#philosophical library

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Christine Chaundler - Every Man's Book of Superstitions - A.R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd. and Philosophical Library Inc. - 1970 (illustrations by Margaret Francis)

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Edmund Bergler - Principles of Self-Damage - Philosophical Library - 1959

[alunah-lalunah]

A healthy sleep is worth more than an entire philosophical library.

It's true that narrative has weak authority over the organism. You can tell yourself a beautiful story about impermanence or non-self, and the moment pain, hunger, or threat appears, the story collapses. That’s not a failure of you, rather the hierarchy of the body. Signals tied to survival always outrank abstract interpretation.

Save your money because most “systems” sell upgraded narratives that won't work. Religion offers salvation stories, psychology offers identity stories, spirituality offers dissolution stories, nothing more. Different costumes, same mechanism of language trying to regulate something that is largely non-verbal.

And real life in form of rent, work, relationships, fatigue are not distractions from life, they are the conditions of life. Any method that only works in a quiet room but fails under pressure is not a general solution. There isn’t any total solution. Not because nothing can change, but because your organism is not centralized. It is layered. And each layer responds to different kinds of influence. If you try to change everything with one abstract or narrative tool such as narrative, meditation, insight, it will fail.

So strip the idea of “solution” down to something more exact. There are only three levers available, and none of them are total.

First, the body. Sleep, movement, physical regulation. Sleep works. It resets the system more reliably than philosophy. This is not trivial. A tired organism is more anxious, more rigid, more self-defensive. You don’t solve fear here, but you change its baseline intensity.

Second, attention. Not meditation as an ideology, but the simple fact that what you attend to shapes what dominates experience. Curiosity can temporarily outcompete self-focus. This is not enlightenment. It is resource allocation. Under pressure, it collapses but over time, it can slightly rebalance how often the “I under threat” takes center stage.

Third, understanding. Not as a story you repeat, but as something that becomes obvious in real time. For example, seeing that a reaction is happening does not stop it, but it can stop the immediate escalation into narrative (“this always happens,” “this defines me”). This is the weakest lever under stress, but it still matters at the margins.

None of these remove the structure, survival pressure will return, fear will return, self-focus will return. So there is no escape from the cycle. There is no not transformation of the whole system, but local reductions in unnecessary amplification is structurally possible.

[philosophicallibrary-blog]

Albert Einstein, Beyond Physics

By Mitchell Ritter

With the world buzzing about this month’s breakthrough in physics – the discovery of the Higgs boson particle – I was curious, and found myself looking back for a starting point that led to where we are now. I came across The World as I See It, a collection of Einstein’s diverse writings, and was intrigued. After all, can anyone today imagine the stature a man like Albert Einstein enjoyed during the first half of the twentieth century? There is no parallel. All physicist that he was, his specialty was gravity, and in our current era we who are not physicists are far more concerned with time – that most fleeting of entities. And he was concerned with how much of it we waste. 

I began to wonder what such a global celebrity, an individual who was the very definition of genius – then and still now – a man for whom no problem was insolvable – at least in the public’s imagination – thought beyond E = mc2. And so I decided to take a walk into a bygone era, almost more for nostalgia than for any thought of current enlightenment.

Much to my surprise I discovered a man of deeply held human values, firmly rooted in his spiritual tradition, without being a captive of it. For Einstein was a man of such vision – how else could he have imagined realms beyond the scope of what anyone else in history had contemplated – and dared a scientific explanation of the ineffable?

In this short collection, and with no small dose of humility, Einstein tackled issues of nationalism, the Nazi cultural and intellectual onslaught, God, religion and morality, pacifism, and the entire Middle East question. Though his solutions may now seem idealistic – almost naively so – his perspective and reasoning reveal a depth of understanding and most of all concern, that remain more than relevant today. Indeed, they illustrate how little has actually changed while providing a prescient warning of what might come if we continue to wade in the shallow waters of distraction rather than look into the depths of mankind’s complex and troubled psychology.

I recommend taking a walk into the world of Albert Einstein, where you may very well discover some surprising new perspectives on life as he saw it.

Find out more about Einstein’s world in this video.

[philosophicallibrary-blog]

Gather Your Thoughts @ a New Round Table

Welcome to friends and newcomers alike! As way of introduction, Philosophical Library is a book publishing company whose founder, Dr. Dagobert Runes, built its “books of lasting value” on the ideas, opinions and genius of some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Einstein, Sartre, Freud, Marx, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Gibran, Gide and others all found a home in that eclectic mix. His daughter, the present publisher, is breathing new life into many of those titles by bringing out revised digital editions that deserve to be considered anew to ensure that we don’t take for granted their impact on our society, and the world at large.

As a philosopher, author and publisher, Dr. Runes knew the importance of facilitating a dialogue among thoughtful people, and he provided an arena for argument, discourse and less fashionable viewpoints. In that tradition, The Philosophical eRound Table is meant to be an extension of that arena, giving writers and readers alike a platform for appreciation and commentary on these classic works and the ideas that have meant something vital to their lives. Classics are called classics for a reason, and we intend to bring these wonderful titles into the digital age with a new take on their timelessness.

How can words written a few generations ago have any relevance today? Albert Einstein, for instance, called himself a “militant pacifist” who regarded Gandhi as “the only truly great political figure of our age.” Would anyone considering the state of the world today have an opinion on that?

Now, the internet has leveled the playing field of personal opinion, and anyone with access and a point of view can tweet, blog or YouTube his or her way to self-expression—sometimes with viral (positive or negative) results. We think the internet is expansive enough to allow for measured commentary that goes beyond the popular penchant for fast and on the fly, and we welcome your contributions to the kind of dialogue we would like to facilitate.

So, as the Web Editor of The Philosophical eRound Table, I invite you to join us as we consider the writings of some of the most provocative, ground-breaking and ingenious minds of our times. They have shaped us, left their impression upon those who followed them, and can still weigh in on the concerns and questions that affect us the most.