The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. (why I am an Agnostic)
When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. (The Myth of the Soul)
Why I am an Agnostic and Other Essays, Clarence Darrow
2. If you want to know what other people think about somethingthat concerns you, you have only to reflecton what you would think of themunder the same circumstances. you schould regard no one as morally superior to you on this point, and no one as more simple. More often than we think, people notice things we believe we have artfully concealed from them. Of this remark, more than half is true, and that is saying a lot for a maxim composed in one’s thirtieth year.
32 In the eye of a man of the world any particular man always remains the same, whether he be a wigmaker or a minister of state, just as marble remains what it is: whether the statue represents Apollo or a Capuchin monk it cannot become bronze or sandstone.
22 There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points “born” and “died” farther away from one another…The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers…
It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
10 One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
379 Probable and improbable. – A woman was secretly in love with a man, raised him high above her, and said a hundred times in the most secret recesses of her hean: ‘if such a man loved me, it would be something I so little deserve I would have to humble myself in the dust!’- And the man felt in the same way, and in regard to the same woman, and he said the same thing in the most secret recesses of his heart. When at last their tongues were loosed and they told one another everything they had kept hidden, there followed a silence; then, after she had been sunk in thought for a time, the woman said in a cold voice: ‘but everything is now clear! neither of us is what we have loved! If you are that which you say, and no more, I have debased myself and loved you in vain; the demon seduced me, as he did you.’ – This story, which is not at all an improbable one, never happens – why not?
Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idlers.Thus Spoke Zarathustra Whoever knows the reader will do nothing more for the reader. One more century of readers – and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone is allowed to learn to read ruins not only writing in the long run, but thinking too. Once the spirit was God, then it became human and now it is even becoming rabble. Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that one must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those who are addressed should be great and tall. The air thin and pure, danger near and the spirit full of cheerful spite: these fit together well. I want to have goblins around me, for I am courageous. Courage that scares off ghosts creates its own goblins – courage wants to laugh. I no longer sympathize with you; this cloud beneath me, this black and heavy thing at which I laugh – precisely this is your thundercloud. You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated. Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities. Courageous, unconcerned, sarcastic, violent – thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior. You say to me: “Life is hard to bear.” But why would you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear: but then do not carry on so tenderly! We are all of us handsome, load bearing jack- and jillasses. What have we in common with the rosebud that trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body? It is true: we love life not because we are accustomed to life but because we are accustomed to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. And even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness. To see these light, foolish, delicate, sensitive little souls fluttering – that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs. I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance. And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, somber: it was the spirit of gravity – through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me. Thus spoke Zarathustra.
358 Grounds and their groundlessness. -You dislike him and present many grounds for this dislike – but I believe only in your dislike, not in your grounds! You flatter yourself in your own eyes when you suggest to yourself and to me that what has happened through instinct is the result of a process of reasoning.
The topic that was suggested, which I’m very happy to talk about, is “Democracy and Education.” The phrase democracy and education immediately brings to mind the life and work and thought of one of the outstanding thinkers of the past century, John Dewey, who devoted the greater part of his life and his thought to this array of issues. I guess I should confess a special interest. His thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years in fact, from about age two on, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into but are real. For much of his life-later he was more skeptical-Dewey seems to have felt that reforms in early education could be in themselves a major lever of social change. They could lead the way to a more just and free society, a society in which, in his words, “the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.” This basic commitment, which runs through all of Dewey’s work and thought, is profoundly at odds with the two lead-ing currents of modern social intellectual life; one, strong in his day-he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s about these things is associated with the command economies in Eastern Europe, the systems created by Lenin and Trotsky and turned into an even greater monstrosity by Stalin. The other, the state capitalist industrial society being constructed in the U.S. and much of the West, with the effective rule of private power. These two systems are similar in some fundamental ways, including ideologi-cally. Both were, and one of them remains, deeply authoritarian in fun-damental commitment, and both were very sharply and dramatically opposed to another tradition, the Left libertarian tradition, with roots in Enlightenment values, a tradition that included progressive liberals of the John Dewey variety, independent socialists like Bertrand Russell, lead-ing elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and of course libertarian socialists and various anarchist movements, not to speak of major parts of the labor movement and other popular sectors.
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Let me return to one of Dewey’s central themes, that the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. That includes, of course, education, which was a prime concern of his. The goal of education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is “to give a sense of the value of things other than domination,” to help create “wise citizens of a free community,” to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty and individual creativeness, which means that we regard “a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.” In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “hu-manistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with wa-ter but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circum-stances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.
330 Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
342 Beware ofconfusion!– Yes! He considers the matter from all sides, and you think he is a genuine man of knowledge. But he only wants to lower the price – he wants to buy it
On the Improvement of the Understanding (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect)
[1] (1) After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
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[51] (1) Meanwhile, I give warning that I shall not here give essence of every perception, and explain it through its proximate cause. (2) Such work lies in the province of philosophy. (3) I shall confine myself to what concerns method – that is, to the character of fictitious, false and doubtful perceptions, and the means of freeing ourselves therefrom. (4) Let us then first inquire into the nature of a fictitious idea.
[52] (1) Every perception has for its object either a thing considered as existing, or solely the essence of a thing. (2) Now “fiction” is chiefly occupied with things considered as existing. (3) I will, therefore, consider these first – I mean cases where only the existence of an object is feigned, and the thing thus feigned is understood, or assumed to be understood. (4) For instance, I feign that Peter, whom I know to have gone home, is gone to see me, [r] or something of that kind. (5) With what is such an idea concerned? (6) It is concerned with things possible, and not with things necessary or impossible.
[53] (1) I call a thing impossible when its existence would imply a contradiction; necessary, when its non-existence would imply a contradiction; possible, when neither its existence nor its non-existence imply a contradiction, but when the necessity or impossibility of its nature depends on causes unknown to us, while we feign that it exists. (2) If the necessity or impossibility of its existence depending on external causes were known to us, we could not form any fictitious hypotheses about it;
Q. You are most frequently termed “philosopher” but also “historian”, “structuralist”, and “Marxist”. The title of your chair at the College de France is “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”. What does this mean?
A. I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane – maybe very narrow – which is the path of the historian of thought.
Q. In The History of Sexuality, you refer to the person who “upsets established laws and somehow anticipates the coming freedom.” Do you see your own work in this light?
A. No. For rather a long period, people have asked me to tell them what will happen and to give them a program for the future. We know very well that, even with the best intentions, those programs become a tool, an instrument of oppression. Rousseau, a lover of freedom, was used in the French Revolution to build up a model of social oppression. Marx would be horrified by Stalinism and Leninism. My role – and that is too emphatic a word – is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people – that’s the role of an intellectual.
Q. In your writing you seem fascinated by figures who exist on the margins of society: madmen, lepers, criminals, deviants, hermaphrodites, murderers, obscure thinkers. Why?
A. I am sometimes reproached for selecting marginal thinkers instead of taking examples from the mainstream of history. My answer will be snobbish: It’s impossible to see figures like Bopp and Ricardo as obscure. Q. But what about your interest in sociel outcasts? A. I deal with obscure figures and processes for two reasons: The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don’t perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape – that people are universal – are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.
Why I Am A Rationalist, The Rational Habit Of Mind Is A Rare One
I am, in this age when there are a great many appeals to unreason, an unrepentant Rationalist. I have been a Rationalist ever since I can remember, and I do not propose to cease to be so whatever appeals to unreason may be made. We have listened to a speech, by which I think we were all much moved, about the pioneers in the past who have done what they could to promote the cause of freedom of thought. I suppose it is for me to speak about the great need of continuing this work in our own day, and about how much there is that remains for all who sympathize with its objects to accomplish. We are not yet, and I suppose men and women never will be, completely rational. Perhaps, if we were, we should not have all the pleasures that we have at present; but I think complete rationality is so distant a prospect that we need not be much alarmed by it, and the nearest approach that we are likely to get is sure to be all to the good. I certainly find that there is a very great deal of irrationality still about in the world. While Professor Graham Wallas was speaking about the bequests that have been made to the Rationalist Press Association I was thinking: What is its creed, what is its dogma, and what is going to be the, so to speak, doctrine that these benefactions are going to be devoted to propagating? You have, of course, to be a little careful, when you find yourself landed with endowments and benefactions, lest you should become another endowed church. (Laughter.) As far as I can see, the view to which we are committed, one which I have stated on a former occasion, is that we ought not to believe, and we ought not to try to cause others to believe, any proposition for which there is no evidence whatever. That seems a modest proposition, and if you can stick to that you will be fairly sure that you are not going to become a sort of ossified endowed church. We ought not to commit ourselves to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations; we ought merely to say that there are a great many propositions about which men and women feel pretty certain, but, concerning which they have no right to feel certain, and it is our business as Rationalists to try to make them see that those things are not certain. I am told that that is a very wicked position to maintain. I have here a book recently published which I commend to your attention. You may or may not know that some little time ago, under the auspices of the National Secular Society, I delivered a lecture on “Why I am Not a Christian.” Now, It appears that I did not know why it is that I am not a Christian; and here is a book which will tell you why I am not — by Mr. H. G. Wood, who is a somewhat eminent member of the Society of Friends, a body for which I have the greatest respect. His book is called Why Mr. Bertrand Russell is Not a Christian. It seems that the reasons are not those which I thought they were. He says in one sentence: “The main reason why he is not a Christian is that he simply does not know what religion is.” One might say that Mr. Wood is not an Agnostic because he does not know what Agnosticism is. After all, I had all the benefits of a Christian education, and he did not have the benefits of an Agnostic education; so that possibly the argument might be considered two-edged. Nevertheless, I commend the book to your attention, and you will then know why it is that I am not a Christian.
Chapter 13. The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery
Nature has made men so equal in their physical and mental capacities that, although sometimes we may find one man who is obviously stronger in body or quicker of mind than another, yet taking all in all the difference between one and another is not so great that one man can claim to have any advantage ·of strength or skill or the like· that can’t just as well be claimed by some others. As for Ÿstrength of body: the weakest man is strong enough to kill the strongest, either by a secret plot or by an alliance with others who are in the same danger that he is in.
As for the faculties of the mind: I find that men are even more equal in these than they are in bodily strength. (In this discussion I set aside skills based on words, and especially the skill – known as ‘science’ – of being guided by general and infallible rules. Very few people have this, and even they don’t have it with respect to many things. I am setting it aside because it isn’t a natural faculty that we are born with, nor is it something that we acquire – as we acquire prudence – while looking for something else.) Prudence is simply experience; and men will get an equal amount of that in an equal period of time spent on things that they equally apply themselves to. What may make such equality in credible is really just one’s vain sense of one’s own wisdom, which most men think they have more of than the common herd – that is, more than anyone else except for a few others whom they value because of their fame or because their agreement with them. It’s just a fact about human nature that however much a man may acknowledge many others to be more Ÿwitty, or more Ÿeloquent, or more Ÿlearned than he is, he won’t easily believe that many men are as Ÿwise as he is; for he sees his own wisdom close up, and other men’s at a distance. This, however, shows the equality of men rather than their inequality. For ordinarily there is no greater sign that something is equally distributed than that every man is contented with his share!
Distrust·: This equality of ability produces equality of hope for the attaining of our goals. So if any two men want a single thing which they can’t both enjoy, they become enemies; and each of them on the way to his goal (which is principally his own survival, though sometimes merely his delight) tries to destroy or subdue the other. And so it comes about that when someone has through farming and building come to possess a pleasant estate, if an invader would have nothing to fear but that one man’s individual power, there will probably be an invader – someone who comes with united forces to deprive him not only of the fruit of his labour but also of his life or liberty. And the ·successful· invader will then be in similar danger from someone else.
Nochrisis 