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| QUOTATIONS 1283-1299 |
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| 1283. There is this one little problem with Plato's proposition that philosophers, as the best qualified, should rule the World, namely that they, as a rule, don't give a damn about the World as it is and, given a choice, would rather have nothing to do with it, and for one simple reason - the reality like an ocean serf is constantly washing away the sand castles of their ideas and hypotheses. For how else could it be explained that in the midst of the scientific revolution of the Eighteenth Century and a hundred years after Newton had formulated the ground-breaking law of universal gravitation, a law that bound terrestrial and celestial motions together in a synthesis of stunning generality and mathematical precision and accuracy, Kant, who is considered by many to be the greatest of modern philosophers, continued to regard the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable, the "things in themselves", maintaining, thus, essentially the same epistemological position as Plato who lived 2200 years before, in the times of widely held beliefs, even among the most educated, that a huge sphere, bearing the stars permanently fixed to its inner surface, moves around the Earth at its centre in a daily rotation. In addition, to account for the solar, lunar, and planetary motions, it was assumed that inside the star sphere there were many interconnected transparent spheres revolving in a similar manner. The willful epistemological "blindness"exhibited by most philosophers, and not only at the dawn of the true scientific knowledge but in the very midst of its triumphant flourishing was not, however, an accidental oversight but rather strenuously self-serving undertaking. For the growing empirical and hard scientific knowledge was not only undermining the traditional religious beliefs but was also making the classical philosophy no more relevant than religion itself as a tool to explain the world. And despite the enormous efforts of Philosophy to separate itself from Religion by claiming to be driven by Reason as opposed to Faith, when faced with the possibility of extinction or irrelevance, philosophers, like their religious "adversaries", resorted to the tactics of trying to hide their heads into the sand of the constructs of pure reason which would gradually become more and more unreasonable. And no matter how hard they were trying to present the transcending of the immediate reality as a noble elevation, it was ultimately the act of a cowardly escapism, for while the reality continues to exist, it is the one who transcends it that parishes. 1284. Before George Orwell in his brilliant satire of totalitarianism Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) gave us such unforgettable examples of Newspeak as "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH", Hegel had written quite seriously in Phenomenology of Mind (1807) the following: "what tastes sweet is properly, or inwardly in the thing, sour", "what is there black is here white", "an act which in appearance is a crime would in its inner nature be capable of being really good", etc., etc. So, it is somewhat unfair to blame the Twentieth Century for the invention of Newspeak and Doublethink, since they must be as old as Civilization itself. 1285. I agree in principle with some of the modern thinkers that one of the unforseen consequences of the Enlightenment was a certain unhappiness and "sadness". But I don't think that the only or even the chief causes of this malady were the unfulfilled promises and frustrated expectations it had brought in its trail. Rather the unhappiness (and I'm talking here about the general unhappiness of the masses and not of selected group of intellectuals) caused by the European Enlightenment could be compared with today's unhappiness with "political correctness. For both imposed certain limitations on one's freedom to give expression to one's prejudices, racism and bigotry, and drastically curtailed one's opportunity to follow one's almost instinctual murderous impulses. And like all the outside or even internalized limitations on our freedom to express ourselves physically and emotionally without restrain, it brings general dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Civilization will always produce certain amount of discontent. For one thing, the Enlightenment deprived the European Gentiles of the "pleasure" of persecuting and killing the Jews with impunity (in the same way as Whites of American Southern States mere deprived after the abolition of slavery of the "pleasure" to persecute and kill Negroes at will). Suddenly, their favourite for centuries pastime of tormenting the defenceless Jews, that used to give any cowardly weakling, every scum and refuse of society the intoxicating feeling and joy of courage ,power and superiority, was out of fashion - it was no longer the thing the supposedly enlightened people can indulge in and yet feel righteous(for everybody, no matter how despicable his actions might be needs to feel righteous). Not that the withdrawal from the centuries of addiction to unbridled cruelty toward the Jews was easy - the old habits die hard. There were recurrent, again and again, attempts to reverse the trend of tolerance at least in area of antisemitism. The most infamous of them was the Holocaust when, after 150 years of Enlightenment-imposed constrain, the German fascists, who saw the Enlightenment as a massive conspiracy by the ignoble Jews to escape a well-deserved punishment and to deprive the noble Aryans of their inherent right (sanctified, by the way, by 2000 years of Christianity) to torment them, declared once again the "open season" on Jews. And it is not a great secret that European Gentiles took to this long denied to them activity with the vengeance and passion of a recovering alcoholic who is suddenly told that there is nothing wrong with the desire to drink, and it is actually good for you. I personally would like to believe that this was the last gasp of "happiness" they were allowed to experience, and look with hope toward the centuries of their unhappiness and sadness. For if enlightenment deprives people of enjoyment of torturing and killing their favourite victims, like Jews in Europe or Blacks in the American South, and causes unhappiness and sadness of the potential murderers, I can live with it happily ever after. For I prefer the sight of an unhappy tiger to the cry of anguish of a being slaughtered lamb. And though the technological progress should not be equated with the enlightenment (witness Japan in Thirties which was certainly technologically advanced but could hardly be called enlightened), here much maligned by modern thinkers technology can actually help. For we all know quite well what the masses (most of intellectuals are not excepted) ultimately want above everything else - bread and circus. And thanks to modern technology there is more bread then ever, and the global village created by it is by now equipped by the global circus in a shape of TV screen which delivers daily to the billions enough mayhem and murder to satisfy any vicarious need for torturing and killing one's fellow human beings. So, let's be optimistic and hope that more and more people may discover that watching somebody else doing the killing on TV screen is almost as exciting but much less dirty and tiresome than doing it yourself. For isn't it like eating a cake and having it too? 1286. Since no one can avoid falling down, both literally and figuratively, every now and then, the trick is to learn how to do it with getting hurt the least. 1287. Now, how about seldom, if ever, mentioned economic interests of American industry lying behind McCarthyism and vicious persecution of all, be it communists, unionists, or any left-leaning, pro-working class, affiliated with no political party or organization activists, who could potentially threaten its absolute dominance over the American workers, the dominance that had reached its peak during the unprecedented unemployment and brutal union bashing of Twenties and Thirties. When in 1945 several millions of American men returned home after having spent four years risking life and limb "in defence of freedom and democracy" they were not in a mood to put up with appalling working conditions they had left behind before going to war, when they were forced by the decade of the worst depression in American history to take any job, at any pay, just to work. But now, after the victory abroad they were coming home to reap the rewards and to claim their right to a decent job with a decent pay. And no police goons, who are only brave when they outnumber a defenceless mob, could subdue the battle hardened veterans. Faced with this newly acquired workers militancy the American industrialists had to find the way how to beat American workers back into submission and to deny their economic demands by other means than the brutal force used so widely and so successfully during The Depression. And the "Threat of Communism" was just what they were looking for. By accusing anyone who demanded better working conditions, better wages, union protection, etc. of being "red" they effectively deflected and almost paralysed the workers' movement toward the expansion of their economic rights. Thus McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria in America after the War had very little to do with the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and a lot with the economico-political threat the American working class presented to the American Capitalism. And the fact that the American employees are in the worst position vis-a-vis their employers than in any other industrialized country is a clear testimony that by using the phantom of the Communist Threat the American capitalists won the internal war against the American workers. 1288. External circumstances and extraneous matters notwithstanding, it is one's own body which is primarily responsible for one's peace of mind. And though a healthy body does not necessarily result in a healthy spirit (there are too many perfectly physically healthy monsters around to disabuse even the strongest believer in the ancient wisdom of the truth of this spurious Latin dictum "mens sana in corpore sano") the unhealthy body invariably deprives one of the feeling of well-being so essential to one's peace of mind. 1289. The history of a relationship between philosophy and science resembles that of a parent and a child, or a teacher and a student. For as long as science remained in its infancy the speculative philosophy with thousands of years of hard thinking behind it felt vastly superior toward and, consequently, very fond and supportive of the nascent science. But when, from the Sixteenth Century and on, the concrete scientific knowledge began to increase rapidly while philosophy continued to be stuck in the essentially same abstract problems it apparently still could not solve despite the enormous amount of energy spent through the millennia, the attitude of philosophy towards science started to change, and instead of support and encouragement turned to that of resentment and jealousy. And the more science developed the greater these resentment and jealousy became. Painfully aware by now of its own limitations (read Hume "Treatise on Human Understanding", or Kant "Critique of Pure Reason") and faced with the exponential growth of hard scientific knowledge, philosophy began to impose on science the quite unreasonable demands of perfection, which it had so spectacularly failed to achieve itself, and to devote a lot of efforts to remind the triumphantly optimistic science of its own limitations. Seemingly unable to grow anymore itself, philosophy had been desperately trying ever since to convince science, which was growing with ever accelerating speed and leaving it more and more behind, that all growth, philosophically speaking, has its limitations and that absolute knowledge is unattainable - the rather disingenuous undertaking on the part of philosophy, to say the least. Thus, from being up to the Seventeenth Century a progressive force, the classical speculative philosophy after the onset of the scientific revolution turned into a clearly regressive one. 1290. Because we are all born with free will, the submission to the will of the others is as unnatural as forcing water to flow contrary to its natural inclination, and the human spirit, like water, is forever looking and finding various ways to proceed in its normal, unadulterated direction. Now, since women were always economically, politically and socially powerless, they are accustomed to follow orders and make, most of the times, excellent subordinates in a working place. But not so in their personal lives. For to compensate for the forced obedience on the job (which they consider not that important, to begin with) women develop very strong behavioural patterns, which they learn to steadfastly maintain though skilfully disguise. Therefore, it much easier to control woman's separate actions, especially in the impersonal sphere, than to affect her deeply ingrained personal traits. Unlike men, who are so much preoccupied with winning each and every one of the numerous fights and skirmishes our daily existence is so full of, women see Life as a continuous War. Therefore they don't mind to concede this or that minor defeat in some insignificant battle, for theirs is the much larger goal - to win the War and they would persevere and endure for as long as it takes to get it. Once a woman makes up her mind it is next to impossible to convince her to change it. She will proceed anyway, come hell or high water. The argumentative skills, which men value so much as a testimony of one's superiority, means nothing to women. They don't waste their time on idle arguing but do what they intend, regardless. And then let men to figure out how to deal with the consequences. Don't they always have a solution to every problem, these strong and so smart men? 1291. If Death is the magnifying glass which allows us to see Life in all its true colours and dimensions, then the more often one faces death (without actually dying, of course) the clearer his vision of life becomes. 1292. The more I observe how Christians treat Jews and how Jews treat Christians, the more I convinced that only a Jew can become a true Christian ( as it was, by the way, originally intended). For while to offer the left cheek after the right had been slapped, or to love one's enemy comes almost naturally to the majority of the Jews, such magnanimity seems to be forever out of reach for most of Christians. 1293. In the past it took a grown up man, in the prime of his physical conditioning to wield a sword or throw a spear. But nowadays to pull the trigger of a machine gun or of a rocket launcher the strength of even 10 years old boy would suffice. And this difference in the starting age and, consequently, in numbers of the available "soldiers" is what primarily makes the modern warfare, (especially of either inter-ethnic kind like in Jugoslavia or Rwanda, or of guerrilla type like in Latin America) so much more protracted and so thoroughly destructive. Many more than in the past combatants have to be maimed and killed before the war can be decisively won or lost. And the rebuilding, after such an utter devastation, both material and human, takes accordingly much more time. 1294. Dear Lord, thank you for being so kind to us. First You created the Jews that we could witness, from a safe distance, what the real suffering looks like. And now you added the AIDS victims so that we can see, while still being alive, what Death is all about. 1295. I would like to ask those homosexuals (both gays and lesbians) who are trying to put down the traditional family and some times refer condescendingly to heterosexuals as "breeders" a simple but fundamental question: "Do they value their lives?" The question is admittedly rhetorical. Of course they do, as much as any human being and perhaps even more. For they seem to enjoy it with gusto and abandon which the rest of us quite honestly often envy (it is not by accident that adjective "gay", which originally meant cheerful, marry, vivacious, happy, became a noun and displaced almost completely the pejorative term "homosexual"). And since they obviously value their lives, do they fully realize and willing to admit that it is a product of a union of male and female, the scorned heterosexuals, the primitive "breeders", and , in most cases, of the despised "traditional family". So, how can one denigrate what had made him or her, the very reason of one's existence? It isn't just ungratefulness, it's a sheer madness. 1296. The deciphering (a perfectly appropriate verb to describe the process in which, by Hegel's own admission, "so much has to be read over and over before it can be understood") the often almost unintelligible writings of the majority of philosophers can be so mentally exhausting that at the end a reader has literally no intellectual energy left to respond with his own arguments and ideas. Now, considering that an average book in philosophy presents a reader with the chain of seldom substantiated assertions (Hegelian "quantity is pure being", "the absolute is pure quantity", etc., immediately come to mind) which a reader is supposed to accept as axiomatic, I wonder sometimes if such a way of writing is not, at least partly, intentional in order to wear down yet another potential opponent(most philosophical writings are clearly polemical), to drain his critical capabilities and thus to convince (or rather to win) if not by the strength of the arguments, then due to the shear fatigue of the reader. 1297. I remember that as a child I would have rather faced the accusations of doing something "wrong" than of doing it under the influence of my friends. For I was much more sensitive to the insult of the second accusation than to the injury of the first. And to tell the truth I still am. For being told that neither your action nor your thoughts are really yours amounts to the denial of one's individuality and self-worth, and few things in life could be as distressful to a person as that. Moreover, I don't think that in this respect I am that much different from the majority of people. For whether "good" or "bad", everyone wants to believe that he is such on his own and not just an empty bottle which could be filled at will with somebody else's wine. 1298. The many books I've read (all written by men) in which a woman, invariably young and beautiful, the object of the main protagonist's half-conscious longings and semi-formed desires, makes the first move, takes charge and puts everything in the right place, and the feeling of disappointment they've produced, that such things had never happen to me (for I have to admit the similar thoughts occasionally cross my mind) brought me to a conclusion that this must be the common male fantasy. Moreover, it clearly indicates that most men are tired of being permanently saddled with a part of a pursuer and a conqueror in romantic relationships and would have actually preferred the gender roles to have been reversed, at least occasionally. 1299. The reason that so many teen-aged, and not so teen-aged girls are attracted emotionally, even erotically, to the "stars" is that they, unlike men who live under the illusion of having choice, know both intuitively and from experience that in reality they would (or already did) have to settle for someone much, much less glamorous and to date, marry, have children and spend their lives with men they hardly like, never mind love. So, why not to live it up in the fantasy world of mass entertainment and satisfy vicariously the ever present need for romance and excitement. |
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