the main concern of the book (the myth of sisyphus) is to sketch ways of living our lives so as to make them worth living despite their being meaningless.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
We might think that facing our total annihilation would be bitter, but for Camus this leads us in a positive direction: “Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch” (N, 90). This insight entails obstinately refusing “all the ‘later on’s of this world,” in order to lay claim to “my present wealth” (N, 103), namely the intense here-and-now life of the senses. The “wealth” is precisely what hope cheats us out of by teaching us to look away from it and towards an afterlife. Only by yielding to the fact that our “longing to endure” will be frustrated and accepting our “awareness of death” are we able to open ourselves to the riches of life, which are physical above all.
Camus puts both sides of his argument into a single statement: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation” (N, 103). Only in accepting death and in being “stripped of all hope” does one most intensely appreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he now suggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, and contrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are what one has and one knows: “To feel one's ties to a land, one's love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the heart can find rest—these are already many certainties for one man's life” (N, 90).
this is what is holy, after all
In these essays, Camus sets two attitudes in opposition. The first is what he regards as religion-based fears. He cites religious warnings about pride, concern for one's immortal soul, hope for an afterlife, resignation about the present and preoccupation with God. Against this conventional Christian perspective Camus asserts what he regards as self-evident facts: that we must die and there is nothing beyond this life. Without mentioning it, Camus draws a conclusion from these facts, namely that the soul is not immortal. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophical writing, he commends to his readers to face a discomforting reality squarely and without flinching, but he does not feel compelled to present reasons or evidence. If not with religion, where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope” and in refusing to hide from the fact that we are going to die. For Camus “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days…. I can see no point in the happiness of angels” (N, 90). There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.
Camus is sometimes mistakenly called a “pagan” because he rejects Christianity as based on a hope for a life beyond this life. Hope is the error Camus wishes to avoid. Rejecting “the delusions of hope” (N, 74), Nuptials contains an evocation of an alternative. Camus relies for this line of thought on Nietzsche's discussion of Pandora's Box in Human, All Too Human: all the evils of humankind, including plagues and disease, have been let loose on the world by Zeus, but the remaining evil, hope, is kept hidden away in the box and treasured. But why, we may ask, is hope an evil? Nietzsche explains that humans have come to see hope as their greatest good, while Zeus, knowing better, has meant it as the greatest source of trouble. It is, after all, the reason why humans let themselves be tormented—because they anticipate an ultimate reward (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 58). For Camus, following this reading of Nietzsche closely, the conventional solution is in fact the problem: hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond.
In the crucial fragment 2, the goddess says she will describe for Parmenides “which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding” (fr. 2.2). The common construal of this phrase as tantamount to the only conceivable ways of inquiry has been one of the principal spurs for readings according to which only two, not three, paths feature in the poem, for it is natural to wonder how the goddess can present fragment 2's two paths as the only conceivable paths of inquiry and nonetheless in fragment 6 present still another path, that along which mortals are said to wander. Two-path interpretations respond to this apparent difficulty by identifying the path of mortal inquiry with fragment 2's second path (though implausibly so, as noted above, sect. 2.2). Parmenides' goddess in fact has good reason to distinguish the two ways of inquiry presented in fragment 2 from the way subsequently presented in fragment 6. The two ways of fragment 2, unlike the third way, are marked as ways “for understanding,” that is, for achieving the kind of understanding that contrasts with the “wandering understanding” the goddess later says is characteristic of mortals. The use of the Greek datival infinitive in the phrase, “there are for understanding” (eisi noêsai, fr. 2.2b; cf. Empedocles fr. 3.12 for the identical construction) distinguishes the two ways introduced in this fragment from the one subsequently introduced in fragment 6, as ways for understanding. That the goal is specifically understanding that does not wander becomes clear when she subsequently presents the third way as one followed by “mortals who know nothing” (fr. 6.4), which leads to “wandering understanding” (plagkton nöon, fr. 6.6). Comparison with fr. 8.34–6a's retrospective indication that “understanding” (noêma, to noein), by which is apparently meant trustworthy thought (cf. fr. 8.50), has itself been a major goal of the inquiry suggests that a way for understanding is one along which this goal of attaining trustworthy understanding might be achieved.
The goddess reveals to Parmenides, however, the possibility of achieving understanding that does not wander or that is stable and unchanging, precisely because its object is and cannot not be (what it is). The third way of inquiry can never lead to this, and thus it is not presented by the goddess as a path of inquiry for understanding. It directs the inquirer's attention to things that are (what they are) only contingently or temporarily: they are and then again are not, or they are a certain way and then again are not that way. The problem with this path is not, as too many interpreters have understood it to be, that nothing exists to be discovered along this way. There are innumerably many things that are (and exist) in the manner specified at fr. 6.8–9a (and fr. 8.40–1). However, since their being is merely contingent, Parmenides thinks there can be no stable apprehension of them, no thoughts about them that remain steadfast and do not wander, and thus no true or reliable conviction. According to Parmenides, genuine conviction cannot be found by focusing one's attention on things that are subject to change. This is why he has the goddess repeatedly characterize the cosmology in the second phase of her revelation as deceptive or untrustworthy. The modal interpretation thus makes it relatively straightforward to understand the presence of the poem's cosmology. It is an account of the principles, origins, and operation of the world's mutable population. It is Parmenides' own account, the best he was able to provide, and one firmly in the tradition of Presocratic cosmology. At the same time, however, Parmenides supposed there was more to the world than all those things that have grown, now are, and will hereafter end (as he describes them in fragment 19). There is also what is (what it is) and cannot not be (what it is).
That Aristotle also viewed the two major phases of Parmenides' poem as dual accounts of the same entity in different aspects is perhaps most apparent in his characterization of Parmenides, in the course of the discussion at Metaphysics 1.5.986b27–34, as having supposed that “what is is one in account but plural with respect to perception.” Theophrastus likewise seems to have adopted such a line. Alexander of Aphrodisias quotes him as having written the following of Parmenides in the first book of his On the Natural Philosophers:
Coming after this man [sc. Xenophanes], Parmenides of Elea, son of Pyres, went along both paths. For he both declares that the universe is eternal and also attempts to explain the generation of the things that are, though without taking the same view of them both, but supposing that in accordance with truth the universe is one and ungenerated and spherical in shape, while in accordance with the view of the multitude, and with a view to explaining the generation of things as they appear to us, making the principles two, fire and earth, the one as matter and the other as cause and agent (Alex.Aphr. in Metaph. 31.7–16; cf. Simp. in Ph. 25.15–16, D.L. 9.21–2).
Parmenides was the first philosopher rigorously to distinguish what must be, what must not be, and what is but need not be.
In the crucial fragment 2, the goddess says she will describe for Parmenides “which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding” (fr. 2.2). The common construal of this phrase as tantamount to the only conceivable ways of inquiry has been one of the principal spurs for readings according to which only two, not three, paths feature in the poem, for it is natural to wonder how the goddess can present fragment 2's two paths as the only conceivable paths of inquiry and nonetheless in fragment 6 present still another path, that along which mortals are said to wander. Two-path interpretations respond to this apparent difficulty by identifying the path of mortal inquiry with fragment 2's second path (though implausibly so, as noted above, sect. 2.2). Parmenides' goddess in fact has good reason to distinguish the two ways of inquiry presented in fragment 2 from the way subsequently presented in fragment 6. The two ways of fragment 2, unlike the third way, are marked as ways “for understanding,” that is, for achieving the kind of understanding that contrasts with the “wandering understanding” the goddess later says is characteristic of mortals. The use of the Greek datival infinitive in the phrase, “there are for understanding” (eisi noêsai, fr. 2.2b; cf. Empedocles fr. 3.12 for the identical construction) distinguishes the two ways introduced in this fragment from the one subsequently introduced in fragment 6, as ways for understanding. That the goal is specifically understanding that does not wander becomes clear when she subsequently presents the third way as one followed by “mortals who know nothing” (fr. 6.4), which leads to “wandering understanding” (plagkton nöon, fr. 6.6). Comparison with fr. 8.34–6a's retrospective indication that “understanding” (noêma, to noein), by which is apparently meant trustworthy thought (cf. fr. 8.50), has itself been a major goal of the inquiry suggests that a way for understanding is one along which this goal of attaining trustworthy understanding might be achieved.
The two ways of inquiry that lead to thought that does not wander are: “that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be” (fr. 2.3)—i.e., “that [it] is and that [it] cannot not be”—and “that [it] is not and that [it] must not be” (fr. 2.5). Each verse appears to demarcate a distinct modality or way of being. One might find it natural to call these modalities, respectively, the modality of necessary being and the modality of necessary non-being or impossibility. Parmenides conceives of these modalities as ways of being or ways an entity might be rather than as logical properties. If one respects the organizing metaphor of the ways of inquiry, one can, even at this stage of the goddess' revelation, appreciate what it means for “that [it] is and that [it] cannot not be” to define a way of inquiry. This specification indicates that what Parmenides is looking for is what is and cannot not be—or, more simply, what must be. Pursuing this way of inquiry requires maintaining a constant focus on the modality of the object of his search as he tries to attain a fuller conception of what an entity that is and cannot not be, or that must be, must be like. To remain on this path Parmenides must resolutely reject any conception of the object of his search that proves incompatible with its mode of being, as the goddess reminds him at numerous points.
The goddess tells Parmenides to stick with "what is". The goddess tells Parmenides to avoid "what is not". The one leads to knowledge of the eternal world; the other one leads nowhere, but does show what not to do which is a valid thing to know. The third way is the world of "wandering understanding", the way of ignorant mortals. This is the world that appears to be the case for those who choose to accept what they see in front of their very eyes, the world of "appearances."
" mortals mistakenly suppose that an object of genuine understanding may be subject to the variableness implicit in their conception of it as being and not being the same, and being and not being not the same. This is not to say that the things upon which ordinary humans have exclusively focused their attention, because of their reliance upon sensation, do not exist. It is merely to say that they do not enjoy the mode of necessary being required of an object of unwandering understanding. The imagery in fr. 6.4–7 that paints mortals as wandering blind and helpless portrays them as having failed entirely to realize that there is something that must be that is available for them to apprehend if only they could awaken from their stupor. Even so, the goddess does not say that mortals have no apprehension. Understanding that wanders is still understanding."
My simile is that the world, divided into everything or nothing, is like a water hydrant spewing at full blast or completely turned off.
This is like Parmenides and his investigations of what is and what is not.
Religion is like the "wandering understanding." It is like sticking a straw into the spewing hydrant and the truth that it draws off in the dribs and drabs, it considers "real".
The arguments of fragment 8, on this view, are then understood as showing that what can be thought and talked about is, surprisingly, without variation in time and space, that is, absolutely one and unchanging. Owen adapted an image from Wittgenstein in characterizing these arguments, ones which “can only show the vacuousness of temporal and spatial distinctions by a proof which employs them,” as “a ladder which must be thrown away when one has climbed it”
Although they repeat the essentials of Owen's view, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield finally acknowledge that the presence of the elaborate cosmology remains problematic for this line of interpretation: “Why [the cosmology] was included in the poem remains a mystery: the goddess seeks to save the phenomena so far as is possible, but she knows and tells us that the project is impossible” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 262, after echoing Owen's line on the cosmology's dialectical character at 254–6). While the meta–principle interpretation raises the expectation, which fails to be met, that the principles of Parmenides' cosmology will conform to the requirements he has supposedly specified earlier in the poem, the strict monist and logical-dialectical interpretations leave even some of their own advocates wondering why Parmenides devoted the bulk of his poem to an account of things his own reasoning is supposed to have shown do not exist.
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
It seems to me to be a way for Parmenides to talk about the world that we actually live in, or believe we live in, while remembering that there is another whole level of existence.
Assuming that the universe has always existed and is a series of parallel universes and that our world is the world of beings and things that we see here and now. The quantum universe allows for entities to pop into existence from anywhere else. This assumes that the entities already existed before they popped into this universe and therefore did not have to be created in order to discover an existence here.
Although they repeat the essentials of Owen's view, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield finally acknowledge that the presence of the elaborate cosmology remains problematic for this line of interpretation: “Why [the cosmology] was included in the poem remains a mystery: the goddess seeks to save the phenomena so far as is possible, but she knows and tells us that the project is impossible” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 262, after echoing Owen's line on the cosmology's dialectical character at 254–6). While the meta–principle interpretation raises the expectation, which fails to be met, that the principles of Parmenides' cosmology will conform to the requirements he has supposedly specified earlier in the poem, the strict monist and logical-dialectical interpretations leave even some of their own advocates wondering why Parmenides devoted the bulk of his poem to an account of things his own reasoning is supposed to have shown do not exist.
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
It seems to me to be a way for Parmenides to talk about the world that we actually live in, or believe we live in, while remembering that there is another whole level of existence.
Assuming that the universe has always existed and is a series of parallel universes and that our world is the world of beings and things that we see here and now. The quantum universe allows for entities to pop into existence from anywhere else. This assumes that the entities already existed before they popped into this universe and therefore did not have to be created in order to discover an existence here.
3.4 The Aspectual Interpretation Prevailing in Antiquity
The idea that Parmenides' arguments so problematized the phenomenon of change as to make developing an adequate theoretical account of it the central preoccupation of subsequent Presocratic natural philosophers is a commonplace of modern historical narratives. Unfortunately, this notion has no real ancient authority. Aristotle's account at Physics 1.8.191a23–33 of the wrong turn he claims earlier natural philosophers took in trying to understand the principles of change has often been thought to legitimate this view, given the Eleatic-sounding argument it records. But Aristotle mentions Parmenides nowhere in the passage, and his complaint is in fact broadly directed against all the early Greek philosophers whose views he has been surveying previously in the book. He complains that they naively adopted the view that no fundamental entity or substance comes to be or perishes, the result being that they are unable to account for, because they disavow, substantial change, which is the very phenomenon Aristotle is most interested in explaining. Aristotle actually understands Parmenides' thesis that what is is one (hen to on) and not subject to generation and change as belonging, not to natural philosophy, but to first philosophy or metaphysics (Cael. 3.1.298b14–24; cf.Metaph. 1.5.986b14–18, Ph. 1.2.184a25-b12).
Road to holy: faith and commitment
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
Road to holy: faith and commitment
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
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