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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=82806

http://www.memorablequotations.com/kierkegaard.htm

Kierkegaard wrote: Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in
desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so
carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even
questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is
really thought which takes his life.

He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more
intimate confidant. . . . My depression is the most faithful mistress
I have known--no wonder, then, that I return the love.

Kierkeegard wrote: Doubt is thought's despair; despair is
personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to
completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in
motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality,
doubt only of thought.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they
demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they
demand freedom of speech.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood
backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must
be lived--forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to
mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite
intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete
quiet to take the backward-looking position.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea
and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the
former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange
feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really
enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his
suffering.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses
which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine
his life becomes

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as
only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker
who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than
grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry
past it.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and
power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye
which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure
disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what
so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against
another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing--and
fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a
difference of quality

Sitaram comments:

I am just now reminded of something Tulsidas said (author of the
hindi Ramayan, circa 1600), paraphrasing "when we are affliced with a
sharp thorn lodged in the skin, it requires a sharp needle as a
remedy. The remedy for suffering may involve suffering".... which is
like Hippocrates: "violent ills require violent remedy"

Kierkegaard continued:

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains,
new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they
fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think
they have seen something.

In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire
to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest
oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions,
selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You
cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in
such a way that it catches you.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there
are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are.
Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but
understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand
itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

============

Sitaram writes:

Was Buddha the perfect Buddhist?

Here is a curious "factoid": only two major religions in the world
have names which denote a quality to be cultivated in the practitioner

Buddhism: from buddh "to be awake, enlightened", and Islam,
meaning "submission"

I suppose if Derrida were to write a paper on Postmodernism, he would
have to be given, automatically, an A+

Woody Allen has a great scene in one of his movies, two men are in a
line at a movie theater, arguing about something that Marshall
McCluen said, and suddenly, woody allen says, "I show you how wrong
you are!" and he runs off in the crowd and drags over Marshall
McCluen himself, to refute the other fellow

or, is it really as simple as all that? I mean, if we could "bring
back" Shakespeare, say, or Plato, would they REALLY be able to tell
us the most important things about their works, or does a product of
the human spirit somehow transcend its author, and wait for posterity
to do its homework. is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

speaking of orators: the man who gave the speech JUST BEFORE
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address" spoke for TWO HOURS. A photographer was
present and had ample time to set up his primitive equipment and take
a picture. When Lincoln began his speech, that photographer felt he
had time for a break. But Lincoln's intire speech lasted only 3 or so
minutes. Many that day thought Lincoln a failure, for so short a
speech

Someone remarks: Sitaram, that's a very intersting thought; i think
it depends on who, some may be best to have in person; but i think
most famous or genius people who we'd want to "bring back" & talk to
are best known for their works & not themselves. even an orator
has 'off days', but her best work might of captured some of her best
ideas

Sitaram replies:

Your post touches on a topic which has interested me, and which I
have written about, namely that our works or writings are BETTER than
we are in person, since they are distillations of our finest moments.

There was a famous writer in the 20th century (Prabhupad, founder of
the Hare Krishna movement in the 1960s) ), and some admirers came to
visit him in his office, and found him reading one of his own books.
they were surpised at this, since he is the author and must know what
the books said, so they inquired "why?" He simply answered, "my
books are BETTER than me"

Of course, Robert Ornstein coined the acronym T.W.I.T (the western
intellectual tradition), namely that we are not happy until we have
put our experiences into words and shared them with others, ... we
depend upon that vicarious element of after-experience to feel
fulfilled, complete

In "Why Write," Jean-Paul Sartre claims that "One of the chief
motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we
are essential in relation to the world"

In the essay, "For Whom Does One Write?", Sartre meditates on the
divergence between the real public and the ideal public that writers
address. "I say that a literature is abstract when it has not yet
acquired the full view of its essence, when it considers the subject
of the work as indifferent."

Henry James' "The Art of Fiction," Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of
Lying," and Jean-Paul Sartre's "Why Write?" all attempt to
distinguish between "good" and "bad" novels

" O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and forge in the smith of my soul the uncharted conscience
of my race." From James Joyce's The Portrait of An Artist as A Young
Man (1904-1914)

What Sartre did was to contrast a divine viewpoint on the world and
on human nature with a human viewpoint where there is no divine
element. Thus, when God thought about creating the world, he
conceived it first -- he had in mind what the world was going to be
and what human nature was going to be.

These were the "essences" of the world and of humanity, the things
that will make them what they are. Then God created everything and
gave existence to the essences. Thus, to God, "essence precedes
existence." Now, Sartre did not believe in God, so there was no place
for the essence of humanity to be before human existence. To us,
existence comes first. The essence comes later. Indeed, the essence
is whatever we decide it is going to be. So, from our point of view
things are just the opposite of what they would be for people who
believed in God. Now it is "existence precedes essence."
Hence, "Existentialism."

Someone complains that Sitaram posts too many quotations:

Sitaram replies:

Consider that every wealthy man has other peoples coins in his
treasury

or, to be more precise, coins which formerly belonged to others, but
which he has now made his own

===============

meaning of ash wednesday

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/1117

Hobbes Locke Jefferson

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/1152

Hobbes argued that morality and justice did not exist in the state of
nature, and that they do not exit for sovereigns, who remain in the
state of nature with regard to their subjects and other sovereigns.

Locke argued that a basic awareness of justice is present even in
the state of
nature, and that sovereigns, no less than their subjects, can be held
to a moral standard.

In Hobbes' conception of human nature, we are leads to an either/or:
either we enjoy freedom from society and its laws - resulting in
chaos; or we give up this freedom for an authoritarian
regime - and enjoy a social order established by force.

if Locke is right - if human beings are naturally rational. social,
and thus capable of self-rule - then we don't need an authoritarian
regime to save us from ourselves

http://www.drury.edu/ess/values/Hobbes1.html

http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/level2/speakers/geoff.htm

http://www.public.asu.edu/~ehoran/teaching/English500/sylleng50219931.
html

http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/foucault.html

"Shakespeare" can refer to the guy who lived in Stratford-on-Avon in
the seventeenth century, or it can refer to the numerous plays and
poems linked under the name "Shakespeare." The idea of the
separability of designation and description becomes clear when
someone argues that "Shakespeare did not write the plays of
Shakespeare"--meaning that the historical figure is not actually the
guy responsible for the body of works called "the plays of
Shakespeare." Such a sentence makes sense only if "Shakespeare"
signifies two separate things.

http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60A/handouts/author.html

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