Great Reads IV

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1662)

Always relevant.

1. "L’esprit croit naturellement, et la volonté aime naturellement; de sorte qu’a, faute de vrais objets, il faut qu'ils s'attachent aux faux." (It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.)
   
   
2. "On se fait une idole de la vérité même; car la vérité hors de la charité n’est pas Dieu, et est son image et une idole, qu’il ne faut point aimer, ni adorer." (We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol which we must neither love nor adore.)
   
   
3. "Nous ne nous tenons jamais au temps présent...si imprudents que nous errons dans le temps qui ne sont pas nôtres, et ne pensons point au seul qui nous appartient; et si vains, que nous songeons à ceux qui ne sont rien, et échappons sans réflexion le seul qui subsiste….Que chacun examine ses pensées, il les trouvera toutes occupées au passé et à l’avenir. Nous ne pensons presque point au présent; et si nous y pensons, ce n’est que pour en prendre la lumière pour disposer de l’avenir. Le présent n’est jamais notre fin: le passé et le sprésent sont nos moyens; le seul avenir est notre fin. Ainsi nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous espérons de vivre; et, nous disposant toujours à être heureux, il est inévitable que nous ne le soyons jamais." (We do not rest satisfied with the present. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists...Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.)
   
   
4. "Tout le monde fait le dieu enjugeant: “Cela est bon ou mauvais”; et s’affligeant ou se réjouissant trop des événements." (Each one creates his god, when judging, "This is good or bad"; and men mourn or rejoice too much at events.)
   
   
5. "Le christianisme est étrange. Il ordonne à l’homme de reconnaître qu’il est vil, et même abominable, et lui ordonne de vouloir être semblable à Dieu."(Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God.

Greats Reads III

Epictetus, The Golden Sayings

Like Sokrates and Jesus, Epictetus was too preoccupied with living life-- the original business of philosophy-- to write anything. Lucky for us he, also like Sokrates and Jesus, had some pretty enthused epigones. His Plato was Arrian of Nicomedia, to whom we how a whole argosy of practical advice on living. This book is a rather antiquated Harvard Classics edition translated by Plato translator Hastings Crossley and purchased by yours truly for $3.50.

1. A guide, on finding a man who has lost his way, brings him back to the right path—he does not mock and jeer at him and then take himself off. You also must show the unlearned man the truth, and you will see that he will follow. But so long as you do not show it him, you should not mock, but rather feel your own incapacity.
   
2. Considering all these things, the good and true man submits his judgment to Him that administers the Universe, even as good citizens to the law of the State. And he that is being instructed should come thus minded: How may I in all things follow the Gods; and, How may I rest satisfied with the Divine Administration; and, How may I become free? For he is free for whom all things come to pass according to his will, and whom none can hinder.
   
3. Even as the traveller asks his way of him that he meets, inclined in no wise to bear to the right rather than to the left (for he desires only the way leading whither he would go), so should we come unto God as to a guide; even as we use our eyes without admonishing them to show us some things rather than others, but content to receive the images of such things as they present unto us.
   
4. Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.
   
5.  If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, “he was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone."

Great Reads I: Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For

Žižek is not a faithful Marxist in several aspects, being equally indebted to Hegel and Lacan; nevertheless, he has remained a staunch atheist. Yet, tabling the point that Marx was far more sympathetic toward religion-- "an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering"-- than the infamous "opium" utterance (removed from context) credits him with, Žižek does break with orthodox Marxism in his defense of the Christian tradition as a force not only helpful but necessary to liberation. This, in essence, is the thesis of this relatively short book. This probably isn't the best place to start if you're new to Žižek, but then again, I don't think anywhere is. It demands far less knowledge of psychoanalysis than The Ticklish Subject, and-- this is the clincher for me-- less knowledge of German idealism than, say, The Fragile Absolute. Of course I can't take some of the pop culture references seriously (My Best Friend's Wedding, Kung-Fu Panda): it seems to be a far less annoying equivalent of pomo writers like David Foster-Wallace who think allusions to mass culture and long hair will render their poor writing less intolerably convoluted and pretentious. Still, as it's difficult to think of a cultural critic more widely-read by those outside the confines of academia, there is clearly a populist element here. I think.

1.  “In short, there is a way to avoid responsibility and/or guilt by, precisely, emphasizing one’s responsibility or too readily assuming one’s guilt in an exaggerated way, as in the case of the white male PC academic who emphasizes the guilt of racist phallogocentrism, and uses this admission of guilt as a stratagem not to face the way he, as a ‘radical’ intellectual, perfectly embodies the existing power relations towards which he pretends to be thoroughly critical.”
   
   
2. "Pre-Christian religions remain at the level of ‘wisdom’; they emphasize the insufficiency of every temporal finite object, and preach either moderation in pleasures or the withdrawal from temporal reality in favour of the True Divine Object which alone can provide Infinite Bliss. Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation. In this precise sense, Christianity is a ‘religion of Love’: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else.’"
   
3. "In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbour to my mirror-image, or to a step along the path of my own self-realization. Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbour-- the Neighbour remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. (Another aspect of this same constellation-- the reverse of the fact that the Jewish God is emptied of jouissance, reduced to a self-referential Name, to the subjectivity of a pure, non-substantial enunciator-- is that the only terrain on which to demonstrate your devotion to the Divine Law is that of ‘love for thy neighbour,’ of your social-ethical activity-- again, there is no direct short cut to contact with the Divine dimension through the ‘inner path’ of mystical spiritual self-realization….This injunction [to love thy neighbour] prohibits nothing; rather, it calls for an activity beyond the confines of the Law, enjoining us always to do more and more to ‘love’ our neighbour not merely in his imaginary dimension...not merely in his symbolic dimension (the abstract symbolic subject of Rights), but as the Other in the very abyss of the Real, the Other as a properly inhuman partner, ‘irrational,’ radically evil, capricious, revolting, disgusting...in short, beyond the Good."
   
4. "Here [in the Pagan cosmos] the supreme Good is the global balance of Principles, while Evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one Principle to the detriment of others (of the masculine Principle to the detriment of the feminine, of Reason to the detriment of Feeling…); the cosmic balance is then re-established through the work of Justice which, with its inexorable necessity, sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is ‘good’ when he acts in accordance with his special place in the social edifice...and Evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with this place. Christianity (and, in its own way, Buddhism) introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it...the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality...Buddha pointedly ignored castes and (after some hesitation, true) even sexual difference. And do not Christ’s scandalous words from Saint Luke’s Gospel point in the same direction: ‘If anyone come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-- yes, even his own life-- he cannot be my disciple’ (14:26)? Here, of course, we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic ‘substance’ that determines our place in the global Order of Things. "