In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to a happy doing; or reply “Here” to a body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of human progress, these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesised, or even conceived as possible.
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.
I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.
If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith that it was nothing, just an empty form which attached itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature.
And then all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost it’s harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff on things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked with a frightening obscene nakedness.
What is a rebel? A man who says no – but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
When Heathcliff, in
Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.
The only truly serious philisophical problem is suicide.
What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood. Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.
Knowing where the trap is – that is the first step to evading it.
The Mind commands the Body and it obeys. The Mind orders itself and meets resistance.
The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk
When god hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place
Human’s live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place, and destroy the person.
One should never presume one is the sole object of a hunt
What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing……..maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged
They were still at the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be a plane where no other human relations mattered.
The truth is that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes in.
But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
Tender is the night
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded relations of men.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The precautionary principle suggests that even in the absence of complete information, we should be prepared to incur reasonable costs to avoid a significant chance of a disastrous outcome.
From a collective standpoint that takes everyone’s interests into account, it would be best if all countries with high levels of emissions made significant reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases the produce. But from the standpoint of an individual nation, this is not necessarily the best possible outcome, for the national costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions could outweigh the national benefits.
Ownership is not a natural relationship between a person and a thing. It is a social convention, and in societies with a legal system, it is defined by the law.
The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke argued that we gain a right to property by ‘mixing our labour’ with natural objects, as long as we leave ‘enough and as good’ for others.
The best justification of a right to private property is that we will all be better off if we recognise such a right. But if it is the common good that justifies the recognition of a right to private property, then the common good can set limits to that right.
Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital – including technology and organisational and government skills – rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences between the average incomes in rich and poor countries which cannot be explained by the differences in effort he suggests that social capital is responsible for at least 90 per cent of income in wealthy societies.
Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is that which is expected to have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions, now and in the future. Typically, utilitarians focus on consequences like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, or the satisfaction and frustration of preferences. They seek to maximise the net surplus of the good consequences, after subtracting the bad ones. Individual rights have, at most, a derivative role to play in utilitarian thinking.
From the standpoint of public reason, the fact of offence is the issue, not how well grounded the offence might be. Although John Stuart Mill and other defenders of freedom have argued that mere offence should not, in the absence of more specific harm, be a ground for infringing individual liberty. Once we grant that a risk of offence to some justifies restricting the liberty of others, we have introduced a sweeping argument for prohibiting any kind of behaviour, public or private. What offends people is not fixed. People can learn to be more tolerant, and that is a better solution than restricting the liberty of others.
Some will think that public reason is a quant relic of enlightenment ideas about reason and progress, properly rejected in the post-modern world in which we now live. They will say it is naïve to believe than anyone decides anything on the basis of reason, and will deny that there is any basis for privileging reason and argument above religious faith, or belief in which doctors, or oracles, or any other way in which people might reach decisions about what we do. But those who say this do not fully think out the alternatives. There are methods of reaching decisions that we use every day, and would not want to do without. We do not want police to go before courts saying that they need no evidence that the accused committed the crimes of which he is accused, because they have faith that he did, and faith needs no evidence to support it. We want physicians who have studied what does or does not help sick people – and if we consult alternative healers, we look for evidence that their therapies work. If we abandon the assumption that reason, evidence and argument can lead to better decisions, more innocent people will be jailed and more sick people will die. So those who want public justification to fit within the same broad framework are not imposing some narrow, sectional set of standards on the debate. They are seeking standards of argument that everyone uses all the time.
When we think ethically, we should do so from an impartial perspective, from which we recognise that our own wants and desires are no more significant that the wants and desire of anyone else. To base judgments about the rights and wrongs of an action on the impact it will have on the welfare of those affected by it is to base ethics on something that is real and tangible.
On Liberty, the finest defence of individual liberty against government interference in the English language, was written by the liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill. In opposition to conservatives who wanted to use the power of the state to stamp out prostitution, sodomy and suicide, Mill urged that the state should restrain individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. It was, in his view, wrong for the state to interfere with an individual ‘for the good of the individual’, whether physical or moral. For a century after the publication of On Liberty, conservatives in both Britain and the United States resisted Mill’s view, defending laws that restricted individual liberty in circumstances that could not be show to cause harm to others – for instance, laws that intruded into the bedrooms of consenting homosexuals, that made prostitution illegal, or that restricted the access of adults to sexually explicit films, books and magazines.
In Hobbesian world in which a dominant nation is liable to attack and overthrow weak governments that are not to its liking, the most sensible response for a government that fears it may be attacked is to obtain nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. Only then can it deter an attack by threatening to inflict intolerable losses on the dominant nation or its allies. Overwhelming military superiority is less significant when the militarily inferior nation possesses and is prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Bush’s tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and 16 June 2003. In these speeches he uses the word ‘evil’ as a noun fare more than he uses it as an adjective – 914 noun uses as against 182 adjective uses. Only twenty-four times, in all of these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do, that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.
Kant advocated a system in which the states would give u, to a world federation, a monopoly on the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner.
Through free competition in the marketplace, the self interested strivings of individuals contribute to the common good.
Thomas Hobbes, the 17th Century English philosopher who lived through the chaos of the English civil war and the Thirty Years War, built his political philosophy on a conception of security that has become dominant in modern society. In his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, Hobbes argued that humans unconstrained by laws would, through competition for wealth and pre-eminence, create a persistent state of insecurity that would ultimately prevent them from attaining either:
‘In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of earth; no navigation, for use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things that require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’
Hobbes’s conception established a total and binary opposition between peace, a state of physical and material security, allowing the pursuit of higher goals, and war, a pervasive, debilitating sense of foreboding of “every man, against every man”.
For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known for as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all time there is assurance to the contrary. “
In this conception, Hobbes was being faithful to the etymology of the word “war”, which derives from the old French “guerre”, meaning “confusion”, “discord” and “strife”. According to a long Western tradition, then, insecurity and security are mutually exclusive physical and material conditions that fundamentally determine the quality of human life. In Hobbes’s theory, “man is a creature civilised by the fear of death”. Hobbes’s entire system of civil society and the state are built form a single “purging emotion” – the fear of death. The Hobbesian conception of security builds an intimate dynamic between physical and material security, in which unconstrained acquisitiveness and competition lead to physical insecurity, and in which physical security is the essential precondition to humans’ bounded pursuit of physical and other achievements. This conception ahs informed our understanding of the human condition, and the widespread popularity of Abraham Maslow’s argument that only physiological necessities precede security in the hierarchy of human needs demonstrates that most people find this conception to be intuitively correct. The priority of physical and material security has informed domestic and international natural and positive law, providing a widely recognised basic right of self-defence that trumps most other rules, norms and considerations. According to this conception, war is only justified when it is required to re-establish conditions of physical and material security or forestall physical and material insecurity.
In every world government-state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned
Albert Einstein
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
Dressed like a brief authority - would never be more but was in constant danger of becoming less; and who had sold the birthright of a free man for an official title or a life pension.
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have the integrity not to fear death.
There is another, more fundamental danger, namely man's restriction of himself and constriction of his horizons to include only his work to which, so the Book says, he has been sentenced to after his expulsion from paradise. If he accepts work as his only obligation, and 'what works' as his only criterion of worthwhileness, he may become the conformist and thoughtless slave of his technology and of those who are in a position to exploit it.
A kind of adult who has betrayed youth and idealism, and has sought refuge in petty and servile kind of conservatism.
She will use little expressions and that will widen the abyss between us….She will say, "when I was a child" - or "when I am old" - or "never in all my life" - That stabs me, Mercury…. We miss something, Mercury - the poignancy of the transient - the intimation of mortality - that sweet sadness of grasping something you cannot hold.
Stalin gave me the impression of a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace.
Nikolai Sukhanov
No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it. Seneca
Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live authentically.
Responsibility avoiding defences:
Only after one takes suicide seriously does one take one's life seriously.
To know and not to act is not to know at all.
It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting – and so dangerous. So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognise as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object – if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world. Thus in regression from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego itself. In the opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide, the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.
Civilisation and It's Discontents
Love
At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact
Man the 'Prosthetic' God
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxillary organs he is truley magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.
“Never give up! People don’t understand how persistent you have to be. You come up against and obstacle and you have to find a way of moving forward. You can take detours, navigate between obstacles and make it happen. Unless you are strong and convinced you can succeed, you will get swept away.”
“There was huge value in the company, so the question was how to unlock it.”
“I drive myself and spare no effort. It is a sheer slog that allows for no laziness of the mind or body”
“A lot of pain is associated with success. In the pursuit of success, time is of no consequence and effort has no limits. In many ways, being successful in business is no different from being a successful sportsman. To there you need drive, discipline and determination. You also need to cope with the pain of maybe not succeeding.”
