• In the preface, according to the author, if you read or better study spinoza's ethics in little pieces at a time, think and really let the ideas settle within and then read some commentary like Pollock's Spinoza or Martineau's Study of Spinoza and again re-read the book : it will be a new book to you. and after the second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy. Sounds pretty compelling!
  • "To be a philosopher" said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."
  • Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
  • In the chapter on Bacon, some lines by Virgil are quoted "Happy the man who has learned the causes of things, and has put under his feet all fears and inexorable fate and the noisy strife of the hell of greed"!
  • Those who wish to seek out the causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. - Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
  • "When you say that if I allow not in God, the operations of seeing, hearing, observing, willing, and the like...you know not what sort of God mine is, I thence conjecture that you [his correspondent] believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the attributes aforesaid. I do not wonder at it; for I believe that a triangle , if it could speak, would in like manner say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle would say that God is eminently circular, and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God." - Spinoza. bulls eye!
  • Pleasure and pain are the satisfaction or the hindrance of an instinct; they are not the causes of our desires, but their results; we do not desire things because they give us pleasure; but they give us pleasure because we desire them; and we desire them because we must. There is, consequently, no free will; the necessities of survival determine instinct, instinct determines desire, and desire determines thought and action. "The decisions of the mind are nothing save desires, which vary according to various dispositions.""There is in the mind no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined in willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this by another, and so on to infinity.""Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volition and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire" Spinoza you beauty! page 229!
  • "I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions.... not as vices of human nature, but properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder and the like to the nature of the atmosphere" - Spinoza. 'Ethics' is waiting for you man!!
  • In the intro section of the chapter on Kant, Durant says "He thought everything out carefully before acting; and therefore remained a bachelor all his life long." such a lovely laugh!
  • "Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity. Whence this order, this sequence, this unity? Not from the things themselves; for they are known to us only by sensations that come through a thousand channels at once in disorderly multitude; it is our purpose that put order and sequence and unity upon this importunate lawlessness; it is ourselves, our personalities, our minds, that bring light upon these seas." Brilliant stuff from the chapter on Immanuel Kant.
  • One of the first reviews of Critique of The Pure Reason by Reinhold is quoted: The Critique of The Pure Reason has been proclaimed by the dogmatists as the attempt of a skeptic who undermines the certainty of all knowledge;-by the skeptics as a piece of arrogant presumption that undertakes to erect a new form of dogmatism upon the ruins of previous systems;-by the supernaturalists as a subtly plotted artifice to displace the historical foundations of religion, and to establish naturalism without polemic;-by the naturalists as a new prop for the dying philosophy of faith;-by the materialists as an idealistic contradiction of the reality of matter;-by the spiritualists as an unjustifiable limitation of all reality to the corporeal world, concealed under the name of the domain of experience. This review in itself is absolutely brilliant!
  • In the chapter on Schopenhauer the authors writes "Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage is the attrition of love, and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry."
  • We like to believe that all history is a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we are the salt and summit; but this notion of progress is mere conceit and folly. "In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it." The quoted sentence is from Schopenhauer and the rest by Durant. This passage has ended up affirming the pessimism which has been haunting me for years.
  • He had a philosophers disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen. On Spencer.
  • "The life is worth living," Santayana says, "is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions." Sigh of all the melancholic souls condensed into one sentence by Santayana!
  • "What is the part of wisdom" Santayana asks; and answers - "To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are!"
  • In the final section of final chapter on John Dewey Durant Writes: On his desk, when he died, there lay a paper on which he had written his last, and perhaps his most characteristic, sentences: ""There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell."
aug 2 2013 ∞
oct 9 2013 +