Quotes About Philosophy

Somehow, to me at least, either of those logics seem to fit the enigmas of our existence, here in the cock-eyed room of primate perceptor organs, better than Aristotelian yes/no choices. Of course, if after long analysis, some experiences can finally be reduced to an Aristotelian choice, that is convenient. But starting from the Aristotelian either/or may be rather constricting or strangulating.

Existentialism dates back to Soren Kierkegaard, and, in his case, represented (1) a rejection of the abstract terms beloved by most Western philosophers, (2) a preference for defining words and concepts in relation to concrete individuals and their concrete choices in real-life situations, and (3) a new and tricky way of defending Christianity against the onslaughts of rationalists.

We have manufactured all "material things" out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, "From the beginning, there has never been a 'thing.'")

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

The "soul" or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the "creative Void" of the Taoists.

Pragmatism has a family resemblance to existentialism and phenomenology and arose out of the same social manifold. This philosophy, or method, derives chiefly from William James — a man so complex that his books land in the philosophy section of some bookstores and libraries, the psychology section elsewhere, and sometimes even appear in the religion section. Like existentialism, pragmatism rejects spooky abstractions and most of the vocabulary of traditional philosophy.

Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.

It is not nonsense. We are merely confronting infinity where we least expected to encounter it — in our own lonely selves.

Operationalism, created by Nobel physicist Percy W. Bridgman, attempts to deal with the common sense objections to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and owes a great deal to pragmatism and instrumentalism. Bridgman explicitly pointed out that common sense derives unknowingly from some tenets of ancient philosophy and speculation — particularly Platonic Idealism and Aristotelian essentialism — and that this philosophy assumes many axioms that now appear either untrue or unprovable.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, created by Niels Bohr (another Nobel winner), says much the same as operationalism, in even more radical language. According to Bohr, common sense and traditional philosophy both have failed to account for the data of Quantum Mechanics (and of Relativity) and we need to speak a new language to understand what physics has discovered.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

Husserl disagreed with traditional philosophy (and anticipated modern neurology) in denying that we passively receive impressions. He insisted on an intentionality of consciousness, in which we vary from intense alertness, to moderate alertness, to weak alertness, to the total passivity that Occidental philosophers regard as normal.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).

We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

It is possible that truth only exists when one has already specified the context or field within which one is speaking.

The only escape from this trap, as far as I can see, is to be skeptical about one's own skepticism: which is what I mean by the New Agnosticism.

Some call this Liberal Copenhagenism model agnosticism. Dr. Marcello Truzzi calls it zeteticism.

fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

Colin Wilson argues that when we say, Life is boring and meaningless, it means that we are boring and meaningless. Can there be any truth in this?

This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

To state our major thesis again in different words, Uncertainty, Indeterminacy and Relativity appear in modern science for the same reason they appear in modern logic, modern art, modern literature, modern philosophy and even modern theology. In this century, the human nervous system has discovered its own creativity, and its own limitations.

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not

See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don't work. A guy like me. I don't have religion or family that sort of thing. So you accept some system of order, and you stick to it.