Tag Archives: Philosophy

FIVE WISE LINES [March 2025]

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Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?

george bernard shaw, PygMalion

Refrain from talk of others’ shortcomings; don’t rest on your strengths.
[罔谈彼短; 靡恃己长.]

Thousand Character classic [千字文]

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

george bernard shaw, Man and superman

A child is the most reliable measure of time. His daily growth is proof of your daily ageing and decline. The child’s gains are your losses, and the closer a child gets to anything, the farther you withdraw, as though you were tied to one another on opposite spokes of a wheel and the wheel, without your noticing it, turns. Dawn for the child is dusk for you.

Otar chiladze, A Man was going down the road

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

George bernard shaw, Pygmalion

“Lethe” by Walter de la Mare [w/ Audio]

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Only the Blessed of Lethe's dews
   May stoop to drink. And yet,
 Were their Elysium mine to lose,
 Could I, sans all repining, choose
   Life's sorrows to forget?

PROMPT: Favorite People

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Daily writing prompt
Who are your favorite people to be around?
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People who take nothing seriously. A distant second goes to those who take everything seriously. And dead last, being people I avoid at all costs, are those who have a sizable set of ideas that they believe should be treated deadly seriously by everyone, while finding others’ serious stuff to be mockable.

Einstein said there are two ways of viewing the world, as if everything is a miracle or nothing is. I’m sure Einstein recognized that there were many people who, in fact, believed their own sect to have “legitimate miracles,” while believing the miracles of other sects were mere superstition. And what he was really getting at was that the latter stance is presumptuous, indefensible, and – quite frankly – ridiculous. Anyhow, my own spin is that there are two legitimate ways to view the world: to take nothing serious and to take everything seriously. All others are shades of petty narcissism.

[As I think of it, I guess I could have answered more simply with the single word: “Travelers.”]

“Worldly Place” by Matthew Arnold [w/ Audio]

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Even in a palace, life may be led well!
 So spake the imperial sage, purest of men,
 Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den
 Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,

Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
 And drudge under some foolish master's 
   ken
 Who rates us if we peer outside our pen --
 Match'd with a palace, is not this a hell?

Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,
 Who spoke these words, no shadow ever
   came;
 And when my ill-school'd spirit is aflame

Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
 I'll stop, and say: "There were no succour
   here!
 The aids to noble life are all within."

PROMPT: Budgeting

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Write about your approach to budgeting.

Don’t want much. Don’t need much. And hope for the best.

PROMPT: Power

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Daily writing prompt
If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
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That no individual would have the power to unilaterally change any law.

Because if we all had the power to change one law it would be chaos, like in “Bruce Almighty.”

BOOKS: “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” by Jonathan Culler

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Literary Theory: A Very Short IntroductionLiterary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan D. Culler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher site – OUP

This brief guide tries to bring some clarity to the question of what literary theory is, a question which is a great deal more convoluted that it is in science (or even the social sciences) where the scientific method shapes our understanding of the term. Often when one hears about literary theory it’s in the context of Marxists, Feminists, or Psychoanalysts, and one might be forgiven for wondering whether those scholars don’t have a discipline of their own (not to mention how much can a Marxist – for example – illuminate The Little Prince or the poetry of Li Bai.)

I thought the book was well-arranged to shed as much light on the topic as possible. Of its nine chapters, the first two explore competing ideas of what constitutes “theory” and “literature,” respectively. There is a chapter (Ch.3) that distinguishes the field from the overlapping discipline of cultural studies. The remaining six chapters cover topical components of the field, including: language / meaning, rhetoric / poetics, story, performative language, identity, ethics, and aesthetics.

This book does a good job of offering some clarity and has a sense of humor as it does so (notably through satirical cartoons that illustrate the book.) If you’re looking for a layman’s guide to the subject, this one is readable and insightful.

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FIVE WISE LINES FROM WILLIAM JAMES [Feb. 2025]

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Our view of the world is truly shaped
by what we decide to hear.

The greatest weapon against stress
is our ability to choose
one thought over another.

The art of being wise is
the art of knowing what to overlook.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor.
We despise anyone who elects to be poor
in order to simplify and save his inner life.

Whenever two people meet,
there are really six people present.
There is each man as he sees himself,
each man as the other person sees him,
and each man as he really is.

NOTABLE MENTIONS:

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats
are in our libraries, seeing the books
and hearing the conversation,
but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

BOOKS: “Practical Taoism” ed. / trans. by Thomas Cleary

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Practical TaoismPractical Taoism by Thomas Cleary
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Shambhala

Like a number of Eastern systems, Taoism is thought of in many different ways by many different people, and a few of those ways are fairly “out there.” To some, it is a philosophy. To others, it is a religion. To still others, it is a style of magic. By “practical Taoism” Cleary is suggesting that the many varied sources from which he drew snippets, assembling them together to make a coherent whole, reflect some of the more down-to-earth philosophy of “inner alchemy.” [Not to be confused with the “alchemy” in which lead is turned to gold, but sharing the central idea that methods exist to convert a low-quality entity into a high-quality one, but in the case of inner alchemy these methods are breathwork, meditation, and movement techniques that improve one’s vitality as a human being.]

The good news is that Cleary does collect a group of ideas that seem less arcane and cryptic than the average Taoist inner alchemy manual content (or, at least, they are translated so as to seem so.) The bad news is that the average Taoist inner alchemy manual was apparently pretty darn arcane and cryptic, such that even this selection isn’t exactly clear as a limpid stream. Some parts of it are straightforward, but one still has some work to do to make sense of what the original authors were trying to get across. [Some readers will enjoy that more than others.]

Presumably owing to the attempt to simplify through selection and translation, the book isn’t annotated, nor does it feature much ancillary material besides a relatively lengthy introduction to setup the reader with a contextual backdrop. So, there is not a lot of help to clarify ideas that are murky. (I do recognize the translator’s challenge in that there is only so much he can do to try to clarify ideas without imposing upon the authors’ intensions.)

I enjoyed, and learned from, this book — even if I didn’t always feel I was reading a “practical” guide to self-betterment.

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BOOKS: “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James

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The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureThe Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by Dr. William James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Project Gutenberg — Free Online

This book is now more than 120 years old and yet is still widely read and is still provoking thought about the nature of religious experiences and how they should be considered by academia. The book is a write-up of a series of twenty lectures that the famous American Philosopher-Psychologist, William James, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02.

There are a few things that impressed me about this book. First, James was skilled with language and clever in conveying ideas, resulting in a good bit of quotable material and stimulating ideas.

Second, James’s writings about Eastern practices and philosophies were impressively clear and faithful. In those days, there wasn’t a lot translated from Sanskrit, Pali, etc. and what had been translated was frequently done by outside academicians with no firsthand experience with Eastern systems — e.g. Hinduism or Buddhism. This meant that the writings about Eastern Philosophy and practices from those days were often contorted by a Western / Abrahamic frame in a way that distorted the true nature of those traditions. James seems to have gained at least some of his understanding from someone with enough practical experience to produce accurate descriptions. Furthermore, James avoids spewing myths and misapprehensions by being humble in stating what is merely his understanding. It should be noted that James does write much more about Abrahamic traditions (as one would expect given his direct experience,) but it’s hard to plumb the depths of mysticism without looking to the East where such practices reached such advanced states.

Finally, I was impressed with James’s ability to walk the line of believer and scholar in a way that was fair both to religion and the religious but also to the scientifically-minded rational sceptic. So much of what I read on the subject takes a vitriolic tone of strict opposition and often unfairly depicts the positions of the other side (to be fair, usually this seems to be because the critic doesn’t understand the views of the other side and so produces an interpretation of the opposing ideas conforming to their own worldview, rather than just lying to win.) [As was attributed to James as well as others, “…people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”]

I’d highly recommend this book for readers interested in philosophy of religion and the psychology of religious experience.

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