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The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. It is certainly true that most ‘normal’ people, myself included, make very limited and uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous use of their intellectual and human potential. It is not just that we are irrational but that we lack scope and range, as
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This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education.
In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says that beauty ‘is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls’. You will, of course, have noticed the sensual sibilance of that phrase.
If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us (Chapter 6), how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think?
Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialized jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that comes to an end.
But even if we are not being radically deceived, it is not at all clear that we can have any knowledge of the world.
The search for meaning is deeply ingrained in human nature, so much so that, when pressed to define man, Plato replied simply, ‘a being in search of meaning.’ Memory is meaning, forgetting is death, and the job of the writer is not so much to teach as to remind.
Be creative. Bizarre or unusual experiences, facts, and associations are easier to remember. Because unfamiliar experiences stick in the mind, trips and holidays give the impression of ‘living’, and, by extension, of having lived for longer. Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.
Feyerabend was never one for mashing his words. ‘My life’ he wrote ‘has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind.’
Never in the history of humanity has the intuitive faculty been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.
Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.
Wise people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
If you learn to work with and never against your nature, things will get done as if by themselves.
Emotional tears (as opposed to reflexive tears such as those from chopping onions) serve a number of social functions such as emphasizing the depth and sincerity of our emotions, and attracting attention, sympathy, and support in times of danger, distress, or need. But they also serve an important psychological function, which is to tell us that a particular problem or situation actually means a lot to us, and that we need to make the time and effort to address or at least process it—opening out, in due course, on a healthier attitude or clearer perspective. As markers of strong emotion,
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Indeed, a single stray emotion or emotional experience can lay waste to the best plans of half a lifetime.
Music is the school and the hospital of the emotions.
In the Poetics, Aristotle compared the purifying or cleansing effects of tragedy on the mind of the spectator to the effect of a cathartic on the body, and called this purging of the emotions catharsis. In that much, tragedy is more comforting, because more real, more faithful, than comedy, which so often rings hollow.
Imagination is the highest form of thought, and almost divine in its reach.
The highest purpose of education is to unlearn what we once took for granted, to replace certainty with subtlety, prejudice with compassion, and destiny with possibility. If reason is slippery, knowledge is even more so. The oracle at Delphi called Socrates the wisest of all people because Socrates knew how little he knew. So instead of running around thinking that we know things, giving up our lives to those things and making trouble in the world, we would do better to sit down a bit, recognizing just how muddled we are and, if we are not in England, enjoying some sunshine at the same time.
What usually gets in the way of both reason and non-rational forms of cognition is not stupidity as such, or feeble-mindedness, but fear and the thing that fear protects, that is, our self-esteem, our sense of self, our ego. If we are to unleash our full cognitive and human potential, we need to love life more than we fear it, we need to suppress or destroy our ego, to commit metaphorical suicide—which will be the work of a life well spent.
