Status Updates From Irrational Man: A Study in ...

"The notion of the immortality of the soul as an intellectual substance (and that that immortality might even be demonstrated rationally) had not dawned upon the mind of Biblical man. If he hoped at all to escape mortality it was on the basis of personal trust that his Creator might raise him once again from the dust."

Psalm 22, "I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly...
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels."

"The sinfulness that man experiences in the Bible--as in the Psalms or the Book of Job--cannot be confined to a supposed compartment of the individual's being that has to do with his moral acts. This sinfulness pervades the whole being of man: it is indeed man's being, insofar as his feebleness and finiteness as a creature he stands naked in the presence of God."

"Deep within Biblical man lurks a certain uneasiness, which is not found in the conceptions of man given to us by the great Greek philosophers. This uneasiness point toward another, and more central, region of human existence than the contrast between doing and knowing, morality and reason."

"The Hebrew is concerned with practice, the Greek with knowledge. Right conduct is the ultimate concern of the Hebrew, right thinking that of the Greek. Duty and strictness of conscience are the paramount things in life for the Hebrew; for the Greek, the spontaneous and luminous play of intelligence."

"This violent contrast is frightening, for it represents a dangerous lagging of man behind his own works; and in this lag lies the terror of the atomic bomb which hangs over us like impending night. Here surely the ordinary man begins to catch a fleeting glimpse of that Nothingness which both artist and philosopher have begun to take seriously. The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence."

"Man has greater power now than Prometheus or Icarus or any of those daring mythical heroes who were later to succumb to the disaster of pride. But if an observer from Mars were to turn his attention to the shape of man as revealed in our novels, plays, painting, and sculpture, he would find there a creature full of holes and gaps, faceless, riddled with doubts and negations, starkly finite."

"Our time, said Max Scheler, is the first in which man has become thoroughly and completely problematic to himself. Hence the themes that obsess both modern art and existential philosophy are the alienation and strangeness of man into his world; the contradictoriness, feebleness, and contingency of human existence; the central and overwhelming reality of time for man who has lost his anchorage in the eternal."

"Every age projects its own image of man into its art. The whole history of art confirms this proposition, indeed this history is itself but a succession of images of man."

"The mind of the West has always been hierarchical: the cosmos has been understood as a great chain of Being, from highest to lowest, which has at the same time operated as a scale of values, from lowest to highest."

"Real time, the time that makes up the dramatic substance of our life, is something deeper and more primordial than watches, clocks, and calendars.
Time is the dense medium in which Faulkner's characters move about as if dragging their feet through water: it's their substance or Being, as Heidegger would put it."

"He cannot escape time, he is in it, it is the time of his fate and his decision; and the watch has no hands to reassure him of that normal, calculable progression of minutes and hours in which our ordinary day-to-day life is passed. Time is no longer a reckonable sequence, then, for him, but an inexhaustible inescapable presence."

"What we do self-consciously call 'modern art,' after all, is nothing more nor less than the art of this time, our art; there is no other today."

"Mathematics is like a ship in mid-ocean that has sprung certain leaks (paradoxes); the leaks have been temporarily plugged, but our reason can never guten that the ship will not spring others."

"In practice, the fact that there is no rock bottom means that the mathematician can never prove the consistency of mathematics except by using means that are shakier than the system he is trying to prove consistent. Math thus cannot escape finally the uncertainty that attaches to any human enterprise."

"Godel has shown that math contains insoluble problems, and hence can never be formalized in any complete system. This means that mathematics can never be turned over to a giant computing machine; it will always be unfinished, and therefore mathematicians--the human beings who construct mathematics--will always be in business. The human element here rises above the machine: math is unfinished as is any human life."

"We know one thing at the coast of not knowing something else, and it is simply not the case that we can choose to know everything at once."

not with that attitude

"But the worst and final form of alienation, is man's alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can--usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten."

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"Man's feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants."

"But the most basic things are always learned with pain, since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevents us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, economic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded."

"The capitalist emerges from feudal society as the enterprising and calculating mind who must organize production rationally to show a favorable balance of profits over costs. Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth."