Philosophize This!

for whom to live is to be in every moment what they already are without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select

This average person is the new barbarian, a laggard behind the contemporary civilization, archaic and primitive in contrast with his problems which are grimly, relentlessly modern. This new barbarian is above all the professional man, more learned than ever before, but at the same time more uncultured, the engineer, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist

predominance over the world

terrorism of the laboratory

To what end is Nature?

To what end is Nature?

What does Nature mean?

The ancient precept of know thyself and the modern precept study nature become at last one maxim.

The stars in the night sky.

The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

Silence is a form of prayer to Kierkegaard.

only by unconditionally obeying does a human being come to understand that what the gospel says is so,

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

To quote Kierkegaard, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

we have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it. That instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways to escape from it.

we have to find a way to quote, connect to the world without eliminating our individuality.

modern man is still anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds or lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine. Well fed and well clothed yet not a free man, but an automaton.

There was only one meaning to life and that is the act of living it.

the mechanical encrusted upon the living

Now some people might laugh at that. But why, if we're accepting the premises from before? There wasn't any nervous energy being built up to set up a thwarting of someone's expectations. He was only saying something positive before the punchline.

In everything that is to excite a lively laugh, there must be something absurd, in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction. Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.

There's a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin titled The Hedgehog and the Fox.

The classic line from the essay is that the hedgehog sees one big thing while the fox sees many things.

The hedgehog, obviously representing the thinking of a typical monist, the fox representing the approach of a pluralist.

a mass society of laborers such as Marx had in mind when he spoke of quote socialized mankind consists of worldless specimens of the species mankind, whether they are household slaves driven into their predicament by the violence of others or free performing their functions willingly.

this worldlessness of the animal labyrinth to be sure is entirely different from the active flight from the publicity of the world, which we found inherent in the activity of good works. The animal labyrinth does not flee the world. But is ejected from it in so far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfillment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate.

the outcome is what is euphemistically called mass culture and it's deep rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness due on one side to the troubled balance between laboring and consumption and on the other to the persistent demands of the animal labyrinths to obtain a happiness, which can be achieved only where life's processes of exhaustion and regeneration of pain and release from pain strike a perfect balance.

I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life. I would receive no directives from anybody. No orders and commands would any longer be issued to me. No pertinent ordinances would be there to consult. In brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me.

this worldlessness of the animal labyrinth to be sure is entirely different from the active flight from the publicity of the world, which we found inherent in the activity of good works. The animal labyrinth does not flee the world. But is ejected from it in so far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfillment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate.

Plato seriously considers implementing something extremely similar to our modern scientific method, but he ultimately decides against it because he thought the end result would be that it would rob human beings of their identity and values.

The world is, as Lippman says, quote, too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, and so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it. End quote.

crystallize into what we call Public Opinion. End quote.

for a dollar you may not even get an armful of candy but for a dollar or less people expect reality slash representations of truth to fall into their laps, end quote.

every authoritarian scheme assumes that its value may be assessed by some prior principle if not of family and birth or race and color or possession of material wealth then by the position and rank the person occupies in the existing social scheme. The democratic faith and equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever. End quote.

If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of being, in other words, if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment this capability of being, then all becoming would long since have come to an end.

Think Plato's Republic, social engineering on a massive scale to the point of carving out and actually designing social classes, even grooming and designing the minds of all future leaders from the moment they're born.