434 Making intercession.– Unprepossessing landscapes exist for the great landscape painters, remarkable and rare ones for the petty. For the great things of nature and mankind have to intercede for all the petty, mediocre and ambitious among their admirers- but the great man intercedes for the simple things.
In the right circumstances
we can all feel vertigo
when looking up
I deciphered my handwritten notes from a notebook from 2004. It was all in Dutch but I translated it and took some of the rambling out, but maybe not enough. I leave that decision up to you.
Structuring society in such a way that every individual coming into the world, man or woman, is given nearly equal opportunities to develop their various abilities and thereby be able to utilize them in their work.
(uit L.J.C. Beaufort, Michael Bakounin, Majesteit, pag. 30)
Why would you worry about your fellow human? In my case, the lack of freedom for others takes away my own freedom. Everyone is increasingly looking alike, as if we no longer have a choice in shaping our own future.
That freedom seems vast because, apparently, no one tells you what to choose or forces you to do this or that. You can select which school to attend, where to work, how to live, and where to go on vacation. Most of the time, people also feel comfortable with those choices: ‘It’s all good, and I feel good.’ The measure of pleasure is whether you feel comfortable. Of course, it’s nice when people feel good; peace of mind is, after all, the ultimate goal of life, I think that is what they say.
But many people don’t feel good and, seemingly, have the same freedoms and opportunities but cannot use them. They can’t because they lack the necessary capacities and resources or, as in my case, they don’t want to function within a capitalist consumption society. A consumer society involves consumption, and unnecessary products must be made to be sold with the money of the people who produce them. I admit this is a bit of an oversimplification, but essentially, that’s the core idea. Now, this itself isn’t so bad, except that no status quo can exist. Growth must happen, and the industry that promotes this is enormous.
Let’s say someone needs a pair of shoes, free of any influence but with the memory of painful, dull feet. They want shoes that prevent that memory from getting worse. Their new shoes do their job, and when worn out, they buy new ones. I’m not suggesting you should only have one pair of shoes, but how much is enough? Most people find it strange if you have 30 pairs, but many do. They probably serve a great purpose for the consumer society, but at what cost? It’s very hard to think through and measure, but I see 30 pairs of shoes made from material that must be extracted from the ground, processed, and transported, all just for the madness of someone who thinks they need so many shoes to protect their feet.
423 In the great silence. – Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. The bells are noisily ringing the angelus – it is the time for that sad and foolish yet sweet noise, sounded at the crossroads of day and night, but it will last only for a minute! Now all is still! The sea lies there pale and glittering; it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening game with red and yellow and green, it cannot speak. The little cliffs and ribbons of rock that run down into the sea as if to find the place where it is most solitary, none of them can speak. This tremendous muteness which suddenly overcomes us is lovely and dreadful, the heart swells at it. – Oh the hypocrisy of this silent beauty! How well it could speak, and how evilly too, if it wished! Its ued tongue and its expression of sorrowing happiness is a deception: it wants to mock at your sympathy!- So be it! I am not ashamed of being mocked by such powers. But I pity you, nature, that you have to be silent, even though it is only your malice which ties your tongue; yes, I pity you on account of your malice!- Ah, it is growing yet more still, my heart swells again: it is startled by a new truth, it too cannot speak, it too mocks when the mouth calls something into this beauty, it too enjoys its sweet silent malice. I begin to hate speech, to hate even thinking; for do I not hear behind every word the laughter of error, of imagination, of the spirit of delusion? Must I not mock at my pity? Mock at my mockery?- 0 sea, 0 evening! You are evil instructors! You teach man to cease to be man! Shall he surrender to you? Shall he become as you now arc, pale, glittering, mute, tremendous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?
381 Knowing one’s ‘individuality’. – We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there – he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated.
385 The vain. – We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities others ascribe to us- in order to deceive ourselves.
390 Concealing mind. -When we catch someone concealing his mind from us we call him evil: and all the more so, indeed, if we suspect that he has done so out of politeness and philanthropy.
419 Party courage. – The poor sheep say to their shepherd: ‘go on ahead and we shall never lack the courage to follow you’. The poor shepherd, however, thinks to himself: ‘follow me and I shall never lack the courage to lead you’.
A youngling opens up,
to a world in riddles.
I admire Tolstoy, not because of his work, which I have never read, but because of what he stood for. I believe that when people say it is a fantastic read, I can see it after a few pages; I don’t have the time to read the rest. Too many books lie around that I have started reading or are waiting patiently for my attention. I have the idle hope that one day I will take the time. I found this quote online, well, not this quote, but something similar. The quotes you find online are not always correct, but after some digging, I found the source and read the chapter till I found it. Russians are a mysterious folk; I wish they still were, now they are as predictable as the rest.
“I have met him. But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You know, one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d’emblée in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days the free – thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free – thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free – thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Part 5, Chapter 9)
You can read the book here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1399
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.
George Christoph Lichtenberg, the Waste Books
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
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.
George Christoph Lichtenberg, the Waste Books
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
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…
George Christoph Lichtenberg, the Waste Books
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
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.
George Christoph Lichtenberg, the Waste Books
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
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.
George Christoph Lichtenberg, the Waste Books
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
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.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
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.
…
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.
Read the rest here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/177531554/Noam-Chomsky-On-Miseducation-pdf
Nochrisis 