visto razonar a un gato que no reír o llorar. [-Unamuno]
• Y toda esa trágica batalla del hombre por salvarse, ese inmortal anhelo de inmortalidad que le hizo al hombre Kant dar aquel salto inmortal de que os decía, todo eso no es más que una batalla por la conciencia. [-Unamuno]
• "Deep down I have probably never drawn great enjoyment from fiction, from reading novels, for example, beyond the pleasure takin in analyzing the play of writing, or else certain naive moments of identification."..."telling or inventing stories is something that deep down does not interest me particularly." [Derrida, This Strange Institution Called Literature]
• 'There are validity claims and they should be taken seriously. But...the difficulty is precisely that before we can debate these claims, we must be able to hear them and that before these claims can claim anything, they need quite literally to be understood...Validity does not come apart from meaning.' [Viskar]
• 'good entertaining ends without detaining' [Odysseus]
• 'Men's lives are short. The hard man and his cruelties will be cursed behind his back, and mocked in death. But one whose heart and ways are kind-of him strangers will bear report to the wide world' [Odysseus]
• "and death is less bitter than to live on and never have the beauty that we came here laying siege to so many days' {suitors, Odyssey, Bk XXI]
• Rage-Goddess, sing the rage...
• "for this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have been done" [Aristotle, NE, BkVI]
misc.
• In das, was Denken heißt, gelangen wir, wenn wir selber denken.Damit ein solcher Versuch glückt, müssen wir bereit sein, das Denken zu lernen. [Heidegger]
• "...Wissen Sie, wesentlich ist für mich: Ich muß verstehen. Zu diesem Verstehen gehört bei mir auch das Schreiben. Das Schreiben ist Teil in dem Verstehensprozeß." -Arendt
• Denn wir vermögen nur das, was wir mögen. Aber wir mögen wiederum wahrhaft nur Jenes, was seinerseits uns selber und zwar uns in unserem Wesen mag, indem es sich unserem Wesen als das zuspricht, was uns im Wesen halt. [Heidegger]
• Das Bedenklichste ist, daß wir noch nicht denken; immer noch nicht, obgleich der Weltzustand fortgesetzt bedenklicher wird. [Heidegger]
• Gleichwohl vermag der Mensch nicht eigentlich
zu denken, solange sich das zu-Denkende entzieht. [Heidegger]
• Es wird gut sein, wenn wir möglichst lange in solcher Abwehrhaltung zu dem Gesagten ausharren; denn so allein halten wir uns in dem nötigen Abstand fur einen Anlauf, aus dem her vielleicht dem einen oder anderen der Sprung in das Denken gelingt.[Heidegger]
• Lernen heißt: unser Tun und Lassen zu dem in die Entsprechung bringen, was sich jeweils an Wesenhaftem uns zuspricht. Damit wir solches Bringen vermögen, müssen wir uns auf den Weg machen. [Heidegger]
• “to learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time.” [Heidegger]
• “True. Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentice in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs…there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.” [Heidegger]
• Was sich entzieht, versagt die Ankunft. Allein - das Sichentziehen ist nicht nichts. Entzug ist Ereignis. Was sich entzieht, kann sogar den Menschen wesentlicher angehen und in den Anspruch nehmen als alles Anwesende, das ihn trifft und betrifft. [Heidegger]
• Das Ereignis des Entzugs könnte das Gegenwärtigste in allem
jetzt Gegenwärtigen sein und so die Aktualität alles Aktuellen unendlich übertreffen. [Heidegger]
• …:gezogen in das Sichentziehende, auf dem Zug in dieses und somit zeigend in den Entzug, ist der Mensch allererst Mensch. Sein Wesen beruht darin, ein solcher Zeigender zu sein…Auf dem Zug in das Sichentziehende ist der Mensch ein Zeichen. [Heidegger]
• Das Religiöse wird niemals durch die Logik zerstört, sondern immer nur dadurch, daß der Gott sich entzieht. [Heidegger]
• Solange wir freilich meinen, darüber, was Denken sei, gäbe uns die Logik einen Aufschluß, solange werden wir nicht bedenken können, inwiefern alles Dichten im Andenken beruht. [Heidegger]
• "...Wissen Sie, wesentlich ist für mich: Ich muß verstehen. Zu diesem Verstehen gehört bei mir auch das Schreiben. Das Schreiben ist Teil in dem Verstehensprozeß." -Arendt
• Denn wir vermögen nur das, was wir mögen. Aber wir mögen wiederum wahrhaft nur Jenes, was seinerseits uns selber und zwar uns in unserem Wesen mag, indem es sich unserem Wesen als das zuspricht, was uns im Wesen halt. [Heidegger]
• Das Bedenklichste ist, daß wir noch nicht denken; immer noch nicht, obgleich der Weltzustand fortgesetzt bedenklicher wird. [Heidegger]
• Gleichwohl vermag der Mensch nicht eigentlich
zu denken, solange sich das zu-Denkende entzieht. [Heidegger]
• Es wird gut sein, wenn wir möglichst lange in solcher Abwehrhaltung zu dem Gesagten ausharren; denn so allein halten wir uns in dem nötigen Abstand fur einen Anlauf, aus dem her vielleicht dem einen oder anderen der Sprung in das Denken gelingt.[Heidegger]
• Lernen heißt: unser Tun und Lassen zu dem in die Entsprechung bringen, was sich jeweils an Wesenhaftem uns zuspricht. Damit wir solches Bringen vermögen, müssen wir uns auf den Weg machen. [Heidegger]
• “to learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time.” [Heidegger]
• “True. Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentice in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs…there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.” [Heidegger]
• Was sich entzieht, versagt die Ankunft. Allein - das Sichentziehen ist nicht nichts. Entzug ist Ereignis. Was sich entzieht, kann sogar den Menschen wesentlicher angehen und in den Anspruch nehmen als alles Anwesende, das ihn trifft und betrifft. [Heidegger]
• Das Ereignis des Entzugs könnte das Gegenwärtigste in allem
jetzt Gegenwärtigen sein und so die Aktualität alles Aktuellen unendlich übertreffen. [Heidegger]
• …:gezogen in das Sichentziehende, auf dem Zug in dieses und somit zeigend in den Entzug, ist der Mensch allererst Mensch. Sein Wesen beruht darin, ein solcher Zeigender zu sein…Auf dem Zug in das Sichentziehende ist der Mensch ein Zeichen. [Heidegger]
• Das Religiöse wird niemals durch die Logik zerstört, sondern immer nur dadurch, daß der Gott sich entzieht. [Heidegger]
• Solange wir freilich meinen, darüber, was Denken sei, gäbe uns die Logik einen Aufschluß, solange werden wir nicht bedenken können, inwiefern alles Dichten im Andenken beruht. [Heidegger]
misc
• ‘Philosophical research remains atheism, which is why philosophy can allow itself “the arrogance of thinking”’. [Heidegger]
• A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.” [Brecht]
• "Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to earth-yes, back to body and life:that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning! May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth...Man and man's earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered." [Nietzsche]
• "Co(g)ito ergo sum"
• "The greek word gnosis, meaning 'knowledge' is used in three ways: (1) knowledge in general terms; (2) as mystical communion; (3) as sexual intercourse. Gnosis is knowledge by participation." [Paul Tillich]
• "Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger." [Diogenes]
• "The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros. He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death. His seven so-called Phallic Poems...openly announce that fucking is its own justification." [Hitchens]
• "the child's first erotic object is the mother's breast...for however long it is fed at its mother's breast, it will always be left with a conviction after it has bean weaned that its feeding was too short and too little." [freud]
• 'There are many excellent inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasant; the earth is to be loved for their sake...And there are many things so well devised that they are like women's breasts; at the same time useful and pleasant." [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke, Bk 3, Sec. 17]
• "I am the breast" [Freud]
• "Melanie Klein is right with her idea that there is a good breast and a bad breast, corresponding-broadly speaking-to the breast when it is present or absent." [Castoriadis] [Translation: The only bad breast is an absent breast!]
• '... Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be. ' [George Will]
• 'Why do we recognize ourselves as subjects of desire, and not agents of pleasure'? [-Foucault]
• "if there is any one who finds nothing pleasant and nothing more attractive than anything else, he must be something quite different from a man..."[Aristotle, NE, BkIII, Ch11]
• "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen." Adorno: Minima Moralia
• "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." [Marx, Capital]
• "Wo es war, soll ich werden." -Freud
• "Yet the absence of imagination had itself to be imagined" -W.Stevens
• "Radicalism is humanism or it is nothing; the proper study of mankind is man (and the ability to laugh is one of the faculties that defines the human and distinguishes the species from other animals.) [-Christopher Hitchens]
• "It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference" [Aristotle, NE, BKII, Ch. 1]
• Was macht bei dir die Geschichte jedes Tages? Siehe deine Gewohnheiten an, aus denen sie besteht: sind sie das Erzeugniss zahlloser kleiner Feigheiten und Faulheiten oder das deiner Tapferkeit und erfinderischen Vernunft? [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 308]
• " Selbstbeherrschung...Denn man muss sich auf Zeiten verlieren können, wenn man den Dingen, die wir nicht selber sind, Etwas ablernen will." [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 305]
• The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful. -- Harold Pinter [on Beckett]
• A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.” [Brecht]
• "Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to earth-yes, back to body and life:that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning! May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth...Man and man's earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered." [Nietzsche]
• "Co(g)ito ergo sum"
• "The greek word gnosis, meaning 'knowledge' is used in three ways: (1) knowledge in general terms; (2) as mystical communion; (3) as sexual intercourse. Gnosis is knowledge by participation." [Paul Tillich]
• "Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger." [Diogenes]
• "The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros. He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death. His seven so-called Phallic Poems...openly announce that fucking is its own justification." [Hitchens]
• "the child's first erotic object is the mother's breast...for however long it is fed at its mother's breast, it will always be left with a conviction after it has bean weaned that its feeding was too short and too little." [freud]
• 'There are many excellent inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasant; the earth is to be loved for their sake...And there are many things so well devised that they are like women's breasts; at the same time useful and pleasant." [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke, Bk 3, Sec. 17]
• "I am the breast" [Freud]
• "Melanie Klein is right with her idea that there is a good breast and a bad breast, corresponding-broadly speaking-to the breast when it is present or absent." [Castoriadis] [Translation: The only bad breast is an absent breast!]
• '... Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be. ' [George Will]
• 'Why do we recognize ourselves as subjects of desire, and not agents of pleasure'? [-Foucault]
• "if there is any one who finds nothing pleasant and nothing more attractive than anything else, he must be something quite different from a man..."[Aristotle, NE, BkIII, Ch11]
• "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen." Adorno: Minima Moralia
• "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." [Marx, Capital]
• "Wo es war, soll ich werden." -Freud
• "Yet the absence of imagination had itself to be imagined" -W.Stevens
• "Radicalism is humanism or it is nothing; the proper study of mankind is man (and the ability to laugh is one of the faculties that defines the human and distinguishes the species from other animals.) [-Christopher Hitchens]
• "It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference" [Aristotle, NE, BKII, Ch. 1]
• Was macht bei dir die Geschichte jedes Tages? Siehe deine Gewohnheiten an, aus denen sie besteht: sind sie das Erzeugniss zahlloser kleiner Feigheiten und Faulheiten oder das deiner Tapferkeit und erfinderischen Vernunft? [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 308]
• " Selbstbeherrschung...Denn man muss sich auf Zeiten verlieren können, wenn man den Dingen, die wir nicht selber sind, Etwas ablernen will." [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 305]
• The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful. -- Harold Pinter [on Beckett]
philosophy
• Philosophy defines itself as 'love of wisdom' because it must in effect begin by loving before claiming to know. In order to comprehend, it is first necessary to desire to comprehend; put another way, one must be astonished at not comprehending (and this astonishment thus offers a beginning to wisdom); or one must suffer at not comprehending, indeed fear not comprehending (and this fear opens onto wisdom). [Jean-Luc Marion]
• “philosophy begins in disappointment…not in an experience of wonder at the fact that things are, but rather with an indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed. One feels that things are not, or at least not the way we expected or hoped they might be.”[Simon Critchley]
• "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends." -Richard Rorty
• "Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüth mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir." -Kant [Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
• "Das Denken des Seins hütet das Wort und erfüllt in solcher Behutsamkeit seine Bestimmung. Es ist die Sorge für den Sprach-gebrauch." -Heidegger
• "Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere" -Novalis
• “…in light of Socrates exemplification-a life spent showing-that one of the most important truths about us is that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live.” [Lear, Open Minded 8]
• “…the only hurdle I seemed to face was the fact of my own death. It didn’t seem to be all that far away. And I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s great thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts-and also write something which mattered to me. “ [Lear, Open Minded, 7]
• “Psychoanalysis, Freud said, is an impossibleprofession. So is philosophy. This is not a metaphor or a poetically paradoxical turn of phrase. It is literally true. And the impossibility is a matter of logic. For the very idea of a profession is that of a defensive structure, and it is part of the very idea of philosophy and psychoanalysis to be activities which undo such defenses…The idea of a profession of psychoanalysis or a profession of philosophy is thus a contradiction of terms.” [Lear Open Minded 5]
o "...but the 'profession' itself is overcrowded with intruders, with interlopers, with exploiters of the increasingly hybrid trade, and it can be renewed and reinvested with meaning only by the quiet solitary individuals who do not consider themselves part of it and who accept none of the customs brought into circulation..." [Rilke]
• “philosophy begins in disappointment…not in an experience of wonder at the fact that things are, but rather with an indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed. One feels that things are not, or at least not the way we expected or hoped they might be.”[Simon Critchley]
• "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends." -Richard Rorty
• "Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüth mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir." -Kant [Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
• "Das Denken des Seins hütet das Wort und erfüllt in solcher Behutsamkeit seine Bestimmung. Es ist die Sorge für den Sprach-gebrauch." -Heidegger
• "Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere" -Novalis
• “…in light of Socrates exemplification-a life spent showing-that one of the most important truths about us is that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live.” [Lear, Open Minded 8]
• “…the only hurdle I seemed to face was the fact of my own death. It didn’t seem to be all that far away. And I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s great thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts-and also write something which mattered to me. “ [Lear, Open Minded, 7]
• “Psychoanalysis, Freud said, is an impossibleprofession. So is philosophy. This is not a metaphor or a poetically paradoxical turn of phrase. It is literally true. And the impossibility is a matter of logic. For the very idea of a profession is that of a defensive structure, and it is part of the very idea of philosophy and psychoanalysis to be activities which undo such defenses…The idea of a profession of psychoanalysis or a profession of philosophy is thus a contradiction of terms.” [Lear Open Minded 5]
o "...but the 'profession' itself is overcrowded with intruders, with interlopers, with exploiters of the increasingly hybrid trade, and it can be renewed and reinvested with meaning only by the quiet solitary individuals who do not consider themselves part of it and who accept none of the customs brought into circulation..." [Rilke]
mit-sein
It is good to rely upon others. For no one can bear this life alone' -Holderlin
• 'without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch.1]
• "...to take solitude seriously and whenever it occurs to experience it as something good. The fact that other people fail to alleviate it should not be attributed to their indifference and withholding but because we are truly infinitely alone, each one of us, and unreachable with very rare exceptions. We must learn to live with this fact. I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other's solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness." [Rilke]
• "...my loneliness first has to be firm and secure again like a forest where no one ever set foot and which has not fear of steps. It must lose all emphasis, exceptionality, and obligation. It must become routine, completely natural and quotidian." [Rilke]
• "To be alone is a veritable elixir that drives an illness completely to the surface. First it has to get bad, worse, the very worst-there is no going further in any language-but then all gets well." [Rilke]
• "...that everything that exceeds a pleasant and unchanging medium state will ultimately have to be received, endured, and mastered by an infinitely solitary (and almost singular) individual without any assistance from anyone else. The hour of dying during which this insight is wrested from everyone is nothing but one of our hours, and not an exception. Our being continually passes through and into transformations that might be of no lesser intensity than the new, near, and next states ushered in by death. And just as we must take leave of one another irrevocably at a specific instant during this most conspicuous of changes, strictly speaking we must surrender, let be and let go of each other with each passing moment.'...'the great pain that is thus expressed?...this terrible truth is probably at the same time our most productive and blissful truth....suddenly one can just make out, as if glimpsed through clear tears, the distant realization that even as a lover one needs to be alone."..."It is the realization that even this apparently most intimately shared thing called love can be fully developed and, as it were, perfected only when it is done alone, apart from others." [Rilke]
• A degree of solitude and resignation is necessary to begin with. Some people can't bear solitude, let alone the idea that the heavens are empty...I accept all of Rilke's implied challenges because of what he wrote about solitude, and the ways in which it must be welcomed rather than feared. [-Hitchens]
• "Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company." [Arendt, The Life of the Mind]
• One Must Learn to Love.- This happens to us in music; first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it;when we sense that we'd miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music; it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love...there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned. [-Nietzsche, Gay Science, 334]
• 'without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch.1]
• "...to take solitude seriously and whenever it occurs to experience it as something good. The fact that other people fail to alleviate it should not be attributed to their indifference and withholding but because we are truly infinitely alone, each one of us, and unreachable with very rare exceptions. We must learn to live with this fact. I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other's solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness." [Rilke]
• "...my loneliness first has to be firm and secure again like a forest where no one ever set foot and which has not fear of steps. It must lose all emphasis, exceptionality, and obligation. It must become routine, completely natural and quotidian." [Rilke]
• "To be alone is a veritable elixir that drives an illness completely to the surface. First it has to get bad, worse, the very worst-there is no going further in any language-but then all gets well." [Rilke]
• "...that everything that exceeds a pleasant and unchanging medium state will ultimately have to be received, endured, and mastered by an infinitely solitary (and almost singular) individual without any assistance from anyone else. The hour of dying during which this insight is wrested from everyone is nothing but one of our hours, and not an exception. Our being continually passes through and into transformations that might be of no lesser intensity than the new, near, and next states ushered in by death. And just as we must take leave of one another irrevocably at a specific instant during this most conspicuous of changes, strictly speaking we must surrender, let be and let go of each other with each passing moment.'...'the great pain that is thus expressed?...this terrible truth is probably at the same time our most productive and blissful truth....suddenly one can just make out, as if glimpsed through clear tears, the distant realization that even as a lover one needs to be alone."..."It is the realization that even this apparently most intimately shared thing called love can be fully developed and, as it were, perfected only when it is done alone, apart from others." [Rilke]
• A degree of solitude and resignation is necessary to begin with. Some people can't bear solitude, let alone the idea that the heavens are empty...I accept all of Rilke's implied challenges because of what he wrote about solitude, and the ways in which it must be welcomed rather than feared. [-Hitchens]
• "Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company." [Arendt, The Life of the Mind]
• One Must Learn to Love.- This happens to us in music; first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it;when we sense that we'd miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music; it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love...there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned. [-Nietzsche, Gay Science, 334]
sein zum tod
• quid aeternis minorem
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes
Why torment your mind, which is unequal to it,
with counsel for eternity?
Why not come and lie under this tall plane tree
or this pine ... ?
Horace, Odes II 11 [Ely Black!]
• 'no one would choose to live with the intellect of a child throughout his life, however much he were to be pleased at the things that children are pleased at....'[ARistotle, NE, BK X, Ch. 3]
• Es más: el hombre, por ser hombre, por tener conciencia, es ya, respecto al burro o a un congrejo, un animal enfermo. La conciencia es una enfermedad. [-Unamuno]
• Nuestra filosofía, esto es, nuestro modo de comprender o de no comprender el mundo y la vida, brota de nuestro sentimiento respecto a la vida misma. Y ésta, como todo lo afectivo, tiene raíces subconscientes, inconscientes tal vez. No suelen ser nuestras ideas las que nos hacen optimistas o pesimistas, sino que es nuestro optimismo o nuestro pesimismo, de origen fisiológico o patológico quizás, tanto el uno como el otro, el que hace nuestras ideas. [-Unamuno]
• "The Most Personal Question of Truth:-What am I really doing, and what do I mean by doing it?" -Nietzsche [DayBreak]
• "To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?" [Nietzsche]
• “not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves" [Nietzsche WM 11/WP 10’ [3]
• "sum moribundus ['I am in dying']...I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. -Heidegger [History of Concept of Time pg. 317]
• "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at for too long." -La Rochefoucauld [ Ely Black]
• “every poet begins (however 'unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.”-Harold Bloom
• Becaus philosophy opens out onto the whole of man and onto what is highest in him, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]
• Quiere decirse que tu esencia, lector, la mía, la del hombre Spinoza, la del hombre Butler, la del hombre Kant y la de cada hombre que sea hombre, no es sino el conato, el esfuerzo que pone en seguir siendo hombre, en no morir....Es decir, que tú, yo y Spinoza queremos no morirnos nunca y que este nuestro anhelo de nunca morirnos en nuestra esencia actual. [-Unamuno]
• "Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being." -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• 'the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest of goods, and this is painful' [Aristotle, NE, BK III, Ch. 9]
• "Was there ever a man more blest by fortune that you Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime...Think then Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death" To this he answered swiftly: "Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus...better I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead."
• "Ancient philosophy was philo-sophia, not philo-theoria. It is to this original
understanding of the enterprise that Schopenhauer returns when he writes that
it is the chief task of philosophy, as it is of religion, to provide a ‘consolation’ in
the face of death. This, he says, is why Socrates was right to define philosophy as
a ‘preparation for death’. To this definition of the task he adds a further
specification: since death conceived as entry into a ‘dark’ and empty ‘nothing’,as absolute annihilation, is, for human beings, the summum malum, our worst fear,
any effective consolation must satisfy the ‘metaphysical need’; the need to be
assured of ‘the indestructibility of our true nature’ by death." [Julian Young]
• Eurete moi he entole eis zoen, aute eis thanaton. [and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. ] [st. Paul]
• Live or die, but don't poison everything... [-sexton]
• Clov: Do you believe in the life to come?....Hamm: Mine was always that. [Beckett’s EndGame]
• "There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. " [Borges, The Immortal]
• Quiero decir del único verdadero problema vital, del que más a las entrañas nos llega, del problema de nuestro destino individual y personal, de la inmortalidad del alma. [-Unamuno]
• 'we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us' [Aristotle, BK X, Ch. 7]
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes
Why torment your mind, which is unequal to it,
with counsel for eternity?
Why not come and lie under this tall plane tree
or this pine ... ?
Horace, Odes II 11 [Ely Black!]
• 'no one would choose to live with the intellect of a child throughout his life, however much he were to be pleased at the things that children are pleased at....'[ARistotle, NE, BK X, Ch. 3]
• Es más: el hombre, por ser hombre, por tener conciencia, es ya, respecto al burro o a un congrejo, un animal enfermo. La conciencia es una enfermedad. [-Unamuno]
• Nuestra filosofía, esto es, nuestro modo de comprender o de no comprender el mundo y la vida, brota de nuestro sentimiento respecto a la vida misma. Y ésta, como todo lo afectivo, tiene raíces subconscientes, inconscientes tal vez. No suelen ser nuestras ideas las que nos hacen optimistas o pesimistas, sino que es nuestro optimismo o nuestro pesimismo, de origen fisiológico o patológico quizás, tanto el uno como el otro, el que hace nuestras ideas. [-Unamuno]
• "The Most Personal Question of Truth:-What am I really doing, and what do I mean by doing it?" -Nietzsche [DayBreak]
• "To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?" [Nietzsche]
• “not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves" [Nietzsche WM 11/WP 10’ [3]
• "sum moribundus ['I am in dying']...I am moribundus. The MORIBUNDUS first gives the SUM its sense. -Heidegger [History of Concept of Time pg. 317]
• "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at for too long." -La Rochefoucauld [ Ely Black]
• “every poet begins (however 'unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.”-Harold Bloom
• Becaus philosophy opens out onto the whole of man and onto what is highest in him, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]
• Quiere decirse que tu esencia, lector, la mía, la del hombre Spinoza, la del hombre Butler, la del hombre Kant y la de cada hombre que sea hombre, no es sino el conato, el esfuerzo que pone en seguir siendo hombre, en no morir....Es decir, que tú, yo y Spinoza queremos no morirnos nunca y que este nuestro anhelo de nunca morirnos en nuestra esencia actual. [-Unamuno]
• "Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being." -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• 'the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest of goods, and this is painful' [Aristotle, NE, BK III, Ch. 9]
• "Was there ever a man more blest by fortune that you Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime...Think then Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death" To this he answered swiftly: "Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus...better I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead."
• "Ancient philosophy was philo-sophia, not philo-theoria. It is to this original
understanding of the enterprise that Schopenhauer returns when he writes that
it is the chief task of philosophy, as it is of religion, to provide a ‘consolation’ in
the face of death. This, he says, is why Socrates was right to define philosophy as
a ‘preparation for death’. To this definition of the task he adds a further
specification: since death conceived as entry into a ‘dark’ and empty ‘nothing’,as absolute annihilation, is, for human beings, the summum malum, our worst fear,
any effective consolation must satisfy the ‘metaphysical need’; the need to be
assured of ‘the indestructibility of our true nature’ by death." [Julian Young]
• Eurete moi he entole eis zoen, aute eis thanaton. [and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. ] [st. Paul]
• Live or die, but don't poison everything... [-sexton]
• Clov: Do you believe in the life to come?....Hamm: Mine was always that. [Beckett’s EndGame]
• "There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. " [Borges, The Immortal]
• Quiero decir del único verdadero problema vital, del que más a las entrañas nos llega, del problema de nuestro destino individual y personal, de la inmortalidad del alma. [-Unamuno]
• 'we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us' [Aristotle, BK X, Ch. 7]
Silenus
• "What wound was I seeking to heal, what thorn was I seeking to draw from the flesh of existence when I became what is called a 'philosopher'?" It may be...that a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher's youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer." [Badiou]
• Now, then, Silenus, since you are so wise, come, tell me, is it really the best fate for a man to be drunk always?" ... "Not at all. Drunkenness is a joy reserved for the Gods : so do men partake of it impiously, and so are they very properly punished for their audacity. For men, it is best of all never to be born;but,being born, to die very quickly ."..."Ah, yes! but failing either?"..."The third best thing for a man is to do that which seems expected of him," -Silenus.
• "Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus...wrote the famous and frightening lines: 'Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.' There he also let us know through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life's burden: it was the polis, the space of men's free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour..." [Arendt, On Revolution, final lines]
• "An old legend has it that King Midas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos,without being able to catch him. When he finally had caught him the king asked him what he considered man's greatest good. The daeomon remained sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: 'Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon." [Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy]
• "If you could edit your past, what would you change?"
"My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it. [Zizek, interview]"
• "A god could save man by simply wishing it-from the farthest shore in the world...Though as for death, of course all men must suffer it: the gods may love man, but they can't help him when cold death comes to lay him on his bier" [Athena, Illiad, Bk III]
• If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distresses, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on earth as on the moon...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]
"The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another; for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are?...the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres...reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]
"...does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest?"[Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence]
"Does existence have a sense?-this question required several centuries even to be understood completely and in all its profundity" [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science]
• Now, then, Silenus, since you are so wise, come, tell me, is it really the best fate for a man to be drunk always?" ... "Not at all. Drunkenness is a joy reserved for the Gods : so do men partake of it impiously, and so are they very properly punished for their audacity. For men, it is best of all never to be born;but,being born, to die very quickly ."..."Ah, yes! but failing either?"..."The third best thing for a man is to do that which seems expected of him," -Silenus.
• "Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus...wrote the famous and frightening lines: 'Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.' There he also let us know through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life's burden: it was the polis, the space of men's free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour..." [Arendt, On Revolution, final lines]
• "An old legend has it that King Midas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos,without being able to catch him. When he finally had caught him the king asked him what he considered man's greatest good. The daeomon remained sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: 'Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon." [Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy]
• "If you could edit your past, what would you change?"
"My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it. [Zizek, interview]"
• "A god could save man by simply wishing it-from the farthest shore in the world...Though as for death, of course all men must suffer it: the gods may love man, but they can't help him when cold death comes to lay him on his bier" [Athena, Illiad, Bk III]
• If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distresses, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on earth as on the moon...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]
"The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another; for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are?...the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres...reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity...[Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World]
"...does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest?"[Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence]
"Does existence have a sense?-this question required several centuries even to be understood completely and in all its profundity" [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science]
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Wollheim: The Thread of Life
"Death may be expected to figure as phenomenon, and it may be expected to figure as thought." [257]
"[it] exerts a large and creeping influence over the process of living" [257]
"What I am denying is that we have knowledge of death based on intuition." [259]
"The concept of death in its application to persons is a hybrid or impure concept."
"Until then we must think that we die when our bodies die, and we must find this a misfortune."
"Of all the beliefs we have about the future, about our future, the hardest to accept is that we shall die...we cannot previsage the moment of death." [264]
"That death is a misfortune, is compatible with three considerations: that life without death would be a meaningless kind of existence for a person, or that we just couldn't live like that. That circumstances can arise in a persons life when death is preferable, or we would rather die. That death is not something that a person endures or suffers. If none of these upset the view that death is a misfortune, they should deepen our understanding of how we must think about it. " [265]
"It is natural to think that the point at which deathlessness would most strikingly affect the character of life is at the moment of choice." [265]
"on the level of character and behaviour, which is all that choice can control." [266]
"If choice has a value it appears to depend on the irradiation of choice through our lives."
"Choice is valuable for what leads up to, or surrounds it." [266]
"The fact that death is a misfortune ...is a view that goes deep; it is not...sensitive to circumstances." [267]
"It deprives us of our phenomenology, and having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for the cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger."
"extreme situations...not only test friendship, they test accounts of what friendship is." [275]
"Friendship lies in a response to the singularity of persons, and a persons' friendship extends only as far as such singularity engages him." [276]
"It is of the essence of friendship that it requires us to abandon the beguiling satisfactions of moralism."
"How can we help one another? What uses are we to each other?...Apart...from need and passion, the profounder ways in which we impinge upon one another are two in number, and both are indirect in their workings..." [278]
"Through constant restraint we place upon our urge to control, manipulate, to change, other. so that...their awareness of our awareness and acceptance, both of them and of their singularity, becomes a source of strength to them." [278]
"The other way...is through the part that we, or rather our internalized counterparts, come to play in the inner worlds of others..."[278]
"Love and Friendship stand contrasted. They differ in the feelings, emotions, and beliefs that they draw upon, and...in their characteristic histories." [279]
"I may loves someone whom neither I nor anyone else can like." [279]
"love and friendship differ in their origins. Love...does not presuppose an attitude on the part of the lover towards his beloved. It is a response-a response, not the response-to a felt relation. initially to the relation of total dependence, and then to whatever we come to substitute for it." [279]
"By contrast, friendship must require an attitude. Being a response to the singularity of others, it is possible only with those whose singularity we are able to respond to appropriately."
"Hence we choose our friends, and we choose them for what we take them to be, which, if it is a case of true friendship, must approximate how they actually are."[ 279]
"Once we have chosen our friends, then friendship in certain ways assimilates itself to love." [279]
"We accept our friends, once they are our friends, for what they are or what they make of themselves. If they change, this will make no difference if the friendship is well established." [279]
"By contrast, love, once it is established, starts to generate attitudes toward the beloved that it did not require in order to arise."
"For unlike friendship. love does not have a history of accumulation, it has a history of substitution. We add one friend to another, but we tend to substitute one lover for another. And this means that love is permanently susceptible to the making of comparisons, the experience of disappointment, the desire to alter, and the insensitivity to differences." [280]
"At the core of friendship...is acceptance....a friend accepts another in the hope that he may thereby come to accept himself." [280]
"...allow him to feel that death is only an ordinary, unremarkable happening in life, which is the one thing death isn't. " [281]
"acceptance of the death of a friend or a lover involves at once the acceptance of death and the acceptance of the death of that particular person.
"The acceptance of a death of a particular person is the acceptance of a fact. However the acceptance of death as itself is more pervasive, there is no fact on which it is focused, and it therefore involves acceptance in an enlarged sense..." [281]
"within the acceptance of our own death the acceptance of death itself spreads its wings."
"At the core of the fear of death is...an appetite and a belief. The appetite is the thirst, the insatiable thirst, for phenomenology, and that belief is a belief about one essential feature of our natural specieshood." [282]
"What the acceptance of death, and by extension a person's acceptance of their own death, must consist in the harmonization of the appetite and the belief...what must take place is the transformation of all desires and all emotions so that there is nothing left to prevent a person from experiencing phenomenology as something inherently, essentially, terminable. He enters into his mental states not just as a person, but as a mortal person." [282]
"To accept death requires that we should live each moment of our life as though it could be our last, or as though the possibility of death was implicit in living." [282]
"Death is a misfortune. It is calculated only to make us feel that the very thing that makes death a misfortune-in effect living, living as a person- is not dissociable form death." [282]
"But does not such a transformation as I talk of, or as the acceptance of death calls for, simply generate an illusion? For is it veridical for us to experience phenomenology as inherently terminable?" [282]
"[it] exerts a large and creeping influence over the process of living" [257]
"What I am denying is that we have knowledge of death based on intuition." [259]
"The concept of death in its application to persons is a hybrid or impure concept."
"Until then we must think that we die when our bodies die, and we must find this a misfortune."
"Of all the beliefs we have about the future, about our future, the hardest to accept is that we shall die...we cannot previsage the moment of death." [264]
"That death is a misfortune, is compatible with three considerations: that life without death would be a meaningless kind of existence for a person, or that we just couldn't live like that. That circumstances can arise in a persons life when death is preferable, or we would rather die. That death is not something that a person endures or suffers. If none of these upset the view that death is a misfortune, they should deepen our understanding of how we must think about it. " [265]
"It is natural to think that the point at which deathlessness would most strikingly affect the character of life is at the moment of choice." [265]
"on the level of character and behaviour, which is all that choice can control." [266]
"If choice has a value it appears to depend on the irradiation of choice through our lives."
"Choice is valuable for what leads up to, or surrounds it." [266]
"The fact that death is a misfortune ...is a view that goes deep; it is not...sensitive to circumstances." [267]
"It deprives us of our phenomenology, and having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for the cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger."
"extreme situations...not only test friendship, they test accounts of what friendship is." [275]
"Friendship lies in a response to the singularity of persons, and a persons' friendship extends only as far as such singularity engages him." [276]
"It is of the essence of friendship that it requires us to abandon the beguiling satisfactions of moralism."
"How can we help one another? What uses are we to each other?...Apart...from need and passion, the profounder ways in which we impinge upon one another are two in number, and both are indirect in their workings..." [278]
"Through constant restraint we place upon our urge to control, manipulate, to change, other. so that...their awareness of our awareness and acceptance, both of them and of their singularity, becomes a source of strength to them." [278]
"The other way...is through the part that we, or rather our internalized counterparts, come to play in the inner worlds of others..."[278]
"Love and Friendship stand contrasted. They differ in the feelings, emotions, and beliefs that they draw upon, and...in their characteristic histories." [279]
"I may loves someone whom neither I nor anyone else can like." [279]
"love and friendship differ in their origins. Love...does not presuppose an attitude on the part of the lover towards his beloved. It is a response-a response, not the response-to a felt relation. initially to the relation of total dependence, and then to whatever we come to substitute for it." [279]
"By contrast, friendship must require an attitude. Being a response to the singularity of others, it is possible only with those whose singularity we are able to respond to appropriately."
"Hence we choose our friends, and we choose them for what we take them to be, which, if it is a case of true friendship, must approximate how they actually are."[ 279]
"Once we have chosen our friends, then friendship in certain ways assimilates itself to love." [279]
"We accept our friends, once they are our friends, for what they are or what they make of themselves. If they change, this will make no difference if the friendship is well established." [279]
"By contrast, love, once it is established, starts to generate attitudes toward the beloved that it did not require in order to arise."
"For unlike friendship. love does not have a history of accumulation, it has a history of substitution. We add one friend to another, but we tend to substitute one lover for another. And this means that love is permanently susceptible to the making of comparisons, the experience of disappointment, the desire to alter, and the insensitivity to differences." [280]
"At the core of friendship...is acceptance....a friend accepts another in the hope that he may thereby come to accept himself." [280]
"...allow him to feel that death is only an ordinary, unremarkable happening in life, which is the one thing death isn't. " [281]
"acceptance of the death of a friend or a lover involves at once the acceptance of death and the acceptance of the death of that particular person.
"The acceptance of a death of a particular person is the acceptance of a fact. However the acceptance of death as itself is more pervasive, there is no fact on which it is focused, and it therefore involves acceptance in an enlarged sense..." [281]
"within the acceptance of our own death the acceptance of death itself spreads its wings."
"At the core of the fear of death is...an appetite and a belief. The appetite is the thirst, the insatiable thirst, for phenomenology, and that belief is a belief about one essential feature of our natural specieshood." [282]
"What the acceptance of death, and by extension a person's acceptance of their own death, must consist in the harmonization of the appetite and the belief...what must take place is the transformation of all desires and all emotions so that there is nothing left to prevent a person from experiencing phenomenology as something inherently, essentially, terminable. He enters into his mental states not just as a person, but as a mortal person." [282]
"To accept death requires that we should live each moment of our life as though it could be our last, or as though the possibility of death was implicit in living." [282]
"Death is a misfortune. It is calculated only to make us feel that the very thing that makes death a misfortune-in effect living, living as a person- is not dissociable form death." [282]
"But does not such a transformation as I talk of, or as the acceptance of death calls for, simply generate an illusion? For is it veridical for us to experience phenomenology as inherently terminable?" [282]
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Going Sane [Adam Phillips]
“It would be sane now to work out how we have become the only animals who can’t bear themselves, and how, if at all, we might become the animals who can. [xxi]
“When we really desire something, or someone, our resistance is likely to take the form of our thinking it too difficult, or not worth the trouble, or impossible.” [28]
“Like all forbidden objects of desire-like the man or woman of our dreams-it bring with it the fear that it may not exist, and the wish that it does not exist (after all, if it does exist, what are we going to do with it when we find it?)
“should we in short, think of our madness, our symptoms, as a toolkit we have evolved for dealing with reality, for getting by; or should we think of them as a kind of truancy from our lives, an evasion of what we need to do, a weakness?” [31]
“…be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting. Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life…” [48]
“as though knowing or acknowledging certain things that are going on around you might drive you mad….” [52]
“our belief in sanity may be the last enclave of our now age-old belief in progress and redemption.” [55]
“the contest between sanity and madness is therefore about the transparency of our intentions, about the extent to which our lives are our own-not subject to darker forces….”
‘the rhetoric of sanity and madness has to do with nothing less than what used to be called the ‘meaning of life’
‘both dawkins and atkins are wondering…what it might be like to be sane in the world discovered by modern physics.
It is sane to keep meaninglessness as bay
‘what dawkins doesn’t consider is why we need a sense of purpose, of meaning, of growth and progress, to feel that our lives are worth living.
‘we assume …that it must, by definition, be sane to believe that life is worth living or at the very least that it is sane to want to believe this.’
‘babies have many of the qualities associated with madness…’
Are adults people who are even better at being children than children are?
The pleasure of mastery replaces the pleasure of gratification; or rather, gratification becomes the mastery of appetite, the pride of self-overcoming’
And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites.’
Lacan calls desire as ‘that without which our lives feel null and void’
‘sanity then, is not something we are born with, but, in varying degrees, painfully acquire.
“all these myths of development and growth and transformation are ways of dealing with the basic fact that life doesn’t work, at least not in the way we want it to work.”
‘it is sane for the child-and as we shall see, for the adult-to go on wanting while being able to acknowledge and deal with the conflicts that wanting involves.’
‘strung out between romance and pornography it is no longer clear what men and women want to use each other for.’
It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are often driven lives.’
‘all the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places: in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death, in our vulnerability as organisms, in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, …in our fall, in our hubris.’
‘human sexuality is surprisingly, and sometimes shockingly, diverse in the forms it can take; and because it is human sexuality it is invested with a range of symbolic significances.
‘instead of asking whether everything (or just some things) is sexual, we should be asking, more pragmatically, how would our lives be better, more interesting, more amusing, more exiting-if we describe them as sexual?
The aggressive element in the sexuality of other animals is evident; but it is sadomasochism that differentiates what is human about human sexuality’
‘this is the double bind that the adolescent is initiated into: it is good to be law abiding, but if you abide by the laws, you will never get what you really want.
‘first, parents and children seem to want more from each other than is good for them. And second, the individuals want more from themselves than is good for them.
‘in short, our sexuality seems to make us unreliable to ourselves and others…’
“It is one of the characteristics of people we call insane that they do not have sufficient regard for life.
“there could be a version of sanity….that may be able to include the possibility that life may not be worth living….
“Like any addiction, our addiction to being alive is an attempt to narrow the albeit overwhelming complexity of our minds.”
Is sex, modern adolescents wonder, a good-enough cause; and if not, what, if anything is?
“the big problem about sex, the adolescent discovers, is that it is so pleasurable. And this pleasure is initially revealed in masturbation.”
“in both acts (suicide and masturbation) what is transgressive is their selfishness, the ruthlessness of their satisfactions.
“In both acts what is dispensed with is the need for other people, either permanently or temporarily.”
“it is this violence, and the violent truthfulness they contain, that has made both suicide and masturbation into such shameful, …absurdly horrifying acts.”
“the self-engrossed individual for whom the future is irrelevant-except the most immediate futures, the moment of release-is our negative ideal; is, in fact, our description of the madman.”
“perhaps it is our profoundest solitariness that is our most forbidden pleasure?
“the key question for the adolescent is: what connection can be made, or is worth making, between his or her masturbatory fantasy-romantic or pornographic-and sexual relations with another person?
‘is masturbatory fantasy the route to other people-a kind of trial action in thought-or a way of insulating one’s desires from others? Is it a refuge, or a way into the world? Sane sex, at its most minimal, may be a form of sociability; it is desire as a medium of contact.
“if there can be some notion of sane sex, it would have to refer to forms of sexuality that were not overly harmful.”
“is there such a thing as harmless sex? And if harmless sex is a contradiction in terms-if there is no sexual excitement without an aggressive intention, no sexual exchange without unpredictable and therefore disturbing consequences-erotic life is above all about damage limitation; about getting away with pleasure seeking, and also getting away from it.
‘the principal legacy of childhood that the adolescent has to work on …First, that sexuality always includes the possibility for harm; and second, that what is desired is forbidden.’
‘We don’t take our sanity for granted…we just prefer to locate our natural insanity at two discrete points; in infancy…and adolescence.’
‘one of our innate assumptions is that change is always crisis…’
‘sanity keeps alive the idea of stability…’
‘leaves the adolescent with one persisting question; can you follow a rule…without trying to break it?
‘adolescence is a crisis-a madness one could say-because the adolescent is trying to work out whether life is worth living…is it worth the trouble, is the pleasure worth the pain?’
‘sex and so called sanity don’t go well together because sexual excitement, whatever else it is, is always about the breaking of rules.’
‘at sex we are not dignified, and our limits can never be taken for granted.
‘if some kind of sanity is something we want but secretly do not desire in our erotic lives, it is because sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known.’
‘how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self?
‘so sanity also describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use as protection against catastrophic change.
‘at the most extreme our fantasies about sanity become our refuge from the new...
A sane choice, a choice that makes too much sense, spells fear of the uncertainty of the future.
‘sanity is a story told by survivors. Sanity, if it comes at all, comes afterward.
‘sanity meant finding ways of not knowing about all the things that might drive you insane were you to know of them.”
‘…sanity becomes a repertoire of avoidances-…it is surprisingly difficult for it not to become that. ‘
‘knowing ourselves and being sane may be mutually exclusive’…’these at least have become our modern suspicions’
‘development of a particular sort; development in the direction of revealing the benefits of the interdependence of human beings on each other. It is sane to believe in, and to live as if there are, good things and people in the world that can help us live our lives. It is sane to be capable of and to get pleasure from innovation, spontaneity, responsiveness, and change.
‘what the sane human cannot be is terrorized, desperate, and remote.
What keeps adults sane is proximity to something akin to the mother’s body. Once…god, Virtues…now it is likely to be a satisfying relationship.]
‘if sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible.
‘autism…schizophrenia…speak of a despair about the beneficence of human exchange.’
Sanity in its narrower definitions deprives us of some necessary tools. It allows us neither the full range of reactions…
‘what vitalizes life…what makes life worth living
‘the sane person has found, or been given, a way of loving life that has made the whole question of whether life is loveable seemingly irrelevant.
Depressed…may not want to die…but cannot always find good reasons for wanting to be alive…or indeed, muster an interest in reasons at all.
‘finding life itself-unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.
‘a capacity to be depressed means being able to recognize something that is true-that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need…depression makes us real, deepens us…
Kleinians…capacity for depression….feature of vision of sanity.
Sanity means loving oneself in the right way, or knowing exactly what about oneself is loveable…
Depression as pathology…illuminates vitality, passion, and engagement
Love of money…will be recognized for what it is….semi-pathological propensities…hand over with shudder to specialist in mental illness.
Keynes believed there had been a moral catastrophe….the mad are ruling the world….
Money, like sexuality, reveals to us something peculiarly disturbing, even pathological, about the nature of our desires.
‘in human beings…appetite can destroy the best things about appetite.
‘,…the primary desire for modern Westerners may simply be to go on desiring…’
‘money gives people an appetite for appetite.
No desiring is far more daunting a prospect than the unavailability of what one desires.’
“money we are reminded, has never stopped people from dying;
‘happiness….is the belated fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness’
‘the infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures.
‘the san adult is always smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests.
‘Freud intimates, that there are animals who do not know what they want; and that in all other creatures the continuity of their needs and wants from birth to death is self evident….it would be a kind of madness for needs to be in doubt
‘what the desire for money reveals to Freud is our hatred of happiness; or fear of satisfaction, our phobia of childhood.’
‘our love of material possessions is a hatred of what we love. Money is the betrayal of childhood.’
‘if the enigma of money is referred back to childhood, money was indeed…like shit…much desired but ultimately useless.
‘…were all preoccupied by the ways in which the appetite for money spoiled people’s appetite for each other.’
‘there is not natural state in which we can live, or to which we can return.’
‘designs for a good life, of which the whole notion of sanity must form a part, have been left to the political theorists.’
‘sanities should be elaborated in the way that diagnoses of pathology are; they should be contested like syndromes, debated as to their causes and constitutions and outcomes, exactly as illnesses are.’
‘for whom is this version of sanity?...for anyone who still wants to use the word; anyone who still gets some pleasure, some inspiration
How ambivalent we are about what we want sanity to mean.
“When we really desire something, or someone, our resistance is likely to take the form of our thinking it too difficult, or not worth the trouble, or impossible.” [28]
“Like all forbidden objects of desire-like the man or woman of our dreams-it bring with it the fear that it may not exist, and the wish that it does not exist (after all, if it does exist, what are we going to do with it when we find it?)
“should we in short, think of our madness, our symptoms, as a toolkit we have evolved for dealing with reality, for getting by; or should we think of them as a kind of truancy from our lives, an evasion of what we need to do, a weakness?” [31]
“…be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting. Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life…” [48]
“as though knowing or acknowledging certain things that are going on around you might drive you mad….” [52]
“our belief in sanity may be the last enclave of our now age-old belief in progress and redemption.” [55]
“the contest between sanity and madness is therefore about the transparency of our intentions, about the extent to which our lives are our own-not subject to darker forces….”
‘the rhetoric of sanity and madness has to do with nothing less than what used to be called the ‘meaning of life’
‘both dawkins and atkins are wondering…what it might be like to be sane in the world discovered by modern physics.
It is sane to keep meaninglessness as bay
‘what dawkins doesn’t consider is why we need a sense of purpose, of meaning, of growth and progress, to feel that our lives are worth living.
‘we assume …that it must, by definition, be sane to believe that life is worth living or at the very least that it is sane to want to believe this.’
‘babies have many of the qualities associated with madness…’
Are adults people who are even better at being children than children are?
The pleasure of mastery replaces the pleasure of gratification; or rather, gratification becomes the mastery of appetite, the pride of self-overcoming’
And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites.’
Lacan calls desire as ‘that without which our lives feel null and void’
‘sanity then, is not something we are born with, but, in varying degrees, painfully acquire.
“all these myths of development and growth and transformation are ways of dealing with the basic fact that life doesn’t work, at least not in the way we want it to work.”
‘it is sane for the child-and as we shall see, for the adult-to go on wanting while being able to acknowledge and deal with the conflicts that wanting involves.’
‘strung out between romance and pornography it is no longer clear what men and women want to use each other for.’
It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are often driven lives.’
‘all the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places: in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death, in our vulnerability as organisms, in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, …in our fall, in our hubris.’
‘human sexuality is surprisingly, and sometimes shockingly, diverse in the forms it can take; and because it is human sexuality it is invested with a range of symbolic significances.
‘instead of asking whether everything (or just some things) is sexual, we should be asking, more pragmatically, how would our lives be better, more interesting, more amusing, more exiting-if we describe them as sexual?
The aggressive element in the sexuality of other animals is evident; but it is sadomasochism that differentiates what is human about human sexuality’
‘this is the double bind that the adolescent is initiated into: it is good to be law abiding, but if you abide by the laws, you will never get what you really want.
‘first, parents and children seem to want more from each other than is good for them. And second, the individuals want more from themselves than is good for them.
‘in short, our sexuality seems to make us unreliable to ourselves and others…’
“It is one of the characteristics of people we call insane that they do not have sufficient regard for life.
“there could be a version of sanity….that may be able to include the possibility that life may not be worth living….
“Like any addiction, our addiction to being alive is an attempt to narrow the albeit overwhelming complexity of our minds.”
Is sex, modern adolescents wonder, a good-enough cause; and if not, what, if anything is?
“the big problem about sex, the adolescent discovers, is that it is so pleasurable. And this pleasure is initially revealed in masturbation.”
“in both acts (suicide and masturbation) what is transgressive is their selfishness, the ruthlessness of their satisfactions.
“In both acts what is dispensed with is the need for other people, either permanently or temporarily.”
“it is this violence, and the violent truthfulness they contain, that has made both suicide and masturbation into such shameful, …absurdly horrifying acts.”
“the self-engrossed individual for whom the future is irrelevant-except the most immediate futures, the moment of release-is our negative ideal; is, in fact, our description of the madman.”
“perhaps it is our profoundest solitariness that is our most forbidden pleasure?
“the key question for the adolescent is: what connection can be made, or is worth making, between his or her masturbatory fantasy-romantic or pornographic-and sexual relations with another person?
‘is masturbatory fantasy the route to other people-a kind of trial action in thought-or a way of insulating one’s desires from others? Is it a refuge, or a way into the world? Sane sex, at its most minimal, may be a form of sociability; it is desire as a medium of contact.
“if there can be some notion of sane sex, it would have to refer to forms of sexuality that were not overly harmful.”
“is there such a thing as harmless sex? And if harmless sex is a contradiction in terms-if there is no sexual excitement without an aggressive intention, no sexual exchange without unpredictable and therefore disturbing consequences-erotic life is above all about damage limitation; about getting away with pleasure seeking, and also getting away from it.
‘the principal legacy of childhood that the adolescent has to work on …First, that sexuality always includes the possibility for harm; and second, that what is desired is forbidden.’
‘We don’t take our sanity for granted…we just prefer to locate our natural insanity at two discrete points; in infancy…and adolescence.’
‘one of our innate assumptions is that change is always crisis…’
‘sanity keeps alive the idea of stability…’
‘leaves the adolescent with one persisting question; can you follow a rule…without trying to break it?
‘adolescence is a crisis-a madness one could say-because the adolescent is trying to work out whether life is worth living…is it worth the trouble, is the pleasure worth the pain?’
‘sex and so called sanity don’t go well together because sexual excitement, whatever else it is, is always about the breaking of rules.’
‘at sex we are not dignified, and our limits can never be taken for granted.
‘if some kind of sanity is something we want but secretly do not desire in our erotic lives, it is because sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known.’
‘how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self?
‘so sanity also describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use as protection against catastrophic change.
‘at the most extreme our fantasies about sanity become our refuge from the new...
A sane choice, a choice that makes too much sense, spells fear of the uncertainty of the future.
‘sanity is a story told by survivors. Sanity, if it comes at all, comes afterward.
‘sanity meant finding ways of not knowing about all the things that might drive you insane were you to know of them.”
‘…sanity becomes a repertoire of avoidances-…it is surprisingly difficult for it not to become that. ‘
‘knowing ourselves and being sane may be mutually exclusive’…’these at least have become our modern suspicions’
‘development of a particular sort; development in the direction of revealing the benefits of the interdependence of human beings on each other. It is sane to believe in, and to live as if there are, good things and people in the world that can help us live our lives. It is sane to be capable of and to get pleasure from innovation, spontaneity, responsiveness, and change.
‘what the sane human cannot be is terrorized, desperate, and remote.
What keeps adults sane is proximity to something akin to the mother’s body. Once…god, Virtues…now it is likely to be a satisfying relationship.]
‘if sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible.
‘autism…schizophrenia…speak of a despair about the beneficence of human exchange.’
Sanity in its narrower definitions deprives us of some necessary tools. It allows us neither the full range of reactions…
‘what vitalizes life…what makes life worth living
‘the sane person has found, or been given, a way of loving life that has made the whole question of whether life is loveable seemingly irrelevant.
Depressed…may not want to die…but cannot always find good reasons for wanting to be alive…or indeed, muster an interest in reasons at all.
‘finding life itself-unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.
‘a capacity to be depressed means being able to recognize something that is true-that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need…depression makes us real, deepens us…
Kleinians…capacity for depression….feature of vision of sanity.
Sanity means loving oneself in the right way, or knowing exactly what about oneself is loveable…
Depression as pathology…illuminates vitality, passion, and engagement
Love of money…will be recognized for what it is….semi-pathological propensities…hand over with shudder to specialist in mental illness.
Keynes believed there had been a moral catastrophe….the mad are ruling the world….
Money, like sexuality, reveals to us something peculiarly disturbing, even pathological, about the nature of our desires.
‘in human beings…appetite can destroy the best things about appetite.
‘,…the primary desire for modern Westerners may simply be to go on desiring…’
‘money gives people an appetite for appetite.
No desiring is far more daunting a prospect than the unavailability of what one desires.’
“money we are reminded, has never stopped people from dying;
‘happiness….is the belated fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness’
‘the infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures.
‘the san adult is always smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests.
‘Freud intimates, that there are animals who do not know what they want; and that in all other creatures the continuity of their needs and wants from birth to death is self evident….it would be a kind of madness for needs to be in doubt
‘what the desire for money reveals to Freud is our hatred of happiness; or fear of satisfaction, our phobia of childhood.’
‘our love of material possessions is a hatred of what we love. Money is the betrayal of childhood.’
‘if the enigma of money is referred back to childhood, money was indeed…like shit…much desired but ultimately useless.
‘…were all preoccupied by the ways in which the appetite for money spoiled people’s appetite for each other.’
‘there is not natural state in which we can live, or to which we can return.’
‘designs for a good life, of which the whole notion of sanity must form a part, have been left to the political theorists.’
‘sanities should be elaborated in the way that diagnoses of pathology are; they should be contested like syndromes, debated as to their causes and constitutions and outcomes, exactly as illnesses are.’
‘for whom is this version of sanity?...for anyone who still wants to use the word; anyone who still gets some pleasure, some inspiration
How ambivalent we are about what we want sanity to mean.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Making Death Thinkable (De Masi)
“The awareness of the end of life is always present in us, and it faces us all the time with anxieties…”
“The idea of death does not only concern our biological destiny, but pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by issues of separation and morning”
“Our culture holds a linear notion of time, according to which individual life, delimited by birth and death, is unique and given only once.”
“As psychoanalysts…we should help every patient to develop their capacity to tolerate the thought of the transience of human life”
“The theoretical formulation of psychoanalysis, founded principally on child development, ….prevented us from appropriately thinking about the question of death”
“how could we enjoy success, love, the birth of a child, the pursuit of ideals, without freeing ourselves, at least temporarily, of the notion of death?
“If death were always present, the awareness of human finite nature would lead to a passive and melancholic acceptance of one’s fate and, ultimately, to a destructive view of life.”
“Although death provokes anxiety, it is precisely the thought of the temporal limit of our life that gives meaning to it.”
“The first concerns the presence or absence of the representation of death in the unconscious; the second links up with the wider theme of separation, loss of objects and loved ones; the third concerns the part played by annihilation anxiety in causing mental suffering.
“The occurrence of death is not exhausted simply by the pain of the separation from our loved ones; it also carries with it an anxiety about our own disappearance into nothingness, about the dissolution of our own identity and personal history.
“whilst in the course of life we can come to terms with our personal losses through the work of mourning, there does not seem to be an equally viable solution when faced with the problem of death.”
“try to understand why death anxiety might be inevitable”
“a subjective self, devoid of the notion of development in time, is inconceivable”…”an essential constituent of our core self, is thrown into question by the inevitable realization of our temporal finiteness.”
“This ineliminable conflict between the psychological illusion of infinite development and the necessarily transient nature of our biological structure is at the root of the anxiety and existential crisis we go through in the course of our lives.”
“The principal hypothesis of this work is that death, as a natural occurrence, is inscribed in our internal world as a psychotic disaster, a state of disintegration of one’s personal identity which is not easy to conceptualise or tolerate.
“The poet (Rilke) admires the beauty of nature, yet he does not derive any pleasure from it; as he is perturbed by the thought that all that beauty is doomed to disappear.”
“Freud concludes that a difficulty in tolerating the transience of things can only have two possible outcomes; one is the melancholia affecting the poet, which prevents him from enjoying beauty, the other leads to a state of endless revolt and dissatisfaction.”
“Freud maintains that the inability to enjoy and appreciate the transience of beauty is due to an inability to mourn.”
“Those who cannot mourn, unconsciously reproach their love object for not being perfect, but only finite as humans are”
“A true capacity to love should entail an appreciation of the object, without the demand that it should always be present or timeless.’
“Life is closed by death, but it is always open to hope, which may be experienced as a denial of the necessary occurrence of death.”
“As human beings, not only do we know what we do not know, but also when we do know something, and we cannot dismiss such knowledge.”
“there have been times in history when the notion of life after death and immortality was an unquestionable assumption”
“Our world would thus strive to bring the repression of death, rooted in life itself, to an institutionalized perfection, pushing the notion of transience to the margins of our collective awareness’
“Ours is probably the first culture that endeavors to provide an answer to the question of death, yet, in reality, it seems to be nothing but an attempt to erase and repress the question itself.”
"...it is necessary to distinguish fear of death, a feeling common to all human beings, from panic, which, instead, torments only some of us."
"at times...those who suffer from excessive death anxiety and panic attacks have been children precociously perturbed by a fear of death.:"
"It would seem that those who experience the most acute death anxiety are those individuals whose early childhood anxieties have not been contained and processed by their primary object."
"in meditation, one is totally absorbed in a pleasurable state, which...calls narcissism, ...regards as a regression to a primitive pre-object phase."
"It follows, however, that if the death instinct and pleasure converge, Freud's hypothesis...becomes untenable.
“The idea of death does not only concern our biological destiny, but pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by issues of separation and morning”
“Our culture holds a linear notion of time, according to which individual life, delimited by birth and death, is unique and given only once.”
“As psychoanalysts…we should help every patient to develop their capacity to tolerate the thought of the transience of human life”
“The theoretical formulation of psychoanalysis, founded principally on child development, ….prevented us from appropriately thinking about the question of death”
“how could we enjoy success, love, the birth of a child, the pursuit of ideals, without freeing ourselves, at least temporarily, of the notion of death?
“If death were always present, the awareness of human finite nature would lead to a passive and melancholic acceptance of one’s fate and, ultimately, to a destructive view of life.”
“Although death provokes anxiety, it is precisely the thought of the temporal limit of our life that gives meaning to it.”
“The first concerns the presence or absence of the representation of death in the unconscious; the second links up with the wider theme of separation, loss of objects and loved ones; the third concerns the part played by annihilation anxiety in causing mental suffering.
“The occurrence of death is not exhausted simply by the pain of the separation from our loved ones; it also carries with it an anxiety about our own disappearance into nothingness, about the dissolution of our own identity and personal history.
“whilst in the course of life we can come to terms with our personal losses through the work of mourning, there does not seem to be an equally viable solution when faced with the problem of death.”
“try to understand why death anxiety might be inevitable”
“a subjective self, devoid of the notion of development in time, is inconceivable”…”an essential constituent of our core self, is thrown into question by the inevitable realization of our temporal finiteness.”
“This ineliminable conflict between the psychological illusion of infinite development and the necessarily transient nature of our biological structure is at the root of the anxiety and existential crisis we go through in the course of our lives.”
“The principal hypothesis of this work is that death, as a natural occurrence, is inscribed in our internal world as a psychotic disaster, a state of disintegration of one’s personal identity which is not easy to conceptualise or tolerate.
“The poet (Rilke) admires the beauty of nature, yet he does not derive any pleasure from it; as he is perturbed by the thought that all that beauty is doomed to disappear.”
“Freud concludes that a difficulty in tolerating the transience of things can only have two possible outcomes; one is the melancholia affecting the poet, which prevents him from enjoying beauty, the other leads to a state of endless revolt and dissatisfaction.”
“Freud maintains that the inability to enjoy and appreciate the transience of beauty is due to an inability to mourn.”
“Those who cannot mourn, unconsciously reproach their love object for not being perfect, but only finite as humans are”
“A true capacity to love should entail an appreciation of the object, without the demand that it should always be present or timeless.’
“Life is closed by death, but it is always open to hope, which may be experienced as a denial of the necessary occurrence of death.”
“As human beings, not only do we know what we do not know, but also when we do know something, and we cannot dismiss such knowledge.”
“there have been times in history when the notion of life after death and immortality was an unquestionable assumption”
“Our world would thus strive to bring the repression of death, rooted in life itself, to an institutionalized perfection, pushing the notion of transience to the margins of our collective awareness’
“Ours is probably the first culture that endeavors to provide an answer to the question of death, yet, in reality, it seems to be nothing but an attempt to erase and repress the question itself.”
"...it is necessary to distinguish fear of death, a feeling common to all human beings, from panic, which, instead, torments only some of us."
"at times...those who suffer from excessive death anxiety and panic attacks have been children precociously perturbed by a fear of death.:"
"It would seem that those who experience the most acute death anxiety are those individuals whose early childhood anxieties have not been contained and processed by their primary object."
"in meditation, one is totally absorbed in a pleasurable state, which...calls narcissism, ...regards as a regression to a primitive pre-object phase."
"It follows, however, that if the death instinct and pleasure converge, Freud's hypothesis...becomes untenable.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Irigaray: The Way of Love
“the book outlines another philosophy, in a way a philosophy of the feminine, where the values of intersubjectivity, of dialogue in difference, of attending to present life, in its concrete and sensible aspects, will be recognized and raised to the level of wisdom” [vii]
“until today, what we have found is, at best, to integrate the other: in our country, our culture, our house.”
“That does not yet signify meeting with the other, speaking with the other, loving with the other.”
“The book is in search of gestures, including gestures in language, which could help on the way to nearness, and in order to cultivate it.”
“This implies another relation with language, a relation which favors the act of speech in the present, and not language already existing and codified.”
“And such an experience of speech, which is irreducible to any other, is related to an experience of listening-to”
“We have to listen to the present speaking of the other in its irreducible difference with a view to the way through which we could correspond to it in faithfulness to ourselves.”
“…Heidegger did not venture, those of the meeting with an other, another who is different while being the nearest to ourselves; the clearing for the advent of a dialogue or conversation between the two parts of humanity in the respect of their otherness to one another.”
“Such a human “Being” is always in becoming even if it exists, or ought to exist, in every instant.”
“a becoming oneself which does not stay in suspension in immutable truths or essences but which provides a faithfulness to oneself in becoming. Such faithfulness is indispensible for a meeting with the other, a dialoguing with the other, a loving with the other. Without it we fall back into fusion, or into couples of opposites whose relation will be governed by hierarchy, submission of one to the other, sadomasochism.”
“objective is to stage a relation of love and of dialogue between two subjects regardless of any object…”
“…to outline the frame of a loving encounter, particularly an encounter able to dialogue in difference, the most paradigmatic and universal difference being sexual difference.”
“the wisdom of which these technicians of the logos are enamored is sometimes a knowing how to die, but seldom the apprenticeship to a knowing how to live.”
“A learned professor from the Sorbonne proves to be a very mediocre life companion: a little boy in love and a lover of boys rather than women. It was already true at the time of Plato’s Banquet.
“Our rational tradition has been much concerned with ‘speaking about’ but has reduced ‘speaking with’ to a speaking together about the same things.”
“…diversity takes place not only between cultures but between subjects, and in a paradigmatic manner between man and woman.”
“…the ability to say oneself to the other without for all that forcing upon the other one’s truth. “
“what henceforth represents the absolute to be attained is the perfection of the relation-never accomplished. Without confusing it once, once again, with some horizon defined by death. Or submitting it to a past plenitude or an ideal future, which amounts partially to the same thing.”
”For the vertical transcendence of the absolute-of the Truth, of the Idea, of the Other-is in a way substituted a respect toward the horizontal transcendence of the other which calls for a different discourse, a different logic, a different relation to perfection. “
“The mastery of nature and of the world is transformed into the elaboration of a shared universe.”
“until today, what we have found is, at best, to integrate the other: in our country, our culture, our house.”
“That does not yet signify meeting with the other, speaking with the other, loving with the other.”
“The book is in search of gestures, including gestures in language, which could help on the way to nearness, and in order to cultivate it.”
“This implies another relation with language, a relation which favors the act of speech in the present, and not language already existing and codified.”
“And such an experience of speech, which is irreducible to any other, is related to an experience of listening-to”
“We have to listen to the present speaking of the other in its irreducible difference with a view to the way through which we could correspond to it in faithfulness to ourselves.”
“…Heidegger did not venture, those of the meeting with an other, another who is different while being the nearest to ourselves; the clearing for the advent of a dialogue or conversation between the two parts of humanity in the respect of their otherness to one another.”
“Such a human “Being” is always in becoming even if it exists, or ought to exist, in every instant.”
“a becoming oneself which does not stay in suspension in immutable truths or essences but which provides a faithfulness to oneself in becoming. Such faithfulness is indispensible for a meeting with the other, a dialoguing with the other, a loving with the other. Without it we fall back into fusion, or into couples of opposites whose relation will be governed by hierarchy, submission of one to the other, sadomasochism.”
“objective is to stage a relation of love and of dialogue between two subjects regardless of any object…”
“…to outline the frame of a loving encounter, particularly an encounter able to dialogue in difference, the most paradigmatic and universal difference being sexual difference.”
“the wisdom of which these technicians of the logos are enamored is sometimes a knowing how to die, but seldom the apprenticeship to a knowing how to live.”
“A learned professor from the Sorbonne proves to be a very mediocre life companion: a little boy in love and a lover of boys rather than women. It was already true at the time of Plato’s Banquet.
“Our rational tradition has been much concerned with ‘speaking about’ but has reduced ‘speaking with’ to a speaking together about the same things.”
“…diversity takes place not only between cultures but between subjects, and in a paradigmatic manner between man and woman.”
“…the ability to say oneself to the other without for all that forcing upon the other one’s truth. “
“what henceforth represents the absolute to be attained is the perfection of the relation-never accomplished. Without confusing it once, once again, with some horizon defined by death. Or submitting it to a past plenitude or an ideal future, which amounts partially to the same thing.”
”For the vertical transcendence of the absolute-of the Truth, of the Idea, of the Other-is in a way substituted a respect toward the horizontal transcendence of the other which calls for a different discourse, a different logic, a different relation to perfection. “
“The mastery of nature and of the world is transformed into the elaboration of a shared universe.”
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Intimacies: Bersani/Phillips
Intimacies
psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy..."
"new story...that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past."
"the question then becomes, what would it be like to expect nothing to take place?"
"lacan places the unconscious as between perception and consciousness, an intriguing alternative to the more orthodox view of the unconscious in depth psychology as behind or below the consciousness.
possibility of de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of analytic exchange.
Only now, with their impersonal intimacy divested of sexual longings and anxieties, will they perhaps be able "to think and feel and speak freely."...a special talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk....it is conversation suspended in virtuality....as never more than potential being.
"In the analytic exchange, the self-hypotheses of the unconscious is realized-more exactly, suspended in the real-only in talk. And this talk may be the only imaginable form of nondestructive jouissance, the jouissance of giving and receiving, through embodied language, the subjecthood of others.
"we may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to account for our inability to love others, and ourselves...its greatness may lie in its insistence on a human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever."
FReuds most profound originality...is to propose not only that satisfied aggression is accompanied by an erotic excitement, that it produces narcissistic jouissance, but also, and more radically, that the sexualizing of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego."
"What is uniquely psychoanalytic...is the notion that the pleasurable power of satisfied aggression is itself a threat to the agent of aggression."
"Thus, sadistically motivated narcissism is also masochistically satisfying."
psychoanalysis is certainly not-at least not in its most original and profound discoveries-an ego-psychology; and yet it recognizes the indispensable function of the ego's capacity to reason and judge in the subject's efforts to protect himself or herself from the drives-in particular, the drive toward destructive juissance-that are the distinctive discovery of psychoanalysis."
"The self-purifying move is the super-ego's 'morality'.
"There is very little evidence of a rational will effectively controlling the ego's expansions, arresting it at the size or stage of human sense of individual dignity and the equally humane respect for the worth of other, similarly restrained egos. Psychoanalysis has decisively discredited any such rationalistic dream"
"might the excitement of the hyperbolized ego be forestalled not by the rational will but by a nondestructive eroticizing of the ego? I will attempt to describe a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other."
"every theory of love is, necesssarily, a theory of object relations"
"Love is transitive; to conceptualize it is to address not only the question of how we choose objects to love, but also, more fundamentally, the very possibility of a subject loving an object...from the very beginning psychoanalysis has been skeptical about that possibility."
"the resurrected object may really be the loving subject, a self we lovingly recover at the very moment we may wish to celebrate our openness to the world..."
"The person who will re-present this woman....is typically the object of an overestimaization, and idealization. "
"Freud traces the overvaluation of the loved one back to the subject's infantile narcisism."
Thus even in the case presented as the closest to pure object love, the loved one carries the burden of being identified with two other love objects that have nothing to do with her: the man's mother and his own idealized infantile ego.
"What, then, can it mean, from a Freudian point of view, to say that we should or even can love others 'for themselves'?
'the problem is how their can be love for another person'
"from the psychoanalytic perspective....a theory of love can't help but be a demystification of love. Other theories of all the different types of love share one assumption: in love, the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness."
"The theory of love adumbrated in Freud and Lacan is demystifying in the sense that it subverts the premise about being on which love is founded, the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness. WE love only ourselves
"if we think about love seriously, by which I mean if we seriously take love to be a narcissistic extravagance, then we will acknowledge that, first of all, simply willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact, and, secondly, that they myth of love can become its truth only if we reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself'
"...no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system."
"Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?"
"...profound continuity, despite the great difference, between the modern and ancient concepts of love. In both cases, love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination."
"the soul that pursues "that which really is what it is" is, then, not pure lack, ....it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation. The lover seeks to make the lover like himself, but this has nothing to do with the specularity of personal narcissism"
"He chooses a boy...who already has the lover's type of being....and then...'pours into the boy's soul more of the particular god's inspiration'....Lovers are at the same time attempting to make the boy more like himself.
"the lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share.
far from suppressing the other, the Socratic lover's narcissims suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served.
"...anomaly in Greek love: erotic reciprocity. The beloved becomes a lover as the result of being loved"
"The boy loves a soul that he both is and is becoming, the latter as a result of the lover's pouring more and more into him the qualities of the god whose nature the lover had already seen in the boy"
"the miracle in all this is that when we describe this love as narcissistic, we must also say that it is pure object-love."
What both the beloved and the lover love are 'secrets' about themselves and the truth about the other.
"narcissistic love in both the lover and the beloved is exactly identical to a perfect knowledge of otherness."
"I call this love impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism"
"In the generous narcissism of the exchange between Socratic lovers, each partner demands of the other...that he reflect the lover's type of being, his universal singularity (and not his psychological particularities, his personal difference), by recognizing and cultivating that singularity as his own most pervasive, most pressing potentiality.
If we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissim, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized , or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.
experience of belonging to a family of singularity...might make us sensitive to the ontological status of difference...I called the nonthreatening supplement of sameness in Homos.
Socratic ideality is more cultivated than it is contemplated.
cultivated through dialogue-intrinsically unending dialogue, for we are always either moving toward or falling away from the being it is our greatest happiness to 're-find' in others.
"Transference love, as Freud says, 'consists of reissuing old components and repeating infantile reactions. But that is always the essence of falling in love."
"most striking...the violence entailed in the move from narcissism toward a so called object"
"there is, one might say, a tragic flaw in this absurdly self-defeating story. In promoting the developmental necessity of overcoming narcissism, object relations theorists have been, as it were, encouraging the greatest possible violence between people."
"in talking against narcissism...psychoanalysts have created the problem they have been trying to solve."
"why is self-destructiveness equated with self-hatred? why is self-love equated with hatred of reality?
As a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard won (i.e., defensive) self knowledge; so called self knowledge become....becomes the stark reversal of traditional priorities, becomes the obstacle rather than the instrument of the individual's satisfaction.
"masochism...as a developmental achievement-that for Bersani through Freud, is the way to go."
What massochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to."
"freud, like lacan, is struck by how difficult it is for the modern individual to maintain his appetite for appetite; that the acquisition of (modern) identity involves the sacrificing of desire, and identity without desire is a futile passion."
"knowing what one wants is an incitement to violence"
"Bersani famously remarked in his 1987 essay, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' 'There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.'
If selfhood is your object of desire, sexuality will be definition become a persecution; it will make a mockery where there should have been satisfaction.
So there is selfhood or jouissance: the (sadistic) ego with its developmental achievements, its masterful plausibility, or the self-shattering (masochistic) ego....
the ways in which we are invited to 'resists projects of subjection' are likely to subject us to something.
"if sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of non violence."
"we have to imagine a social world...as Bersani intimates...in which the fundamental question, the abiding concern is, 'do you want to have sex with me?' everything follows from that answer.
once the sexual is staged as the losing of self rather than its assertion or consolidation or indeed triumph, the obsession with sex becomes an obsession with a certain kind of love."
Bersani want to imagine forms of desire that are not forms of revenge.
The primary loss to be mourned is for the violence necessitated by the protection of selfhood....we would have to learn to stop taking sex personally.
the fears to be faced, are inextricable from the losses to be mourned. The fear of jouissance, ...not to mention the dread of 'modes of ascesis'...is not to be underestimated....
Bersani seems to suggest....that we tend not to be sufficiently narcisistic.'
"To have the courage of one's narcissism-to find a version of narcissism that is preservative ate once of survival and pleasure-would be to have the courage of one's wish for more life rather than less.
what bersani calls 'willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others' may not be a commitment to others-to the so called otherness of others, to other people as so-called ends in themselves- but a commitment to our own hatred. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.
psychoanalysis may have relieved us of the ridiculous demand to love others for themselves, and at the same time demanded that we do nothing less. Bersani wants to keep ope....the question of what we might love others for, what in others we might love that would curb the violence in our human-all-too-human personal relations.
'essentially it is the function of judgment to make two kinds of decision. It has to decide whether or not a thing posseses a certain property, and whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality.
"do I love it because it is inside me, or is it inside me because I love it?
the original version of the question do you want to have sex with me? would be the question do I want to eat you or spit you out?
for something to be loveable it must be already inside one, or we must want it to be inside.
it is as though the ego already knows its own mind. Nothing can be unrecognizable, nothing can be paradoxical, nothing can be a mixed bag, nothing can be both inside and outside.
...our preferred model of love relations, this loving of the other for their difference. It is a picture we cannot afford not to do without....
love as recovery-love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother-is bound to be a furious project.
what we call love is our hatred of the future, and it is because other people represent our future objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.
the ego, for its very survival, has to seek out new (i.e. other) objects that it cannot bear because they are new; and it is prohibited by incest taboo from seeking out the old object that it desires, and cannot bear because they are forbiddden.
if the ego's project is (psychic) survival, rage is going to be the order of the day.
we need a new vocabulary, new ways of putting what can go on between people that do not presume a lethal antagonism.
psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy..."
"new story...that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past."
"the question then becomes, what would it be like to expect nothing to take place?"
"lacan places the unconscious as between perception and consciousness, an intriguing alternative to the more orthodox view of the unconscious in depth psychology as behind or below the consciousness.
possibility of de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of analytic exchange.
Only now, with their impersonal intimacy divested of sexual longings and anxieties, will they perhaps be able "to think and feel and speak freely."...a special talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk....it is conversation suspended in virtuality....as never more than potential being.
"In the analytic exchange, the self-hypotheses of the unconscious is realized-more exactly, suspended in the real-only in talk. And this talk may be the only imaginable form of nondestructive jouissance, the jouissance of giving and receiving, through embodied language, the subjecthood of others.
"we may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to account for our inability to love others, and ourselves...its greatness may lie in its insistence on a human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever."
FReuds most profound originality...is to propose not only that satisfied aggression is accompanied by an erotic excitement, that it produces narcissistic jouissance, but also, and more radically, that the sexualizing of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego."
"What is uniquely psychoanalytic...is the notion that the pleasurable power of satisfied aggression is itself a threat to the agent of aggression."
"Thus, sadistically motivated narcissism is also masochistically satisfying."
psychoanalysis is certainly not-at least not in its most original and profound discoveries-an ego-psychology; and yet it recognizes the indispensable function of the ego's capacity to reason and judge in the subject's efforts to protect himself or herself from the drives-in particular, the drive toward destructive juissance-that are the distinctive discovery of psychoanalysis."
"The self-purifying move is the super-ego's 'morality'.
"There is very little evidence of a rational will effectively controlling the ego's expansions, arresting it at the size or stage of human sense of individual dignity and the equally humane respect for the worth of other, similarly restrained egos. Psychoanalysis has decisively discredited any such rationalistic dream"
"might the excitement of the hyperbolized ego be forestalled not by the rational will but by a nondestructive eroticizing of the ego? I will attempt to describe a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other."
"every theory of love is, necesssarily, a theory of object relations"
"Love is transitive; to conceptualize it is to address not only the question of how we choose objects to love, but also, more fundamentally, the very possibility of a subject loving an object...from the very beginning psychoanalysis has been skeptical about that possibility."
"the resurrected object may really be the loving subject, a self we lovingly recover at the very moment we may wish to celebrate our openness to the world..."
"The person who will re-present this woman....is typically the object of an overestimaization, and idealization. "
"Freud traces the overvaluation of the loved one back to the subject's infantile narcisism."
Thus even in the case presented as the closest to pure object love, the loved one carries the burden of being identified with two other love objects that have nothing to do with her: the man's mother and his own idealized infantile ego.
"What, then, can it mean, from a Freudian point of view, to say that we should or even can love others 'for themselves'?
'the problem is how their can be love for another person'
"from the psychoanalytic perspective....a theory of love can't help but be a demystification of love. Other theories of all the different types of love share one assumption: in love, the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness."
"The theory of love adumbrated in Freud and Lacan is demystifying in the sense that it subverts the premise about being on which love is founded, the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness. WE love only ourselves
"if we think about love seriously, by which I mean if we seriously take love to be a narcissistic extravagance, then we will acknowledge that, first of all, simply willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact, and, secondly, that they myth of love can become its truth only if we reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself'
"...no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system."
"Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?"
"...profound continuity, despite the great difference, between the modern and ancient concepts of love. In both cases, love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination."
"the soul that pursues "that which really is what it is" is, then, not pure lack, ....it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation. The lover seeks to make the lover like himself, but this has nothing to do with the specularity of personal narcissism"
"He chooses a boy...who already has the lover's type of being....and then...'pours into the boy's soul more of the particular god's inspiration'....Lovers are at the same time attempting to make the boy more like himself.
"the lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share.
far from suppressing the other, the Socratic lover's narcissims suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served.
"...anomaly in Greek love: erotic reciprocity. The beloved becomes a lover as the result of being loved"
"The boy loves a soul that he both is and is becoming, the latter as a result of the lover's pouring more and more into him the qualities of the god whose nature the lover had already seen in the boy"
"the miracle in all this is that when we describe this love as narcissistic, we must also say that it is pure object-love."
What both the beloved and the lover love are 'secrets' about themselves and the truth about the other.
"narcissistic love in both the lover and the beloved is exactly identical to a perfect knowledge of otherness."
"I call this love impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism"
"In the generous narcissism of the exchange between Socratic lovers, each partner demands of the other...that he reflect the lover's type of being, his universal singularity (and not his psychological particularities, his personal difference), by recognizing and cultivating that singularity as his own most pervasive, most pressing potentiality.
If we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissim, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized , or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.
experience of belonging to a family of singularity...might make us sensitive to the ontological status of difference...I called the nonthreatening supplement of sameness in Homos.
Socratic ideality is more cultivated than it is contemplated.
cultivated through dialogue-intrinsically unending dialogue, for we are always either moving toward or falling away from the being it is our greatest happiness to 're-find' in others.
"Transference love, as Freud says, 'consists of reissuing old components and repeating infantile reactions. But that is always the essence of falling in love."
"most striking...the violence entailed in the move from narcissism toward a so called object"
"there is, one might say, a tragic flaw in this absurdly self-defeating story. In promoting the developmental necessity of overcoming narcissism, object relations theorists have been, as it were, encouraging the greatest possible violence between people."
"in talking against narcissism...psychoanalysts have created the problem they have been trying to solve."
"why is self-destructiveness equated with self-hatred? why is self-love equated with hatred of reality?
As a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard won (i.e., defensive) self knowledge; so called self knowledge become....becomes the stark reversal of traditional priorities, becomes the obstacle rather than the instrument of the individual's satisfaction.
"masochism...as a developmental achievement-that for Bersani through Freud, is the way to go."
What massochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to."
"freud, like lacan, is struck by how difficult it is for the modern individual to maintain his appetite for appetite; that the acquisition of (modern) identity involves the sacrificing of desire, and identity without desire is a futile passion."
"knowing what one wants is an incitement to violence"
"Bersani famously remarked in his 1987 essay, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' 'There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.'
If selfhood is your object of desire, sexuality will be definition become a persecution; it will make a mockery where there should have been satisfaction.
So there is selfhood or jouissance: the (sadistic) ego with its developmental achievements, its masterful plausibility, or the self-shattering (masochistic) ego....
the ways in which we are invited to 'resists projects of subjection' are likely to subject us to something.
"if sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of non violence."
"we have to imagine a social world...as Bersani intimates...in which the fundamental question, the abiding concern is, 'do you want to have sex with me?' everything follows from that answer.
once the sexual is staged as the losing of self rather than its assertion or consolidation or indeed triumph, the obsession with sex becomes an obsession with a certain kind of love."
Bersani want to imagine forms of desire that are not forms of revenge.
The primary loss to be mourned is for the violence necessitated by the protection of selfhood....we would have to learn to stop taking sex personally.
the fears to be faced, are inextricable from the losses to be mourned. The fear of jouissance, ...not to mention the dread of 'modes of ascesis'...is not to be underestimated....
Bersani seems to suggest....that we tend not to be sufficiently narcisistic.'
"To have the courage of one's narcissism-to find a version of narcissism that is preservative ate once of survival and pleasure-would be to have the courage of one's wish for more life rather than less.
what bersani calls 'willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others' may not be a commitment to others-to the so called otherness of others, to other people as so-called ends in themselves- but a commitment to our own hatred. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.
psychoanalysis may have relieved us of the ridiculous demand to love others for themselves, and at the same time demanded that we do nothing less. Bersani wants to keep ope....the question of what we might love others for, what in others we might love that would curb the violence in our human-all-too-human personal relations.
'essentially it is the function of judgment to make two kinds of decision. It has to decide whether or not a thing posseses a certain property, and whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality.
"do I love it because it is inside me, or is it inside me because I love it?
the original version of the question do you want to have sex with me? would be the question do I want to eat you or spit you out?
for something to be loveable it must be already inside one, or we must want it to be inside.
it is as though the ego already knows its own mind. Nothing can be unrecognizable, nothing can be paradoxical, nothing can be a mixed bag, nothing can be both inside and outside.
...our preferred model of love relations, this loving of the other for their difference. It is a picture we cannot afford not to do without....
love as recovery-love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother-is bound to be a furious project.
what we call love is our hatred of the future, and it is because other people represent our future objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.
the ego, for its very survival, has to seek out new (i.e. other) objects that it cannot bear because they are new; and it is prohibited by incest taboo from seeking out the old object that it desires, and cannot bear because they are forbiddden.
if the ego's project is (psychic) survival, rage is going to be the order of the day.
we need a new vocabulary, new ways of putting what can go on between people that do not presume a lethal antagonism.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Michel Onfray: In Defence of Atheism
"Human credulity is beyond imagining. Man's refusal to see the obvious, his longing fro a better deal even if it is based on pure fiction, his determination to remain blind have no limits. Far better to swallow fables, fictions, myths, or fairy tales than to see reality in all its naked cruelty, forcing him to accept the obvious tragedy of existence. Homo sapiens ward off death by abolishing it. To avoid solving the problem he wishes it away. Only mortals have to worry about death's inevitability. The naive and foolish believer knows that he is immortal, that he will survive the carnage of Judgment Day."
"Just as psychonanalysts often treat others in order to avoid questioning themselves too closely..."
"My atheism leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter, when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organize a world for others."
"The pathological grip of the death fixation does not heal itself through chaotic and magical muckspreading but by philosophical work upon oneself."
"Atheism is not therapy but restored mental health."
[rework enlightenment...radical enlightenment v. theist mainstream]
"Atheology"
"confronted today by nihilism...not fertile field in wake of death of god."
"God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads towards extinction."
"...they include horror of death's void, the inability to integrate death as a natural process with which we must come to terms, in whose presence intelligence alone can have any effect. And there is denial, the absence of any meaning beyond what we ourselves have to offer, with absurdity as a starting point."
"doubt is coeval with belief"
"the neurosis that impels men to forge gods results from the usual workings of the psyche and the subconscious. Creation of the divine coexists with terror of the void in a life that must end."
"Atheism rejects the existence of God as a fiction devised by men desperated to keep on living in spite of the inevitability of death."
"Spinoza...taught a hedonist morality of joy beyond good and evil."
"Nietzsche introduced transvaluation: atheism is not an end in itself. Do away with God, yes, but then what?"
"We celebrate collectivity over the singularity..."
"Presenting the case for atheism requires delving into the religious impulse. It stems from fear, misgiving, unease, inability to look death in the face, the feeling that something is lacking, and distress at teh realization that human life is finite; the primary components of existential angst."
"because god exists, everythign is permited."
"Where does the Catholic substratum survive? And where the Judeo-Christian epistemology/ Simply in the notion that matter, the real, and the world are not all there is. That something remains outside all the explanatory apparatus: a force, a power, an energy, a determinism, a will, a desire. And after death? Well, certainly not thing. Something..."
"Atheism implies the banishing of transcendence. With no exceptions."
"Atheist Christianity-or Christianity without God. Yet another curious creature! The phenomena exists: it characterizes one who denies God but at the same time asserts the excellence of Christian values..."
"...they consider that the cure for the nihilism of our period does not require a post-Christian effort but a secular and immanent re-reading of the message lef by Christ."
"But philosophy, reason, utility, pragmatism, individual and social hedonism-these constitute so many invitations to maneuver on the terrain of pure immanence, in the interests of men, by themselves and for themselves, and not by God and for God.
"Shared fundamentals of monotheisms...:waves of hatred...hatred of intelligence....hatred of life...obsession with death...hatred of here and now...hatred of the corruptible body...investment in eternal, immortal, divine...hatred of women..."
"all three monotheisms have a negative attitude toward the joy of life and even toward some of the basic human drives."
"might point to the advantages of a guiding principle less obsessed with the death wish than with love of life."
"We speak, think, live, act, imagine, eat, suffer, sleep, and conceive as Judeo-Christian, constructed by two thousand years of formatting by biblical monotheism"
"at the level of public life, institutions, forms, powers-in other words the essential-remains Judeo-Christian!"
"...we must fight for a post-Christian secularism, that is to say atheistic, militant, and radicall opposed to choosing between WEstern Judeo-Christianity and its Islamic adversary."
"Just as psychonanalysts often treat others in order to avoid questioning themselves too closely..."
"My atheism leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter, when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organize a world for others."
"The pathological grip of the death fixation does not heal itself through chaotic and magical muckspreading but by philosophical work upon oneself."
"Atheism is not therapy but restored mental health."
[rework enlightenment...radical enlightenment v. theist mainstream]
"Atheology"
"confronted today by nihilism...not fertile field in wake of death of god."
"God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads towards extinction."
"...they include horror of death's void, the inability to integrate death as a natural process with which we must come to terms, in whose presence intelligence alone can have any effect. And there is denial, the absence of any meaning beyond what we ourselves have to offer, with absurdity as a starting point."
"doubt is coeval with belief"
"the neurosis that impels men to forge gods results from the usual workings of the psyche and the subconscious. Creation of the divine coexists with terror of the void in a life that must end."
"Atheism rejects the existence of God as a fiction devised by men desperated to keep on living in spite of the inevitability of death."
"Spinoza...taught a hedonist morality of joy beyond good and evil."
"Nietzsche introduced transvaluation: atheism is not an end in itself. Do away with God, yes, but then what?"
"We celebrate collectivity over the singularity..."
"Presenting the case for atheism requires delving into the religious impulse. It stems from fear, misgiving, unease, inability to look death in the face, the feeling that something is lacking, and distress at teh realization that human life is finite; the primary components of existential angst."
"because god exists, everythign is permited."
"Where does the Catholic substratum survive? And where the Judeo-Christian epistemology/ Simply in the notion that matter, the real, and the world are not all there is. That something remains outside all the explanatory apparatus: a force, a power, an energy, a determinism, a will, a desire. And after death? Well, certainly not thing. Something..."
"Atheism implies the banishing of transcendence. With no exceptions."
"Atheist Christianity-or Christianity without God. Yet another curious creature! The phenomena exists: it characterizes one who denies God but at the same time asserts the excellence of Christian values..."
"...they consider that the cure for the nihilism of our period does not require a post-Christian effort but a secular and immanent re-reading of the message lef by Christ."
"But philosophy, reason, utility, pragmatism, individual and social hedonism-these constitute so many invitations to maneuver on the terrain of pure immanence, in the interests of men, by themselves and for themselves, and not by God and for God.
"Shared fundamentals of monotheisms...:waves of hatred...hatred of intelligence....hatred of life...obsession with death...hatred of here and now...hatred of the corruptible body...investment in eternal, immortal, divine...hatred of women..."
"all three monotheisms have a negative attitude toward the joy of life and even toward some of the basic human drives."
"might point to the advantages of a guiding principle less obsessed with the death wish than with love of life."
"We speak, think, live, act, imagine, eat, suffer, sleep, and conceive as Judeo-Christian, constructed by two thousand years of formatting by biblical monotheism"
"at the level of public life, institutions, forms, powers-in other words the essential-remains Judeo-Christian!"
"...we must fight for a post-Christian secularism, that is to say atheistic, militant, and radicall opposed to choosing between WEstern Judeo-Christianity and its Islamic adversary."
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolutoin
"god for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer...Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possiblity of any entity whatsoever." [7]
"He made the world with no functional end in view but simpy for the love and delight of it." [8]
"He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture-" [8]
"If we are God's creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it. The question raised by radical Romanticism, which for these purposes includes Karl Marx, is that of what political transformation would be necessary for this to become possible in practice." [10]
"...a disagreement of why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us." [11]
"Aestheticians are seized by the beauty and sensuous particularity of things, theologians by the fact that their existence is so mindbendingly contingent..." [13]
"On this theological view morality is quite pointless...it is a question of how to live most richly and enjoyable, relishing one's powers and capacities purely for their own sake." [13]
"the morality jesus preaches is reckless, extravagent, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal..." [14]
"self authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence." [16]
"Men and women are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledge the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith." [20]
"His death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition." [23]
“What is at issue is a slashing sword, not peace, consensus, and negotiation.” [24]
“Given the twisted state of the world, self-fullfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment.” [24]
“Fullness of life is what matters; but working for a more abundant life all around sometimes involves suspending or surrendering some of the good things that characterize existence.” [25]
“becoming a eunuch for the kingdom.” [25]
“we need to have faith that, against all appearances to the contrary, the powerless can come to power.” [25]
“’eternal life’, life at its most richly and exuberantly human, intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight.” [28]
“concept of political love” [32]
“…even if the account I have given of it is not literally true, it may still serve as an allegory of our political and historical condition.” [33]
“The difference between science and theology, as I understand it, is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing….” [37]
“the difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself also hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implication of this are for living.” [37]
“Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists some Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness to the promise of a transformative love.” [37]
“your average liberal rationalist does not need to believe that despite the tormented condition of humanity there might still, implausibly enough, be hope, since they do not credit such a condition in the first place.” [38]
“money is a great breeder of unreality” [41]
“New Age religion…offers a refuge from the world, not a mission to transform it.” [41]
“postmodernity is the era in which religion goes public and collective once again, but more as a substitute for classical politics than a reassertion of it.” [44]
“what is the point of faith or hope in a civilization which regards itself as pretty well self-sufficient, as being more or less as good as it gets?[45]
"He made the world with no functional end in view but simpy for the love and delight of it." [8]
"He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture-" [8]
"If we are God's creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it. The question raised by radical Romanticism, which for these purposes includes Karl Marx, is that of what political transformation would be necessary for this to become possible in practice." [10]
"...a disagreement of why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us." [11]
"Aestheticians are seized by the beauty and sensuous particularity of things, theologians by the fact that their existence is so mindbendingly contingent..." [13]
"On this theological view morality is quite pointless...it is a question of how to live most richly and enjoyable, relishing one's powers and capacities purely for their own sake." [13]
"the morality jesus preaches is reckless, extravagent, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal..." [14]
"self authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence." [16]
"Men and women are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledge the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith." [20]
"His death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition." [23]
“What is at issue is a slashing sword, not peace, consensus, and negotiation.” [24]
“Given the twisted state of the world, self-fullfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment.” [24]
“Fullness of life is what matters; but working for a more abundant life all around sometimes involves suspending or surrendering some of the good things that characterize existence.” [25]
“becoming a eunuch for the kingdom.” [25]
“we need to have faith that, against all appearances to the contrary, the powerless can come to power.” [25]
“’eternal life’, life at its most richly and exuberantly human, intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight.” [28]
“concept of political love” [32]
“…even if the account I have given of it is not literally true, it may still serve as an allegory of our political and historical condition.” [33]
“The difference between science and theology, as I understand it, is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing….” [37]
“the difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself also hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implication of this are for living.” [37]
“Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists some Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness to the promise of a transformative love.” [37]
“your average liberal rationalist does not need to believe that despite the tormented condition of humanity there might still, implausibly enough, be hope, since they do not credit such a condition in the first place.” [38]
“money is a great breeder of unreality” [41]
“New Age religion…offers a refuge from the world, not a mission to transform it.” [41]
“postmodernity is the era in which religion goes public and collective once again, but more as a substitute for classical politics than a reassertion of it.” [44]
“what is the point of faith or hope in a civilization which regards itself as pretty well self-sufficient, as being more or less as good as it gets?[45]
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Pascal
"Men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, [so] they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all." [Pascal]
Monday, April 6, 2009
cioran II
"When we have worn out the interest we once took in death, when we realize we have nothing more to gain from it, we fall back on birth, we turn to a much more inexhaustible abyss."
"As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name."
"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."
"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentus pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known."
"I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death."
"Not to have been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!"
"Have you suffered for knowledge? This is crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker."
"I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions" [Cioran]
"each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me."
"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."
"What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself."
"I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies"
"Firsthand thinkers meditate upon things; the others upon problems. We must live face to face with being, and not with the mind."
"In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy."
"consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."
"an existence constantly transfigured by failure"
"She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has benn a matter of indifference to us."
"To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature...will not long grant us 'this morsel of matter she lends.'-This morsel of matter: by dint of pondering it we reach peace, though a peace it would be better never to have known."
"To be happy you must contanly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager-and with what success!-to sabotage happiness."
"we have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
"As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name."
"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."
"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentus pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known."
"I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death."
"Not to have been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!"
"Have you suffered for knowledge? This is crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker."
"I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions" [Cioran]
"each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me."
"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."
"What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself."
"I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies"
"Firsthand thinkers meditate upon things; the others upon problems. We must live face to face with being, and not with the mind."
"In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy."
"consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."
"an existence constantly transfigured by failure"
"She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has benn a matter of indifference to us."
"To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature...will not long grant us 'this morsel of matter she lends.'-This morsel of matter: by dint of pondering it we reach peace, though a peace it would be better never to have known."
"To be happy you must contanly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager-and with what success!-to sabotage happiness."
"we have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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