The Notebook Again (Western Philosophy Version)

     Well my friends, I am almost totally recovered from the artificial coof, and am well enough to write an original post composed almost entirely of original content (plus a few smallish quotes). But the thing is that I just posted a post that I’d been considering posting for years, and I figure I might was well do a part 2 involving not Buddhist extracts but some of my favorites by western philosophers.

     The first little series is from Albert Camus, from his The Myth of Sisyphus, which I remember left me very unimpressed when I checked it out from the International Institute for Advanced Buddhist Studies library in Rangoon. (We should avoid suicide mainly just to spite the universe? I really don’t THINK so.) Still, the man, despite being a Frenchman, was capable of actual profundity.

…in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event.

…to understand is above all to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its utmost elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity…. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.

     David Hume is probably my favorite philosopher to write in the English language, though he had a somewhat dishonest, backdoor approach to bashing Christianity. The man was a radical, which of course is something I like in philosophers, though not in street rioters.

The idea of existence…is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent.

…reason alone can never produce any action or give rise to volition.

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions [i.e., irrational feelings], and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

     Albert Einstein has been bashed mightily by certain members of the right, though I fail to see that he was a dishonest thief of other people’s scientific work. The very fact that he could understand his own math, a feat mastered by only a handful in his lifetime, indicates that he was no idiot, and ALL scientists base their theories on the preexistent work of others. Like Isaac Newton (also considered to be an ass if not an idiot) said, he stood upon the shoulders of giants.

It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

I do not believe we have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying—“A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills”—impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor.

     John Locke (enough said, it's a short one):

Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.

     Carl Jung, an interesting fellow to say the least, and in my opinion a better psychologist, or at least a wiser one, than Sigmund Freud, says the following.

No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.

Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil. This is a painful fact. (Though I have failed to perceive what the equal and opposite force produced by Buddhism has been. It does seem to be overwhelmingly good, with the exception of some corrupt yet relatively harmless monks.)

     And from his classic Answer to Job:

The “revelation” was experienced by an early Christian who, as a leading light of the community, presumably had to live an exemplary life and demonstrate to his flock the Christian virtues of true faith, humility, patience, devotion, selfless love, and denial of all worldly desires. In the long run this can become too much, even for the most righteous. Irritability, bad moods, and outbursts of affect [like the violent Book of Revelation] are the classic symptoms of chronic virtuousness.

     Immanuel Kant is hard to read, and I’ve read more about him than by him. Nevertheless he was one of the most important modern western philosophers, and he apparently saw spirits.

At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.

     Following are some quotes from Bertrand Russell, who went through various phases in his philosophical life and spent a lot of time championing science as our best way to understand reality. He furthermore rejected mysticism. Consequently I do not rank him very high on the list of the greatest western philosophers, yet he was obviously a brilliant man (even into his 90s), and much of what he said is well worth consideration. His book Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits was very interesting, and could have been entitled What Can We Do about the David Hume problem? Hume’s skepticism kicks much of western philosophy in the head, which caused Lord Russell considerable concern.

Only in so far as the initial perceptual datum is trustworthy can there be any reason for accepting the vast cosmic edifice of inference which is based upon it.

Individual percepts are the basis of all our knowledge, and no method exists in which we can begin with data which are public to many observers.

…while mental events and their qualities can be known without inference, physical events are known only as regards their space-time structure. The qualities that compose such events are unknown—so completely unknown that we cannot say either that they are or that they are not different from the qualities that we know as belonging to mental events.

When a physiologist examines a brain, he does not see thoughts; therefore the brain is one thing and the mind which thinks is another. The fallacy in this argument consists in supposing that a man can see matter. Not even the ablest physiologist can perform this feat. His percept when he looks at a brain is an event in his own mind, and has only a causal connection with the brain that he fancies he is seeing. When, in a powerful telescope, he sees a tiny luminous dot, and interprets it as a vast nebula existing a million years ago, he realizes that what he sees is different from what he infers. The difference from the case of a brain looked at through a microscope is only one of degree: there is exactly the same need of inference, by means of the laws of physics, from the visual datum to its physical cause. And just as no one supposes that the nebula has any close resemblance to a luminous dot, so no one should suppose that the brain has any close resemblance to what the physiologist sees.

     Next for some quotes from Russell’s classic History of Western Philosophy.

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.

A man may be a cheerful pessimist or a melancholy optimist.

A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance? In the past, a great deal; in our own time, much less. No solution to this problem has hitherto been found….

Descartes’s indubitable facts are his own thoughts—using “thought” in the widest possible sense. “I think” is his ultimate premiss. Here the word “I” is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form “there are thoughts.” The word “I” is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say “I am a thing which thinks,” he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense.

     Now for a few quotes from Ernst Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. It certainly would not win any prizes today, as it contains an entire section on how homosexuality is a “perversion” of normal human psychology.

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement of the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out,—the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

No mistake—the turd is mankind’s real threat.

     And now for a quote from the Sacred Scrolls.

Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates he kills for sport, or lust, or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair: for he is the harbinger of death.

     And NOW for some scathing academic commentary from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

Only the learned read old books, and…they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so….

The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (especially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present state of the question.” To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

     And finally, two quotes from John Stewart Mill, the first from “On Liberty” and the second from “Utility of Religion.”

The progress principle…whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to Custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality: they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependents of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.

To find people who believe their religion as a person believes that fire will burn his hand when thrust into it, we must seek them in those Oriental countries where Europeans do not yet predominate, or in the European world when it was still universally Catholic.