SorenAspiring

I'm just using Tumblr as a mildly entertaining means to record quotations I might want to keep track of, be it for my work or leisure.

[sorenaspiring]

Freud proceeds to specify what it is that is wrong with the stories his patients tell him. The difficulties are in the first instance formal shortcomings of narrative: the connections, “even the ostensible ones—are for the most part incoherent,” obscured and unclear; “and the sequence of different events is uncertain.” In short these narratives are disorganized and the patients are unable to tell a coherent story of their lives. What is more, he states, “the patients’ inability to give an ordered history of their life in so far as it coincides with the history of their illness is not merely characteristic of the neurosis. It also possesses great theoretical significance.” What we are led at this juncture to conclude is that Freud is implying that a coherent story is in some manner connected with mental health (at the very least with the absence of hysteria), and this in turn implies assumptions of the broadest and deepest kind about both the nature of coherence and the form and structure of human life. On this reading, human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything (or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.

Stephen Marcus - “Freud & Dora”

Salvador Dali’s portrait of Freud

[sorenaspiring]

Lemonade: a "conceptual project based on every woman's journey of self-knowledge and healing,"

--From Tidal's press release That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged.  In all the conflicts between philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed and immovable center, of all thought...  Self-knowledge... is the first prerequisite of self-realization.  We must try to break the chain connecting us with the outer world in order to enjoy our true freedom. "La plus grande chose du monde c'est de scavoir etre a soy,' writes Montaigne. Cassirer, An Essay on Man

[sorenaspiring]

There are too many who, understanding nothing of literature or art, degrade their pure radiance into personal inflammation.

F. H. Bradley, “On the Treatment of Sexual Detail in Literature”

Manet, Olympia

[sorenaspiring]

[Thomas Merton] also implies that if our fundamental human problem is ‘Prometheanism’, wanting to steal divinity from God rather than labouring at being human, then good writing, with its inbuilt ironies and its awareness of its own conditions, is one of the things that stops us imagining we are more than human.

From Rowan Williams’ 2015 Orwell Lecture

[sorenaspiring]

True concern for the welfare of others is something hardly won, easily lost and replaced by a destructive self-indulgence, which finds in the supposed predicament of those others and in one's own role in seeking to relieve it rich material for fantasy, interposing between oneself and others also and the reality of the human situation an impenetrable barrier.

D. M. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, 89

Unfortunately, photographer unknown

[sorenaspiring]

So what answer may we give such a question as whether "ought" can be derived from "is"? One answer is: No. You cannot go from "is" to "ought" any more than you can go from France to Paris. There is no distance (of that kind) between them. Another answer is: Yes. You can derive "ought" from "is" the way you can derive pleasure from playing the piano. But only on condition that you actually play the piano and actually do find pleasure in playing. 

Stanley Cavell, Claim of Reason, 323

Photo of Melody Gardot

[sorenaspiring]

Ah my deare angrie Lord, Since thou dost love, yet strike; Cast down, yet help afford; Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve: And all my sowre-sweet dayes I will lament, and love.

George Herbert, Bitter-sweet

Photo of Detroit ruins by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

[sorenaspiring]

Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it.  The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice.... Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.

Roger Scruton, Beauty, 193

Jeff Koons

[sorenaspiring]

Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.

Thoreau, Walden

(Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)

[sorenaspiring]

If we did not already know that joy in seeing must be counted among the most elemental, irrepressible, coveted joys of mankind, we could deduce it from the everyday phenomenon of 'concupiscence of the eyes,' the hypertrophy of visual curiosity, the morbidity of the contemporary craving to see.  We can deduce it from the extent of this degeneration which, it seems, is imperiling specifically our most elemental and precious powers.... This, incidentally, may suggest that the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 102

[Written long before Tublr... the app embodiment of concupiscence of the eyes.]

[sorenaspiring]

So there, if we can find our way to it, is the remedy.  It is a remedy that cannot be achieved through art alone. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: ‘you must change your life’.  Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it.  The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.

To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair.  It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only—or even at all—in the present.  They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.  The art, literature and music of our civilization remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.  And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.

Roger Scruton, Beauty

[sorenaspiring]

“...being human requires knowing what it is to be human, and that requires the intimate recognition of other human beings.  This is certainly not a new idea, and it has never been put more clearly than by a man of the theater:

I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.”

Ted Cohen quoting Arthur Miller in Thinking of Others

Stage set sketch for Death of a Salesman, unknown artist

[sorenaspiring]

Indeed there are forms of intelligence that seem to work against interpersonal understanding.  There is a kind of intelligence especially likely to be found in universities, in my experience, very ready to assign stupidity or some other disability to those who are different.   Both inside and outside the academy is to be found a kind of pseudo-intelligence in the form of one of those ideologies that includes, built-in, an explanation of those one does not understand.   This explanation, in fact, is either a pretense to understand or a refusal to admit that there is anything to be understood.  In possession of one of these "systems of thought," one says of one's opponent, "He is repressing," "He is trapped in his ideology," "His class consciousness blinds him," "He is an infidel," "He is possessed," "He is hysterical."  These "analyses" or "diagnoses" are, typically, nothing more than the speaker's oblique confession of his own ignorance about the person he presumes to be explaining.

Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others

Photo by Carl Purcell

[sorenaspiring]

The ultimate object of the human will and the process itself of becoming, by which we approach yet never quite reach this goal with the infinitely variable steps in countless apparent or true detours of our personal time frame: neither this object nor this process can ever be adequately described in words, neither the destination nor the journey.  St. Augustine declares […] that man is unable to put into words the central and full meaning of the concept of the good, its complete realization: “We cannot say and yet cannot be silent either… What are we to do, employing neither speech nor silence?  We ought to rejoice! Jubilate! Shout out your heart’s delight in wordless jubilation!”  Such “wordless jubilation” (at least one of its manifestations) is known as music!

Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings

Kandinsky, Improvisation 28

[sorenaspiring]

Beauty is an option for art and not a necessary condition.  But it is not an option for life.  It is a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it.

Arthur C. Danto, closing lines of Abuse of Beauty

Monet- Sunrise

[sorenaspiring]

It is not without significance that the old myth makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is warlike.  Even in her birth she has to maintain a hard struggle with the senses, which do not want to be dragged from their sweet repose.

Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Botticelli, detail from Athena and the Centaur

[sorenaspiring]

A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense.  It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it?  And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility. ...Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too..."

Elder Zosima to Fyodor Pavlovich in The Brothers Karamazov