The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.
— William Butler Yeats
‘As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural”, quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilisable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves.
Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.’
— Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The middle class non entity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus rows of well-to-do houses with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wondeless crapulous civilisation
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
➜ The Self
I am found of how philosopher Daniel Dennett deals with this problem of perceived, but illusionary selves. He attributes these philosophical problems to the fact that often we think in all-or-nothing terms. Either the self exists or it doesn’t. Dennett thinks that this line of thought leads to the conceptual pitfalls and muddles that arise in thought experiments such as the teleportation case. Under Dennetts view, the self is best viewed as a “center of narrative gravity”. Essentially, we build up a series of micro-stories about ourselves and our place in the world and this autobiographical conglomeration gives rise to the illusion of a central self simply due to the fact that all these stories happen to a single body. However, this “bundle view” of the self has important philosophical ramifications simply because it calls into question ideas concerning responsibility and agency. As Dennett phrases it, “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them;they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source”.
The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-hold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.
— Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
I gave up long ago saying everything I thought (somehow I even wonder whether there is such thing as a though) I fell back on writing out in prose. All that remains now is writing, writing by itself, grasping it’s way with words, searching and describing, meticulously, in depth, hanging on, hammering out reality, rejecting compromise.
— J.M.G. Le Clezio
I will have to say this much for the old ‘hard’ Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or — I would prefer to say — discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
— Christopher Hitchens
I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m the only healthy person. That’s bad off, isn’t it?
— Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so people will live longer yet only the madmen ask why
Yearning for a new orientation for an age that has lost it’s bearings
