Life, or being, exists in absolute contrast to non-being. Death initiates non-being. Therefore the only life-affirming philosophy is one which resists death. It is a binary decision: 1 or 0. Evolution can only provide for life at a species level, and so it concerns itself with reproduction and replacement. We can do better. We can assess and address the needs of the individual, and so we must concern ourselves with extension and maintenance.
Labels: thought
Change without creation is necessarily directed by its initial limitations.
Labels: thought
The process of refinement is an ouroboros. Because nothing is excreted by this autophage, nothing is produced—it is merely repurposed.
Labels: thought
To be diverse and rapidly-evolving is heaven; extinction is hell.
Labels: thought
A commitment to rationalism is not a death pact with simplistic equations.
Labels: thought
Faith is almost antithetical to spirituality, not just in religious matters but in many others. When people have faith in their country, in their political party, in their leaders, it causes them to act in a way that can be controlled by others. That behavior comes out of a kind of laziness, where they don't examine the reasons why they do things. Doubt is a magical thing, doubt comes from God's hands and everything good that happens comes out of it, so it can't be inimical to spirituality.
Paul Park, Locus Magazine
Labels: quote
Arianna Huffington chose a few of my phrases to use in the "Ned Lamont Concession Speech" that she drafted on The Huffington Post.
Labels: publication notice
What's wrong with being elitist, if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive? I'm very, very keen that people should raise their game rather than the other way around.
Richard Dawkins
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I don't usually do internet memes, but this one seemed too fun to pass by:
Labels: meme
A man's philosophy, a woman's philosophy, is the conscious habit of thought by which the self gathers itself together, cleanses itself, governs itself, steers itself; and copes as well as it may with all the pleasant or unpleasant impacts of the vast impinging Not-self.
It is not that all the drift and flotsam of the great historic religious and metaphysical systems that float around its path are meaningless to an intelligence thus working out its own philosophy. They supply it with continual tests and comparisons as to the practical value of its own habitual ways of going to work.
What, for example, in its intimate experience of soothing and distressing feelings, has it found for itself that corresponds to the old human tradition about God? What is its personal substitute for traditional morality? What has it found for itself that corresponds to the great, seductive, disturbing, stimulating systems of Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche? What is there in its disciplined self-created reactions to the mystery of Good and Evil that corresponds to the "logoi" of Christ, to the impassioned psychology of St. Paul, to the oracles of Laotze, of Buddha, of Heraclitus?
But let us not be deceived. These are not essential questions. All these inspirations and imperatives have so mingled with the stream of human consciousness that the air is full of them, and only the scholastic searcher after historic origins need concern himself as to what is Heathen or Christian, Mediaeval or Classical, Occidental or Oriental, in these "streams of tendency" making for the wisdom of life.
No! these are not essential questions. It matters little whether some deep psychic secret of which you have luckily possessed yourself ought to be attributed to Plato, or Goethe, or Wordsworth, or Dostoievsky, or the Tao, or the wisdom of Zoroaster, or the doctrine of the Stoics. All the philosophers, all the prophets, draw their secrets from the same sort of fountain—that is to say from the solitary contemplations of their own lonely, anti-social ego, feeling its way by itself amid the smarting blows and the thrilling caresses of intimate personal experience.
John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude
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Standard causality is demonstrated by reliable repetition and by noting the lack of effect when the proposed cause is removed. But what if there were another type of causality, independent of (and undetectable by) these objective measures? A correlation which existed only in expectation, or intent? Would this be delusion? Or magic?
Labels: thought
To embrace without needing is to experience without suffering. Once habit has been exploded, only the requirements of the body keep us from being truly free.
Labels: thought
And many a flower waves
And wastes its sweet perfumes
In desert solitudes.
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, "Ill Fortune"
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Transgression in society is often trivial; transgression in nature, rarely so.
Labels: thought
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Michael C. Rush (aka M. C. Rush)
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