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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
LOGIC RATIONALITY
"The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with truth."
"Rationalism, in order to save truth, renounces life."
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Meditations on Quixote
"Logic is the art of going wrong with, confidence."
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"The heart has reasons reason does not know. "
Pascal
"That the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings. . .when no other mental habit is cultivated."
From the autobiography of John Stuart Mills
Atrophy of the heart, emotional atrophy is the result of excessive expenditure of energy in intellectual pursuits.
Darwin
"Behold the new morning glittering down the eastern sleeps; fly, false Phantasms, from its shaft of light; let the absurd fly utterly, forsaking this lower Earth for ever. It is Truth and a Shala Redux that (in the shape of Philosophism) hence-forth reign. For what imaginable purpose was man made if not to be 'happy'? By victorious Analysis and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him. . .Nay, who knows but, by sufficiently victorious analysis, 'human life may be indefinitely lengthened' and men get rid of Death, as they have already done of the Devil.--So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her 'Redunt Saturnia Regna ' . " "
Carlyles--Account of the French Revolution
*The return of Saturn
"The more rational a man is the more deceitful he becomes as soon as he goes wrong; he becomes as false to the world and, in order to be true to himself, declares reality a lie."
Goethe
"With the rise of scientific rationalism in the seventieth century, the Mandala principle fades from the screen of the conscious collective activities of the west, the rise or rational and seemingly anti-magical art and consciousness is itself magic. It is as if the mirror of unity which the Cathedral builder had shown to European man had been broken and dissolved. But what European man had done in the breaking Of this mirror had inevitable planetary consequence, for in the destruction of that mirror of unitive vision, demonic energies were unleashed, energies that would not be satisfied until every last UNITIVE MIRROR in the world had been broken," (Tezcatlipoca means "Smoking mirror", Quetzacoatls' dark twin)
Mandala
Arguelles
"Those who attack the intelligentsia for its neurotic dispositions might as well attach the miners for their susceptibility to T.B.. .It is a professional disease and should be recognized as such."
Koestler
"As to intelligence, symbolized by Lucifer, the Prince of Intellectuals, it will in fact almost always be opposed to more and spiritual development, and will render the pursuit of true happiness difficult. The rationalist, who in the last forty years has had reason to doubt the all-mightiness of reason, accepts without a tremor the overthrow of physical theories considered unshakable in his youth. He admits the inconceivable space in which the electrons . move (three dimensions of space for every electron present; thirty dimensions for ten electrons) he admits that the electron is a "wave of probability." He admits the existence of particles such as the "Neutrino," and the "Anti-neutrino" which was invented for reasons of pure mathematical symmetry. He admits without resistance, the existence, the reality of these paradoxical entities which he is forbidden to visualize; yet he obstinately refuses to admit the possibility of a supernatural, creative power without which the greatest scientific problems are incomprehensible, simply because the models furnished by his sensorial experience do not enable him to conceive or visualize it even though he is quite aware of their limits. He knows and does not even discuss the fact that the image he has built up of the universe rests on reactions billions, or 0,000,000,000,001 per cent) of the vibrations surrounding him and which go through him without leaving a trace in his consciousness. There is nothing more irrational than a man who is rationally irrational."
Lecomte du Nouy
Human Destiny
Longmans,Green & Co. 1947
"Darwin bitterly lamented the fact that his studies had atrophied his appreciation of poetry."
"In the European scientist the steeling of the intellect for the interpretation of nature has often been accompanied by the loss of the feeling for beauty."
Romaine Roland
"When man became an intellectual he paid for his new privileges with a loss of a treasure of emotional spontaneity, of sensualities"
D.H. Lawrence
The delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter found in the crotch of a hollow cave, found such an enormous amount of it, that leaning too far it sucked him in and he How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s head, and sweetly perished there."
Herman Melville
The "Intellectual", faithful to his essential duty, denounce the realism of States; where upon, the States, no less faithful to their duty, made him drink the hemlock. They do not denounce the realism of States, but, on the contrary approve of it; they no longer drink the hemlock. "
"The Christian sequence of thought is: Problem, examination of problem, authority pronounces on problem, its solution be- comes the only acceptable interpretation and is generally so accepted. Those who do not accept it are heretics. This system of thought has been wholly taken over by the Communists, with the sole distinction that they call heresy-deviation.The Jewish system of thought is radically different. It runs--Problem, the greater the problem the greater the variety of solutions: if, for practical reasons it becomes necessary to support one solution against another, the spiritual integrity of the rejected solutions must be safeguarded."
Puer Aeternus--(Marie Louise Von Franz)
"The inner battle between the feeling of uniqueness and statistical thinking is generally a battle between intellectualism and allowing feeling its own right in life, because feeling evaluates what is important to me, and my own importance is the counterbalance. If you have real feelings you can say certainly that this is an ordinary woman (for if you see her walking along the street she is not very different from any other , but to me she is of the highest value. That would mean that the ego makes up its mind to defend and stand up for its own feelings without denying the other aspect. The solution would be to say, 'Yes, that may be so from the statistical point of view, but within my life there are certain values, and within my life she has value. For an act of , loyalty is required towards ones own thinking; Otherwise it is split off from it by statistical thinking, which is why intellectual people have a tendency towards Communism and such types of thought. A woman tends to have a personal attitude. Masculine has to think impersonally and objectively, statistically, cold, scientific, objective--Women's Lib requires women to become the same.
Marie Von Franz
"I think the present day reason is an analogue of the flat you' re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. "
Robert Jungk
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"The ancient Greeks, I say, who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future . They listened to the wind (sibyls) , and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventor of reason sound insane?
Robert Jungk
"Life somewhat better might content him,
But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou has lent him:
He calls it Reason-hence his power's increased,
To be far beastlier than any beast."
Mephistopheles
"It is in this light that we must approach, if we wish to understand them, not only the speculations of Plato, and Aristotle, for instance, on the nature of the stars and planets, but also the meaning of common words like vous (nous) andLogos (Logic) , and the whole apparatus of language by which they expressed these speculations. If we are content to translate, and to think, 'mind' for vous and 'reason' or 'word' for oyos, we are in continual danger of surreptitiously substituting our own phenomena for those which they were in fact dealing with. It is not only that they speculated on whether the planets were 'visible gods' or only images of the gods, as statues are; on the nature of the fifth Essence and its relation to the earthly elements; on the Anima Mundi; on whether or not the Aether , which is the substance of the spheres, has a soul etc. The very meanings of the incidental words with the help of which they did the speculating, implied participation of some sort. Whereas the words into which we struggle to translate them imply the reverse.
Saving the Appearances--A Study in Idolatry
by Owen Barfield
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"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given
phenomenon is infinite."
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Hume is saying everything we know about the external world is coming through the senses. Kant says we have 'apriori' in our head a very real object whose existence we have no reason to doubt. Whose reality can be confirmed anytime. The tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn' t good started with the Greeks.
Robert Graves
"Logic is like the sword, those who appeal to it shall perish by it."
Samuel Butler
I shall not be a bit surprised, if in the midst of this Universal Reason that is to be there will appear, all of a sudden and unexpectedly, some common-faced, or rather cynical and sneering, gentleman who with his arms akimbo will say to us: 'Now then, you fellows, what about smashing all of this Reason to bits, sending their logarithms to the devil and living as we like according to our own silly will!"
Dostoevsky
Letters from the Undergrounds
"If you say that everything, Chaos, darkness, anathema, can be reduced to mathematical formula, that it is possible to anticipate all things and keep them under the sway of reason by means of arithmetical calculation, then man will go insane on purpose so as to have no judgment and behave as he likes. believe this because it appears that man's whose business is to prove to himself that he is a man and not a cog-wheel."
Dostoevsky
Human society can never be "rationalized" because there is an irrational principal in it; it is not a nest of ants.
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind. "
Freud
"May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep!
William Blake
"For the great snake, making a human face emerge from the contortions of his body as he writhes with the pain of feeding upon his own tail, is strangely like the intellectual of our time who, have used their conscious and rational faculties to discover the dark realms of the unconscious psyche- realms that tie them willy-nilly to the primitive-can no longer trust rationality, but instead make reasons feed upon itself by rationally arguing the helplessness of reason."
W.H. McNeil
The Rise of the West
"For instance, nowadays when we talk of the intellect, we as a rule mean only the reason. We do not make a distinction between the one and the other, and are apt to think that the human reason is the only source and therefore criterion of all knowledge, and so what is not rational to us is consequently unintelligible. But it is only during the last few hundred years that this identification of the human reason with the intellect has been made. Before that, the distinction was appreciated. Actually, intellect is something different from, and higher than, the reason. It is capable of understanding knowledge that is beyond the reach, of reason. It is in fact a divine quality in man.
James Wyckoff
Mesmer
"If the man who has once begun to think wishes to persist in his mere living he can do so only by surrendering himself, whenever this idea takes possession of him, to thoughtlessness, and stupefying himself therein. If he perseveres with thinking he can come to no other result than Reverence for Life. Any thinking by which men assert that they are reaching skepticism or life without ethical ideals, is not thinking but thoughtlessness which poses as thinking, and it proves itself to be such by the fact that it is concerned about the mystery of life and the world.
Albert Schweitzer"
Out of my life and work
"The ethic, then, which originates in thinking is not "According to reason," but no-rational and enthusiastic. It marks off no skillfully defined circle of duties, but lays upon each individual the responsibility for all life within his reach, and compels him to devote himself to helping it."
Albert Schweitzer
Out of my life and work
THINKING
"I therefore stand and work in the world as one who aims at making men less shallow and morally better by making them think. "
Albert Schweitzer
Out of my Life and work
"With the spirit of the age I am in complete disagreement, because it is filled with disdain for thinking."
Albert Schweitzer
"But today in addition to that neglect of thought there is also prevalent a mistrust of it. The organized political, social, and religious associations of our time are at work to induce the individual man not to arrive at his convictions by his own thinking but to make his own such convictions as they keep ready made for him. Any man who thinks for himself and at the same time is spiritual; free, is to them something inconvenient and even uncanny. He does not offer sufficient guarantee that he will merge himself in their organization in the way they wish. All corporate bodies look today for their strength not so much to the spiritual worth of the ideas which they represent and to that of the people who belong to them, as to the attainment of the highest possible degree of unity and exclusiveness. It is in this that they expect to find their strongest power for offence and defense. Hence the spirit of the age rejoices, instead of lamenting' that thinking seems to be unequal to its task, and gives it no credit for what, in spite of imperfections, it has already accomplished. It refuses to admit, what is nevertheless the fact, that all has come about through the achievements of thought, or to reflect that thinking may still be able in the future to accomplish what it has no succeeded in accomplishing as yet. Of such considerations the spirit of the age takes no account. Its only concern is to discredit individual thinking in every possible way, and it deals with that on the lines of the saying: "Whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath. " .
Albert Schweitzer
Out of My Life and work
"It is only by confidence in our ability to reach truth by our own individual thinking, that we are capable of accepting truth from outside. Unfettered thought, provided it be deep, never degenerates into subjectivity. With its own ideas it stirs those within itself which enjoy any traditional credit for being true, and exerts itself to be able to possess them as knowledge. "
Schweitzer
Out of my life and work
"In a period which regards as absurd and little worth, as antiquated and long ago left far behind, whatever it feels to be in any way akin to rationalism or free thought, and which even mocks at the vindication of inalienable human rights which was secured in the eighteenth century, I acknowledge myself to be one who places all his confidence in rational thinking. I venture to say to our generation that it must not think it has done with rationalism because the rationalism of the past had to give place first to Romanticism, and then to a 'Realpolitik' which is coming to dominate the spiritual sphere as well as the material. When it has run the gauntlet of the follies of this universal 'Realpolitik' and has thereby got itself into deeper and deeper misery, both spiritual and material, it will discover at last that there is nothing for it do but trust itself to a new Rationalism, deeper and more efficient that the old, and in that seek its salvation.
Renunciation of thinking is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy. Where there is no longer a conviction that men can get to know the truth by their own thinking, skepticism begins. Those who work to make our age skeptical in this way, do so in the expectation that, as a result of renouncing all hope of self-discovered truth, men will end by accepting as truth what is forced upon them with authority and by propaganda .
Albert Schweitzer
Out of my life and work
"Your business as thinkers, is to make plainer the way from something to the whole of things."
Justice Holmes
"Thinking is harmony within us. Once catch the rhythm of that kind of thinking, and you are on your way. But know this, that the world will try to batter you into dissonance at every turn. Every Formalist will try to break your harmony by refusing to leave Thought where it belongs, with Spontaneity. Every company of formalists will try to pigeon-hole this subject of Consent. They will break it down to 'naturalism' or 'mysticism' or something equally ludicrous. Everywhere the world is against you if you try to keep thought simple and detached."
Newton Dillaway
"And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible mist, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts."
Melville
Moby Dick
"Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so."
Bertrand Russell
"He that will look into many parts of Asia and America, will find men reason there perhaps as acutely as himself, who yet never heard of a syllogism, nor can reduce any one argument to those forms; and I believe scarce anyone makes syllogisms in reasoning within himself. God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational. ....Syllogism comes after knowledge, and then a man has little or no need of it."
-john Locke 1690
"The present system of logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate the errors found on vulgar notions than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than useful."
-Francis Bacon
"And so we see that formal logic has come full circle: From the rules of an ancient parlor game, it developed into a system that dominated Western thinking for two thousand years-and then wound up as technique for feeding problems into automatic machines."
-Rudolf flesch
The Art of Clear Thinking
"I realized that regardless of persons or topics of discussion the same tricks and dodges recurred again and again and could easily be recognized."
-Schopehaur, On Logic and Dialectic
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Book: "The Development of Logic" by William Kneale and Martha Kneale
Book: "Goodbye Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search For a New Cosmology" by Keith Devlin
Book: "Logic Made Easy: How To Know When Language Deceives You" by Deborah J. Bennett
Book: "The Art of Clear Thinking" by Rudolf Flesch
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