More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 6, 2023 - July 13, 2024
If we look at Plato, or Aquinas, or Descartes, or Spinoza, or Hume, or Kant, what is striking is the wide reach of their thought – the extent to which it spans a great many of what we now think of as distinct specialities
Like spiritual exploration, philosophical exploration shows the fly the way out of the bottle. This is a form of enlightenment and is referred to (with deliberate paradoxical intent) as ‘beginner’s mind’ in the Zen tradition: the freshness of insight before intellectualising dimmed it. At the end of his career, Husserl admitted that ‘the first result of reflection is to bring us back into the presence of the world as we lived it before our reflection began (Lebenswelt)’.
Reality is rich and complex, and I have suggested that part of it is always hidden from us. This is not just my take: it was, in different ways what Bacon meant when he said that ‘the subtlety of Nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding’, what Heraclitus meant by saying that ‘Nature loves to hide’, what Einstein meant by ‘Nature hides her secrets’, and what Heidegger meant by ‘the clearing in which Being stands is itself at the same time concealment’.
‘The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization’, wrote Friedrich Hayek, may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be
...more
‘As soon as I have expressed something in a word’, wrote Erich Fromm, an alienation takes place, and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience actually exists only up to the moment when it is expressed in language. This general process of cerebration is more widespread and intense in modern culture than it probably was at any time before in history … words more and more take the place of experience.
To quote Nietzsche: Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by
...more
William James. ‘The intellectual life of man’, he wrote ‘consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.’
As Rabindranath Tagore put it, ‘the small wisdom is like water in a glass: clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable.’
The philosopher Bryan Magee writes that ‘whenever I see, all that language can do is to indicate with the utmost generality and in the broadest and crudest of terms what it is that I see’: Even something as simple and everyday as the sight of a towel dropped on to the bathroom floor is inaccessible to language – and inaccessible to it from many points of view at the same time: no words to describe the shape it has fallen into, no words to describe the degrees of shading in its colours, no words to describe the differentials of shadow in its folds, no words to describe its spatial relationships
...more
philosophy ought … to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.
‘How convenient it is’, he said, ‘to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to make or find a reason for whatever one has a mind to do.’127 Franklin,
Two of the greatest phenomenologists of schizophrenia, Eugène Minkowski and Wolfgang Blankenburg, suggested that schizophrenics attempt to compensate for a loss of intuition, of that vital, pre-reflective grasp of reality, by a sort of pseudo-philosophising, or ‘hyper-reflection’ on experience – essentially a disease of over-awareness, in which things that should run smoothly at the preconscious level are yanked into the focus of awareness, where life comes to a juddering halt.
I think of a famous, and touching, passage in Darwin’s Autobiography: I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately
...more
In the past I was afraid of stepping out of line too much and making a fool of myself. Now that I know how foolish we all are, I am happy to be just another human being.
Whitehead sets this in the context of normal psychology: It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions … showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how creatively to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to. But if we failed to apply it to our situation, a myth would remain abstract and incredible.
Mercier and Sperber’s view that logic was invented in order to win arguments, not to take us closer to the truth.
we need to bear in mind that there is more truth about the human predicament in King Lear than in any number of textbooks of genetics, irrespective of whether there was ever a King Lear at all.
We do not use metaphor to decorate, and therefore obscure, something best conveyed literally (although that would be how the left hemisphere sees it), but to bring to life a deeper and broader set of meanings than could be conveyed by literal language.
Describing how his father introduced him to astronomy as a child, Coleridge writes that he heard him speak of astounding matters far beyond everyday experience without the least ‘incredulity’, because he was already familiar with tales of the imagination:
You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? ‘If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.’ But once it stops, what do I know about pain?210 Lewis
Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply do not attempt to unite with reality. But now and then that symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some great emotion, some devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, lifts us to another level of consciousness…
The Dollar Cost Auction. A dollar is put up for auction, and goes to whoever bids the highest, in increments of 5 cents, however low that bid may be. But, according to the rules of this auction, the under-bidder pays the full amount of his bid and gets nothing in return. What happens is that once embarked on, it is impossible to exit a bidding war in which both parties lose.
As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded: ‘Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition?!’ ‘Of course not’, replied the scientist. ‘But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.’
In the real world, no-one reflecting that all Cretans are liars imagines an audience to understand that every single statement ever made by any Cretan was and is a lie.
Cantorian proofs can be constructed to show that two lines of any length – for example, an infinitely long line and one that was one millionth of an inch long – would both have the same number of points and that a line a millionth of an inch long has the same number of points as there are in the entire universe.
The gut and the psyche have close connexions. Anxiety, depression, and other disorders have characteristic expressions in gut behaviour – and the associations work both ways: diseases of the gut affect mind and mood. As well as containing 95% of the body’s serotonin, which also acts, as is well known, as a neurotransmitter in the brain, and is thought to be involved in affect regulation, the gut has some 200–600 million neurones, rather more than there are in the brain of a dog.15 And most of the neural traffic is from the gut to the brain, not the other way round. You can take it that they
...more
For example, it seems that trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors may have been passed on to their children.23 A genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, or witnessed or experienced torture, or who had had to hide during the Second World War, showed that they and their children exhibited epigenetic changes not found in children of Jewish families who were outside Europe during the War. The changes were in the region of a gene that is known to be involved in regulating stress; the children also had an increased likelihood of stress disorders.
Recently, the frequency of oscillation of electromagnetic fields has been found to make the difference between carcinogenic and cancer-inhibiting effects on organisms, and this is not a one-off finding, but consistent with a large and rapidly growing body of evidence: the mechanism is, however, uncertain.
The key point to remember is that what is capable of being retained in the centre of our field of awareness is very limited indeed, and when we use only what we see there to construct our view of reality we go wrong. Not just because of how little we can see there, but because even the little that we can see is necessarily distorted by the type of fixing, isolating, abstracting, distancing, devitalising attention brought to bear on it.
When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me. Berenson recalled that once, upon seeing a fake, he had felt an immediate discomfort in his stomach.78 We are back to the guts. Here we have more than one expert talking about feeling physically sick or feeling an immediately unpleasant sensation in the stomach on seeing something that was intuitively wrong with a work of art.
A patient called TN, who was cortically blind, exhibited what is called affective blindsight. He was able to react spontaneously to facial expressions, with an appropriate emotional response accompanied by activity in the right amygdala, even though he denied that he had seen anything – and indeed, in the conventional understanding of the word ‘see’, he had not.97 He was also able to walk down a corridor negotiating a range of awkward obstacles that had been placed in his path, some low to the ground, some higher – a bin, a tray, a tripod – and avoided every one of them. He had to squeeze up
...more
In many cases, however, prejudice and bias concur. Some degree of bias in favour of what you believe, is inevitable – otherwise you wouldn’t believe it, would you?
This is one reason why it is of the utmost importance that there be dissenting voices, since the presence of even one dissenting voice reduced conformity by 80%.
the correlations between stereotypes and criteria range from 0.4 to over 0.9, and average almost 0.8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria).36 Stereotypes of age,37 sex,38 and race39 have all been repeatedly shown to be remarkably reliable, and transferable across cultures.
Considerable evidence has accumulated that people usually (though not always) apply their stereotypes in a largely rational manner, relying heavily on stereotypes in the absence of clear individuating information, but relying heavily on relevant individuating information when it is available
A piece of research has just shown that confidence in your intuitions is only weakly predictive of whether they are good or not:
Ant colonies, for example, send out ‘scouts’ in search of a potential nest – say, a narrow crack in a rock. Such a scout has to estimate whether the area is big enough to house the colony. Not having a tape measure and a slide rule, it does this by using a heuristic. It runs around randomly, leaving pheromone trails of a certain length, then leaves. After a period, it returns, this time moving on a different random path. By noting the frequency with which it encounters the old trail, it can estimate the size of the cavity. The heuristic is remarkably accurate:
Dissanayake argues that those who belong to pre-modern cultures think in pictures, as well as using direct perception and sensory memory, patterns of smell, light and sound intuitively, in ways that we have lost.
One group got to see the task, then had a full night’s sleep, and returned the next day. The other group, after seeing what was involved in the task, got on with their normal daily routine, and came back after 12 hours. Of those who had worked out the rule, twice as many had slept.
‘Poetry, wrote Byron, ‘won’t come when called, – you may as well whistle for a wind … I have thought over most of my subjects for years before writing a line.’
Indeed Dickens’ own experience was similar: ‘some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don’t invent it – really do not – but see it, and write it down’.
To quote Richard Feynman: ‘Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.’
are inversely proportional. According to him, the salt–blood pressure hypothesis was invented by two French scientists in 1904 based on just six patients.
Delimitation is what makes something exist. Friction, for example, the very constraint on movement, is also what makes movement possible at all.
It was the painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s view that ‘the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind’.35 This was not an idle reflection. He returned to it with a vengeance in 1985: In 1953 I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind. But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is a line which does not exist in nature. And that line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization … The straight line is atheistic and immoral. The straight line is
...more
A review of the literature on radiation hormesis in 2019 concluded that ‘practically all immune parameters are beneficially influenced by all forms of low-dose radiations.’
It is right it should be so; Man was made for Joy & Woe … Joy & Woe are woven fine, A Clothing for the Soul divine; Under every grief & pine, Runs a joy with silken twine.
One of the best known poems in the Italian language is Leopardi’s ‘L’infinito’, in which he describes how a break of trees that partly obscures the view of an open landscape floods his mind with the sense of the infinite, and the stirring of the branches enhances the sense of stillness: Always dear to me has been this lonely hill, and this line of trees which, from so much of the furthest horizon, hides my view. Yet as I sit and gaze, in my thoughts I conjure up boundless spaces far beyond it, and superhuman silences, and deepest quiet – until my heart almost grows afraid. And as I hear the
...more
‘The only simplicity for which I would give a straw’, said the rather down-to-earth jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘is that which is on the other side of the complex – not that which never has divined it.’
