Chaos of human experience

"Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel , a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience. ”"

Chaos of human experience

"Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel , a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience. ”"

Evolutionary computing

"In 1995, for instance, the engineer John Koza used evolutionary computing to design a low-pass filter, a device that can cut off sounds above a certain frequency. Koza chose 2, 000 cycles a second as his cut off. After 10 generations, his computer produced a circuit that muffled frequencies above about 500 cycles and only completely extinguished them above about 10, 000. After 49 generations, it had created a circuit that produced a sharp drop-off at 2, 000 cycles. Natural selection had created a design for a seven-rung ladder made out of inductors and capacitors. The same design had been invented in 1917 by George Campbell of AT&T. The computer, without any direction from Koza, had infringed on a patent ."

Genetics of racism

"Out of 25, 000 or so genes in the human genome, an estimated 6, 000 genes exist as different versions (known as alleles). The distinctions that we conventionally use to divide the species into races – skin color, hair, and the shape of faces – are controlled by only a few genes. The vast majority of variable genes do not respect so-called racial boundaries. There is far more variability within any given population of humans than between populations. If all the humans on Earth were wiped out except a single tribe in a remote New Guinea valley, the survivors would still preserve 85 percent of the genetic variability of our entire species."

The greatest deception

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions"

- Leonardo da Vinci

The old boy beamed up on me

"I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of the speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his . To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep , but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up , open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me! Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source of heat was discovered . That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold ! the old boy beamed up on me."

~ Ernest Rutherford

I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape

“If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. ”

~ Huxley

I have done my best to sweep away this vanity

“It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity up on his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. ”

~ Huxley

From so simple a beginning

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that , whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ”

~ Charles Darwin

Light will be thrown on the origin of man

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. ”

~ Charles Darwin

Evolution of eye

"Likewise, there was no need for an eye to pop out of an animal’s head all at once. Invertebrates such as flatworms have nothing more than nerves with endings coated in light-sensitive pigments. Some crustaceans have eyes that consist of little more than a layer of pigment coated by a membrane. Over time, this membrane could separate from the pigment and begin to act like a crude lens. With small alterations, such an eye could turn into the precise telescopes that birds and mammals use. Because a little eyesight is better than none at all , each new step along the way would be rewarded by natural selection."

Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book

"Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book , written by a man who had quietly listened for years to other scientists scoff at evolution, and had imagined them scoffing at him as well . He addressed their objections one by one. If old species gradually turned into new species, then why were animals so distinct from one another? Darwin’s answer was that competition between two similar species would tend to drive one of them extinct , so that the animals alive today would be only a scattered selection of all the species that had ever lived.

But shouldn’t we be able to see these intermediate forms as fossils? Darwin reminded his readers that fossils, by their nature, could provide only a few fragments of life’s history. In order to become a fossil , a carcass had to be properly buried in sediment , turned to rock , and then avoid destruction by volcanoes or earthquakes or erosion. Those chances are abysmally low, and so a species, which once included millions of individual animals, might be known from a single fossil . Gaps in the fossil record shouldn’t be a surprise – they should be the rule. “The crust of the earth is a vast museum, ” Darwin wrote, “but the natural collections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote. ”"

It is like confessing a murder

"I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galápagos organisms , etc., that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact which could bear any way on what are species . I have read heaps of agricultural and horticultural books , and have never ceased collecting facts . At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced ( quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not ( it is like confessing a murder ) immutable… I think I have found out ( here’s presumption !) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends . You will groan , and think to yourself, “on what a man have I been wasting my time and writing to .” I should , five years ago , have thought so ."

~ Charles Darwin – letter to  Joseph  Hooker

Intellectuality is the only aim in the world

“It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing – the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful…. Who with the face of the earth covered with the most beautiful savannas & forests dare say that intellectuality is the only aim in the world?”

~ Charles Darwin

One second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity

“A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created. ”
~ Charles Darwin

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

"Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves ;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass ,
Move on the mud , or pierce the watery mass ;
Then as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume."

~ Erasmus Darwin - The Temple of Nature

Darwinian “cold bath”

"By taking the Darwinian “cold bath, ” and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages – that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose. In principle, the factual state of the universe, whatever it may be, cannot teach us how we should live or what our lives should mean – for these ethical questions of value and meaning belong to such different realms of human life as religion, philosophy, and humanistic study. Nature’s facts can help us to realize a goal once we have made our ethical decisions on other grounds – as the trivial genetic differences among human groups, for example, can help us to understand human unity once we have agreed on the unalienable rights of all people to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Facts are just facts, in all their fascination, their pristine beauty, and, sometimes, their unfortunate necessity (bodily decline and mortality, as the obvious example), and ethical rectitude, or spiritual meaning, reside within other domains of human inquiry."

Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true

A famous legend (perhaps even true) from the early days of Darwinism provides a good organizing theme for understanding the centrality and importance of evolution both in science and for human life in general . A prominent English lady, the wife of a lord or a bishop (yes, they may marry in the Church of England), exclaimed to her husband when she grasped the scary novelty of evolution: “Oh my dear, let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known!”

Evolution of language

"Natural selection has also shaped some human genes that appear to control particular kinds of thought . Take language. Our capacity to learn a language shows some signs of being a hard-wired instinct . That suggested that genes shaped language, and yet at the time scientists didn’t know of a single language-linked gene. Now they have one. It was discovered in a family in London who suffered a hereditary difficulty with both speech and grammar. In 2002 British scientists announced that the family members who had language problems all carried a mutant form of a gene they called FOXP2. Brain scans later revealed that people who carry mutant forms of FOXP2 have less activity in a language-related region of their brain called Broca’s area.

Scientists then compared human FOXP2 to the version carried by other mammals. Obviously, FOXP2 does not produce a capacity for language in other species. But in a 2005 experiment with mice, scientists showed that it influences animal communication. Mouse pups with only one working copy made far fewer cries to their mother. Those without any working copies made no cries at all .

A comparison of silent and non-silent substitutions revealed that FOXP2 has undergone intense natural selection in humans. Scientists were even able to estimate when that natural selection took place: less than two hundred thousand years ago. That just so happens to be around the time our species first emerged. These results hint that full blown language was a late-arriving skill and has only evolved relatively recently in the hominid lineage."

Broken genes

"Some of the most striking examples of these broken genes come from our noses. All mammals carry several hundred genes for producing receptors on nerve endings in the nose. These genes evolved through accidental duplications. When a single gene became two, both genes at first encoded the same receptor. But then a mutation struck one of them, changing the receptor’s ability to catch odors. If the receptor did a worse job with the mutation, natural selection tended to delete the gene. But in some cases the mutation caused the receptor to catch a new odor molecule, expanding the smells the mammal could detect . Over millions of years, this process gave rise to a huge family of odor receptor genes.
 
In mice, dogs, and other mammals that depend heavily on their sense of smell , almost all the copies of these genes work properly. But in chimpanzees and humans, the majority of odor receptor genes are defective. They can’t make a receptor at all . Scientists generally agree that these mutant genes must have accumulated in our genomes because ancient apes were evolving to rely less on their noses and more on their eyes. As a result , chimpanzees and humans share a strange legacy of our common ancestry: broken genes."

All external government is tyranny'

'If the individual has a right to govern himself , all external government is tyranny'
~ Benjamin Tucker

Freedom for everybody and in everything

'Freedom for everybody and in everything, with the only limit of the equal freedom for others'.
~ Malatesta

Aspiration towards unlimited freedom

'That aspiration towards unlimited freedom, if not tempered by a love for mankind and by the desire that all should enjoy equal freedom, may well create rebels who, if they are strong enough, soon become exploiters and tyrants, but never anarchists.'
~ Malatesta

To do "what one wants"

'Right to act according to one's own agreement, to do "what one wants" while associating one's will to those of other men in all collective works'

~ Elisee Reclus

Not free man

‘The  man  who  does  not  do what  he wants,  only  what pleases  him  and  which  suits  him,  is  not  free.'

~ Faure

Anarchist freedom

 

"On the contrary, anarchists believe that genuine freedom can only be achieved in a society without the State. They therefore embrace the traditional socialist freedoms such as freedom from want and insecurity as well as the liberal freedoms of expression, thought, assembly and movement. When they talk about economic freedom, they mean both the liberal sense of freedom from the economic controls of the State and the socialist sense of freedom from economic hardship. The alleged 'freedom' of the few on the other hand to exploit and to command is not a desirable form of freedom since it leads to oppression. They are thus the most coherent and consistent advocates of freedom."

Equally free men

'Man is truly free only among  equally free men. '

~ Bakunin

Man seeks freedom

'Man  seeks  freedom  as  the  magnet  seeks  the pole  or water its  level,  and  society  can  have  no  peace  until  every  member is  really  free.'

~  Josiah  Warren

Anarchist doctrine

'The anarchist doctrine may be resumed in one word: liberty'

~ Sebastien  Faure

I am interested in science and in philosophy

 

“For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from narrow specialization and from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill, and in his personal knowledge and authority; a faith that so well fits our 'post-rationalist' and 'post-critical' age, proudly dedicated to the destruction of the tradition of rational philosophy, and of rational thought itself.”
Karl Popper, 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery'.

Better to debate a question without settling it

“It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”

~ Joseph Joubert

You look at science as some sort of demoralizing invention of man

 

“You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.” - Rosalind Franklin

Leave my country

Nationalist to anarchist: Why don’t you just leave this country and go elsewhere? You don’t believe or respect its very foundations. We certainly won’t miss the traitors of this land, the like of you.

Anarchist: For a person, belonging to a specie who hopes to live for 70 or 80 years at the most, this is mighty claim you lay to a piece of land, belonging to no one. How long have humans been here, on this planet? And since when did they get the right to carve up this planet into pieces for themselves, setting up their own laws, fighting and killing people living on other pieces of lands? By what right does any thing on this planet “belong” to you or anyone, you, we, who start life here, born with life counters counting down every second. By what right you claim to own a piece, you call your property, individually, or your country, your nation, collectively. What does it even mean to “own” a piece of the planet earth, in your name, that you then pass on to your families? To own a piece of cosmos, by what right do you even claim to such inheritance, we whose very existence is constructed from borrowed materials from this very planet, this immensity, this universe.

And you call me a traitor, because I don’t agree to your hate against other people, other humans, members of my own specie. And yet I am the one who is a traitor? You carry guns and weapons and organize yourselves into bodies of mass murderers, your armed forces, and you wage wars against your own kind and I am the one who is the traitor, one who see no Americans or Indians or Iranians but members of my own specie. And for this loyalty to my fellow humans you declare that I am not fit to live in your land? Really, truly, honestly? I ask you to help me abolish all instruments of divisions and oppression, the state, the nations, the borders, the mighty war machines, and for that I get to wear the label, traitor? Why my dear fellow human, why should it be so and where am I to go, to some other planet, or would you rather take my life for thinking of peace and freedom and love and respect for this planet and its entire living species. Tell me why?

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing

When Levin thought about what he was and what he lived for, he found no answer and fell into despair; but when he stopped asking himself about it, he seemed to know what he was and what he lived for, because he acted and lived firmly and definitely. . . .
Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.
So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Feeling of intention from unconscious thoughts

"A sense of having pondered a question must be present in consciousness in close proximity to an answer in order for us to feel a clear cause-and-effect relationship. But we are intending to do a wide variety of things at any given instant. We are planning tonight's dinner, next week's lecture, a trip to the mountains, when to pay our taxes, get our shoes resoled, and when to turn on the TiVo. Having myriad dissimilar intentions simultaneously present in consciousness would create a chaotic and confused mind; attention would be scattered among all the questions being entertained. Not having all intentions simultaneously front and center in awareness creates the illusion that some thoughts aren't intentional, but simply "occur to us." It would appear that evolution has chosen the uncluttered mind at the expense of stripping the feeling of intention from unconscious thoughts."

Awareness that we are thinking is a sensation

"Just as we sense where our mind "is," we must be informed as to what it is doing. Awareness that we are thinking is a sensation that happens to us; it is not a thought that we can consciously will. We feel that we are thinking in the same way that we feel bodily activity. Those thoughts that don't reach awareness aren't felt as being actively thought. Which leads us to the larger question of the role of mental sensory systems in differentiating conscious from unconscious thoughts."

To banish imperfection

“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”

~John Ruskin

Out there or in here?

"To know what our minds are doing, we need some sensory system that can monitor our mental activities. Though my discussion has centered on the feeling of knowing, it is clear that there are also mental systems for monitoring self-perception. Perhaps the most universal, persistent, and unchallenged sensation is how your "self" feels as though it is located somewhere behind your eyes, somewhere inside your head, or at least somewhere within your body. It makes evolutionary sense that we don't normally feel ourselves "out there" in the cosmos or three blocks away in a saloon. Without a localized presence, you would be constantly "looking for yourself" without any guidelines for where "you" might be. If the sense of self is to have value in developing personal and social behavior, or even where to sit on the bus, we must know where "we" stand in relationship to others. Ideally, the brain would develop a global positioning system for the self."

Disembodied thought is not a physiological option

"Disembodied thought is not a physiological option. Neither is a purely rational mind free from bodily and mental sensations and perceptions."

Reason is not disembodied

Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experi­ences... . The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual sys­tems and modes of reason. To understand reason, we must under­stand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. Reason is not a transcen­dent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the re­markable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.
~ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

Thought cannot exist with­out sensation

"Thought cannot exist with­out sensation—both sensations from the outside world as perceived by the body and internal mental states."

Madness is rare in individuals

"Madness is rare in individuals―but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

―Friedrich Nietzsche

Metaphysical dilemma of how to reach a conclusion

"As an isolated system, thought is doomed to the perpetual "yes, but," that arises out of not being able to know what you don't know.Without a circuit breaker,indecision and inaction would rule the day. What is needed is a mental switch that stops infinite ruminations and calms our fears of missing an unknown superior alternative. Such a switch can't be a thought or we would be back at the same problem. The simplest solution would be a sensation that feels like a thought but isn't subject to thought's perpetual self-questioning. The constellation of mental states that consti­tutes the feeling of knowing is a marvelous adaptation that solves a very real metaphysical dilemma of how to reach a conclusion."

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations—always darker, emptier, simpler than these .
—Friedrich Nietzsche

To expect that we can get others to think as we do…

"Complete and full agreement is not synonymous with identical thought processes. Even when we fully agree on an idea,this agreement arises out of different ways of thinking, involving utterly unique genetics and personal experience. To expect that we can get others to think as we do is to believe that we can overcome innate differences that make each of our thought processes as unique as our fingerprints."

The wind is cold to him who is cold

“Things are to you such as they appear to you, and to me such as they appear to me.… The wind is cold to him who is cold, and not to him who is not.”
~ Protagoras

Evidence doesn’t usually logically entail that for which it is evidence

"But evidence doesn’t usually logically entail that for which it is evidence. Normally, a given piece of evidence merely provides grounds, perhaps very good grounds, for supposing the belief in question is true. Notice that you might possess excellent evidence for believing something, yet still be mistaken. A piece of evidence does not normally provide us with a logical guarantee that our belief is true."

A free press can, of course, be good or bad

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

~ Albert Camus

But we are also individual beings

"We are by nature, for example, sociable animals, who must co-operate or die; but we are also individual beings who seek our own fulfilment. To be individuated is an activity of our species being, not a condition at odds with it. We could not achieve it, for example, were it not for language, which belongs to me only because it belongs to the species first."

Love is a taxing, dispiriting affair

"Love is a taxing, dispiriting affair, shot through with struggle and frustration, far removed from some beaming, bovine contentment."

Problems of life have still not been touched at all

‘We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, then problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem’
~ Wittgenstein - Tractatus

Wealth is an end in itself

"As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is that it compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact purely utilitarian. The means of life become the end. Life consists in laying the material infrastructure for living. It is astonishing that in the twenty-first century, the material organization of life should bulk as large as it did in the Stone Age. The capital which might be devoted to releasing men and women, at least to some moderate degree, from the exigencies of labour is dedicated instead to the task of amassing more capital."

To sacrifice her happiness to her happiness

"If the meaning of life lies in the common goal of human beings, then there seems no doubt about what this is. What everyone strives for is happiness. ‘Happiness’, to be sure, is a feeble, holiday-camp sort of word, evocative of manic grins and cavorting about in a multicoloured jacket. But as Aristotle recognizes in his Nicomachean Ethics, it operates as a kind of baseline in human life, in the sense that you cannot reasonably ask why we should seek to be happy. It is not a means to something else, as money or power generally are. It is more like wanting to be respected. Desiring it just seems to be part of our nature. Here, then, is a foundational term of sorts. The problem is that it is so desperately indeterminate. The idea of happiness seems both vital and vacuous. What counts as happiness? What if you find it in terrorizing old ladies? Someone who is determined to become an actor may spend fruitless hours auditioning while living on a pittance. For much of the time she is anxious, dispirited, and mildly hungry. She is not what we would usually call happy. Her life is not pleasant or enjoyable. Yet she is, so to speak, prepared to sacrifice her happiness to her happiness."

The idea that I can determine the meaning of my own life is an illusion

"Nor can it be a question of creation ex nihilo. Human beings are self-determining – but only on the basis of a deeper dependency upon Nature, the world, and each other. And whatever meaning I may forge for my own life is constrained from the inside by this dependency. We cannot start from scratch. It is not a matter of clearing away [externally]-given meanings in order to hammer out our own, as Nietzsche seemed to imagine. For we are already plunged deep in the midst of meaning, wherever it is we happen to find ourselves. We are woven through by the meanings of others – meanings which we never got to choose, yet which provide the matrix within which we come to make sense of ourselves and the world. In this sense, if not in every sense, the idea that I can determine the meaning of my own life is an illusion."

What he himself has imported into them

‘Ultimately man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them.’
~ Nietzsche

To remain a prisoner of the illusion

"To claim gloomily that existence is bereft of meaning is to remain a prisoner of the illusion that it might have meaning. But what if life is just not the kind of thing which can be spoken of in either of these terms? If meaning is something people do, how can we expect the world to be meaningful or meaningless in itself ? And why then should we bewail the fact that it does not present itself to us as bursting with significance?"

Uncreated, without reason for being

‘Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is superfluous for all eternity.’
~ Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness

What’s the meaning of that?

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?
TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

~ Anton Chekhov - Three Sisters

What does it attain by this course of life

"To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it … what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course."

~ Schopenhauer

If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life

 

‘If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feel like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has now been discovered seems fortuitous in relation to how things were then.’
~ Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

We possess art lest we perish of the truth

 

‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

A question about a question

"One is reminded of the American poet Gertrude Stein, who was rumoured on her deathbed to have asked over and over again ‘What is the answer?’, before finally murmuring ‘But what is the question?’ A question about a question posed while hovering on the brink of nothingness seems a suitable symbol of the modern condition."

Life’s but a walking shadow

 

… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Meaning cannot just be whatever I decide

"Meaning cannot just be whatever I decide. If life does have a meaning, then that is its meaning for you, me, and everyone else, whatever meaning we might think it has or would like it to have. Anyway, it may be that life has a number of meanings. Why should we imagine that it has only one? Just as we can assign it many different meanings, so it may have a variety of innate meanings, if it has innate meanings at all. Perhaps there are several different purposes at work in it, some of them mutually contradictory. Or perhaps life changes its purpose from time to time, just as we do. We should not suppose that the given or innate must always be fixed and singular. What if life does indeed have a purpose, but one completely at odds with our own projects? It may be that life has a meaning, but that the vast majority of men and women who have ever lived have been mistaken about what it is. If religion is false, then this is in fact the case."

The Meaning of Life was now a lucrative industry

"The sham swamis and phoney sages of our time stand in for various more conventional gods who have failed. Philosophers, for example, seem to have been reduced to no more than white-coated technicians of language. It is true that the idea of the philosopher as a guide to the meaning of life is a popular misconception. Even so, one might expect them to do rather more than attempt to dissuade people from leaping out of windows by pointing out that the grammar of ‘nothing matters’ differs from that of ‘nothing chatters’. At the same time, theology had been discredited by creeping secularization, as well as by the crimes and follies of the churches. A positivist sociology and behaviourist psychology, along with a visionless political science, completed the betrayal of the intelligentsia. The more the humanities were harnessed to the needs of the economy, the more they abandoned the business of investigating fundamental questions; so the more the Tarot touts, pyramid pushers, avatars of Atlantis, and detoxicators of the soul rushed to fill their place. The Meaning of Life was now a lucrative industry. Books with titles like Metaphysics for Merchant Bankers were eagerly devoured. Men and women who were disenchanted with a world obsessed with making money turned to the purveyors of spiritual truth, who made a lot of money out of purveying it."

Opium of the people

"In our own time, one of the most popular, influential branches of the culture industry is unquestionably sport. If you were to ask what provides some meaning in life nowadays for a great many people, especially men, you could do worse than reply ‘Football’. Not many of them, perhaps, would be willing to admit as much; but sport, and in Britain football in particular, stands in for all those noble causes – religious faith, national sovereignty, personal honour, ethnic identity – for which, over the centuries, people have been prepared to go to their deaths. Sport involves tribal loyalties and rivalries, symbolic rituals, fabulous legends, iconic heroes, epic battles, aesthetic beauty, physical fulfillment, intellectual satisfaction, sublime spectaculars, and a profound sense of belonging. It also provides the human solidarity and physical immediacy which television does not. Without these values, a good many lives would no doubt be pretty empty. It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people."

The steady haemorrhaging of public meaning

"Meanwhile, the more religion loomed up as an alternative to the steady haemorrhaging of public meaning, the more it was driven into various ugly forms of fundamentalism. Or if not that, then into New Ageist claptrap. Spirituality, in short, became either rock-hard or soggy. The meaning-of-life question was now in the hands of the gurus and spiritual masseurs, the technologists of piped contentment, and chiropractors of the psyche. With the correct techniques, you could now be guaranteed to shed the flab of meaninglessness in as little as a month. Celebrities whose minds had been addled by adulation turned to Kabbala and Scientology. They were inspired in this by the banal misconception that spirituality must surely be something outlandish and esoteric, rather than practical and material. After all, it was the material, in the shape of private jets and hordes of minders, that they were trying (mentally, at least) to escape from."

How to keep people harmlessly distracted

"Culture [is] largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they [are] not working."

Knowledge is an aid to happiness

"It is not true, in other words, that you’re only happy if you don’t know it. For this naively Romantic view, self-reflection is always fatally stymieing. It is what one might call the high-wire-act-across-an-abyss theory of life: think about it and you instantly come a cropper. But knowing how things stand with you is a necessary condition for knowing whether to try and change them or to keep them more or less as they are. Knowledge is an aid to happiness rather than its antagonist."

State is an anti-social institution

 

"The State is not, as [some] would have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social way. It is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service."

- Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State

Human existence is contingent

"What marks modernist thought from one end to another is the belief that human existence is contingent– that it has no ground, goal, direction, or necessity, and that our species might quite easily never have emerged on the planet. This possibility then hollows out our actual presence, casting across it the perpetual shadow of loss and death. Even in our most ecstatic moments, we are dimly aware that the ground is marshy underfoot – that there is no unimpeachable foundation to what we are and what we do. This may make our finest moments even more precious, or it may serve to drastically devalue them."

A ‘useless passion’

"But they do not give the appearance of being troubled by what has been called ‘ontological anxiety’: namely, the feeling (sometimes accompanied by a particularly intense hangover) that one is a pointless, superfluous being – a ‘useless passion’, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it"

Just another way of distracting ourselves

"In portraying a world in urgent need of redemption, it [tragedy] intimates at the same moment that the very thought of redemption may well be just another way of distracting ourselves from a terror which threatens to turn us to stone."

Count no man happy till he dies

‘Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.’
~ Chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

Is there always a solution?

"But this may be to say no more than that the problem has now escalated beyond all feasible resolution. This need not be a defeatist judgement, simply realistic. Destructive forces which spring from remediable causes can take on a lethal momentum of their own which there is finally no stopping. Perhaps it is now simply too late to staunch the spreading of terrorism. In which case there is no solution to the problem of terrorism – a proposition that would be impossible for most politicians to voice publicly, and one that is profoundly unpalatable to most other people, not least chronically up-beat Americans. Even so, it may be the truth. Why should one imagine that when there is a problem there is always a solution?"

There are situations from which one can emerge only with dirty hands

"But the truth is that there just are situations from which one can emerge only with dirty hands. Pressed far enough, every moral law starts to come apart at the seams."

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience

 

‘The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others’
~ Isaiah Berlin

The ultimately possible attitudes to life are irreconcilable

 

‘The ultimately possible attitudes to life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.’
~ Max Weber

The true meaning of life is too terrible

[Perhaps] “the true meaning of life is too terrible for us to cope with, which is why we need our consoling illusions if we are to carry on. What we call ‘life’ is just a necessary fiction. Without a huge admixture of fantasy, reality would grind to a halt."

If we have the conceptual apparatus to pose the question…

"If we have the conceptual apparatus to pose the question, then we already have in principle the means to determine an answer to it."

Not how the world is, is the mystical

‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein