Our moment in history

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown: we can use today’s interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic — and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy.

Stop. Read. Think.

Meister Eckhart:

MEISTER ECKHART met a beautiful naked boy.
He asked him where he came from.
He said: “I come from God.”
Where did you leave him?
“In virtuous hearts.”
Where are you going?
“To God.”
Where do you find him?
“Where I part with all creatures.”
Who are you?
“A king.”
Where is your kingdom?
“In my heart.”
Take care that no one divide it with you!
“I shall.”
Then he led him to his cell.
Take whichever coat you will.
“Then I should be no king!”
And he disappeared.
For it was God himself–
Who was having a bit of fun.

(Legends. #1)

Friday Monty

Philosophers’ Olympic Football. “Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there.”

Baseball ethics

Steve Gimbel asks if it’s cheating for a catcher to “frame” a pitch. Join the discussion.

Gotta love new media

A very cool summary of a very provoking debate between Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the The Atlantic. A summary of the summary:

Over the last few days, Atlantic bloggers Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been engaged in a discussion and debate about the politics of identity. What started as an exploration of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor turned into a philosophical discourse on what it means to be liberal or conservative. Along the way, Sullivan and Coates defined and refined their views, reacting to each other, to their readers, and to commentators in the blogosphere. We found the dialogue fascinating, but increasingly hard to follow as multiple tabs opened on our browsers. So we’ve pulled the various strands of the conversation together, to give readers a glimpse at the evolution of ideas in real time.

—Chris Bodenner

The liberal arts as a catalyst for change and restoration of our principles

NFC

For your Friday:

Character is determined more by the
lack of certain experiences than by
those one has had.

Stop. Read. Think.

On this, the 500th post of this blog, I think I’ll include a couple of passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra that have been particularly influential in my life. Also, at this juncture, for anyone who is interested in Nietzsche, I recommend: Nietzsche, Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas.

Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.

In every Instant being begins; around every Here rolls the ball There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.

(Excerpt from “The Convalescent” in the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, by Friedrich Nietzsche.)

 

"One-sided tape" by bored-now

 

Courage after all is the best slayer–courage that attacks; for in every attack there is sounding brass.

But in the human being is the most courageous animal, and so it overcame every animal. With sounding brass it even overcame every pain, but human pain is the deepest pain.

Courage also slays dizziness at the abyss; and where do human beings not stand at the abyss? Is seeing itself not–seeing the abyss?

Courage is the best slayer; courage slays even pity. But pity is the deepest abyss, and as deeply as human beings look into life, so deeply too they look into suffering.

But courage is the best slayer, courage that attacks; it slays even death, for it says: “Was that life? Well then! One More Time!”

In such a saying, however, there is much sounding brass. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

(My emphasis. Excerpt from “On the Vision and the Riddle” from Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, by Friedrich Nietzsche.)

Stop. Read. Think.

A new feature. It will not have a consistent posting time. It will happen when it does.

There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have been dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it appears to relate to this subject.

Saturn grew wear of sitting alone, or with none but the great Uranus or Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he would act again, but he made nothing more, but went on creating the race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, ‘a new work, O Saturn! the old is not good again.’

Saturn replied. ‘I fear. There is not only the alternative of making and not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I put forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo. Therefore I do what I have done; I hold what I have got; and so I resist Night and Choas.’

‘O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, ‘thou canst not hold thine own, but by making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’

‘I see,’ rejoins Saturn, ‘thou art in league with Night, thou art become an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite me with hatred. I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’–’I appeal to Fate also,’ said Uranus, ‘must there not be motion?’–But Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of the sun, and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature froze, the things that were made went backward, and, to save the world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn.

This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on politics between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to us. It is ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement. ‘That which is was made by God,’ saith Conservatism. ‘He is leaving that, he is entering this other;’ rejoins Innovation.

Christianity and the post-modern condition

"Good Friday" by Swamibu

An interesting read about Roger Haight, a Jesuit priest and scholar, who wrote a book called Jesus Symbol of God for which he has been censured by the Roman Catholic Church.

Jesus Symbol of God addressed the postmodern critiques of Christianity that are of concern to North American Catholics. Haight was affirming the continued relevance of Christianity to the contemporary philosophical and social context that has posed such challenges to the legitimacy of certain traditional Christian claims. A lack of adequate response to these challenges has resulted in many people leaving the Church. Haight saw himself as responding to reasonable critique with a reasonable response—he was doing what he was supposed to do as a priest and as a theologian.

His student, Jeremy Kirk, does an interview discussing his mentor:

The need to recognize pluralism is not going to decrease in an increasingly globalized and interdependent world that faces increasingly complex and communal crises. If Christianity is still to serve as a resource for ethical reflection in light of historical crises (which I deeply hope it can), it must be true to this contemporary pluralistic and globalized context.

Theologians like Haight are doing the work that will keep Catholicism relevant to particular contemporary contexts, but it comes at the price of being disliked and rejected by parts of the very churches they seek to serve. A colleague at Union, Sarosh Koshy, described the Church as a ship and the theologian as one who periodically has to get out of the ship and push it off a sandbar. Sometimes in order to do this, the theologian gets left behind. Such is the case, at the moment, with Haight. But considering the impact of his work, I do not think he is lonely on that sandbar. Not with so many of us trying to join him.

Child at play

No way you haven’t seen “Nietzsche Family Circus” before… but this is a pretty good one for me today. Thought I’d share.

Man’s maturity: to have regained the
seriousness that he had as a child at
play.

Brooks, Hilzoy and ethics

Update: Mathew Yglesias weighs in.

"Venus Williams" by sufw

Hilzoy takes a swat at Brooks’ faulty reasoning from this column:

There has been some interesting science recently on the nature of moral decision-making. But the research Brooks cites does not show what he seems to think it does, since the question how we make moral judgments on the fly is not, and does not answer, questions about the role of reasoning in morality.

Consider an analogy: if you’re a good tennis player, you make a lot of judgments about the future trajectories of tennis balls. You are probably not aware of making them: you see your opponent hit the ball, and start running to meet it without thinking. Moreover, it’s very lucky that we have the ability to do this: if we did have to stop and work out the trajectory of each shot our opponents took, we would never manage to hit them at all, and there would be no more tennis.

Suppose that someone took note of this fairly obvious fact, and wrote:

“The rise and now dominance of this perceptual approach to mechanics is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way physics is conceived by most people. It challenges the Einsteinian tradition, with its hyper-rational formulae and equations. It challenges those scientists who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.”

That would be pretty dumb, right? Just because we do not work out the future path of the ball using equations when we are playing tennis does not mean that those equations are pointless, or that there is no role for physics. It just means something we already knew: that whatever the point of physics is, it is not: being used by Venus Williams while she is playing.

‘Knocketh, knocketh,’ sayeth the Lord

This is too good (Ha ha… God pun):

It all came to me when I was teaching a class in the philosophy of religion at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. We were discussing Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, which contends that an all-perfect being has to exist. The notion of perfection was to take all good qualities and extend them to an infinite degree. And then I realized, hey a sense of humor is a good thing, right? If you were trapped on a deserted island with someone, would you prefer someone who could make you laugh? Of course, but if you look at any of the standard Holy Books, and Sacred Scripture, there are no jokes. There’s no “‘Knocketh, knocketh,’ sayeth the Lord. And the angel did reply, ‘Who is there?’ And the Lord did say, ‘I am the Lord thy God.’ And the angel did say, ‘I am the Lord thy God who?’ And the Lord did quip, ‘I told you not to take my name in vain…ahh, got you again.’ And the Lord never grew tired of that joke. And the angels did roll their eyes.” Nothing like that. I mean if this God is supposed to be all-perfect, then he’d not only be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, he’d also be all-funny. But no.

Arguments for and against God

Good read. And thorough:

The traditional arguments have much to teach us, but concentrating on them can disguise a simple but important point. As Anselm and Paley both recognized, the devout are not exactly holding their collective breath. For the most part, they do not believe that God exists on the basis of any argument. How they know that God exists, if they do, is itself unknown—the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place.

(Danke: Sullivan)

Participating in the divine

When in the act of creation we have a task, but the result does not come from us. We facilitate it, but do not provide it. Emerson talked about this. Nietzsche talked about this. David James Duncan has talked about this. And now Elizabeth Gilbert. She gets it.

more about “Participating in the divine“, posted with vodpod