Mechanism

A man ever considered with purely earthly respects, appears to be reaching peaks of moral and physical perfection. His skills coalesce delightfully to lead him to that goal. His senses more perfect than in lower species, his memory so amazing, that presents him with various objects, not allowing to be mixed up, his ability to judge, allowing to classify them and compare, his mind, every day discovering new relations between the two, everything works, leading him toward new discoveries, and strengthening his dominance.

Meanwhile, among his conquests and victories, neither the enthralled world, nor established social organizations, nor announced laws, nor fulfilled needs, nor multiplied pleasures are enough for his soul. A desire continues to grow in him that demands something else. He examined, penetrated, tamed and adorned his earthly refuge, but his eyes look for another realm. He became the master of visible and finite nature, but desires the nature invisible and without borders. He took care of things which, the more complex and artificial they are, of the higher caliber they seem. He learned and counted everything, but feels discouraged that he only deals with interests and calculations.

Some inner voice shouts inside of him and tells him that all these things are just a mechanism, more or less brilliant, more or less perfect, but inadequate to be a finale or a limitation of his existence, and that what he took as the goal, was only a number of means.

Benjamin Constant – On religion

Everything but a Feeling

LichtenbergWhen at different periods in life one speculates about solipsism (which considers all material bodies as nothing more than just our ideas), it usually happens as follows:

  1. First, as boys, we laugh at the absurdity of this idealism.
  2. A little bit later, this theory seems to us witty and presumable; we discuss it eagerly with people who in terms of age or education, are still in the first period.
  3. At a more mature age, we consider it to be very accurate, we annoy ourselves and others with it, but we think it is unworthy of disproving and against nature. Man believes that it is not worth brooding over it, because it seems to him that he had thought enough about it.
  4. In the end, however, after deeper deliberation this idealism becomes the truth quite invincible for him.

Please only think that even if there are any items outside of our mind, we know nothing about their objective reality. Everything we receive is solely through our impressions and ideas. The belief that these impressions and ideas are caused in our mind by external objects, is after all nothing more than just our idea again. There is no way to overcome idealism, since we would always be only idealists, even if there were material objects around us, because we could know absolutely nothing of the essence of these objects.

Everything is but a feeling; knowledge of external things would be a contradiction: man cannot go beyond himself. By judging that we perceive material external objects, we are clearly in the wrong, because we only see ourselves, i.e. our imagination. Nothing in the world can we know except ourselves and except changes which occur in us. Also, we cannot feel for someone else or as them, as we say sometimes: we only feel for ourselves. This sentiment seems strange, but on closer deliberation ceases to be such. No one loves a father, mother, wife and children, but only loves pleasant feelings that these people cause; these feelings flatter either our pride or our self-love; we love ourselves, i.e. ourselves in someone, but not that someone. It cannot be otherwise, anyone who denies this assertion, does not understand it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – Vermischte Schriften

Pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose plutôt que rien?

A belief in the existence of the material world is impossible to justify using reason. When I get lost in thoughts on that subject, what happens to me always when I wonder about it, I come to a conclusion that everything we see is a mere phenomenon, that there is nothing outside of us that relates to our fantasies, and I always go back to this question of the Indian king: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Jean d’Alembert – Letters to Voltaire

Convenience

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. Ita is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain.

Erwin Schrodinger

The Wall

I got up, walked back and forth, and, to change my ideas, I began to think about my past life. A crowd of memories came back to me pell‐mell. There were good and bad ones ‐ or at least I called them that before. There were faces and incidents. That made me smile. How madly I ran after happiness, after women, after liberty. Why? I wanted to free Spain, I admired Pi y Margall, I joined the anarchist movement, I spoke in public meetings: I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.  

At that moment I felt that I had my whole life in front of me and I thought, “It’s a damned lie.” It was worth nothing because it was finished. I wondered how I’d been able to walk, to laugh with the girls: I wouldn’t have moved so much as my little finger if I had only imagined this. My life was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn’t pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm.

Jean Paul Sartre – The Wall

In Captivity of Habits

Pure experience informs us about permanent sequences of facts; but does not tell us that one fact results from the other. If you pull the trigger of a shotgun, you will hear a shot; but what we really find is that there has been a shot after pulling the trigger, not that it arose from, not that was its effect. How it happens, that one fact follows the other, is not given by the experience; so if we have to stick closely to the experience, we must renounce causal connections, and be content with just setting permanent sequences. It was the most unexpected and unique thesis by Hume.

There is, therefore, no basis to recognize causal relationships as necessary: ​​neither rational, nor experiential. And yet in life and in science we always recognize them, and we expect that when the cause happened, inevitably too the effect will happen. Such attitude of mind requires explanation; it was, in turn, a new issue for Hume: why, although we have no basis for this, we recognize the existence of causal relationships?

We do this because we rely on previously gathered experience and we move this experience ahead. So far, after pulling the trigger of a shotgun, the shot fell, so we think it will continue to be the same. But in doing so, we no longer stay within the limits of pure experience, but we cross them. These two sentences are by no means equivalent: “I found that this object here is accompanied by such a result” and “I expect that other objects, which, as far as we know them, are similar to that, will be accompanied by similar effects.” From one of these sentences to the other we would go only through reasoning, but is there such reasoning? Do we have the right to extend into the future our previously gathered experience?

There is no reasoning, which entitles to extend the existing experience into the future. There is no contradiction in the assumption that although certain event had some result, a similar event will have a different result. Moving the experience to the future is not done by reasoning, but by a factor of a different kind altogether; the conclusions from cause to effect are not a matter of reasoning. These are the matter of habit.

Constant repetition of certain relations changes nothing in the nature of these relations, but changes our attitude towards them. In the mind, it produces the tendency to expect further repetitions. Since we are used that after pulling the trigger, a shot falls, we think it will continue to be so. But the basis for this conclusion is purely subjective. Although this inclination has a certain objective basis, namely regularity in the occurrence of the relations previously observed; but precisely this basis alone is insufficient to draw conclusions. The actual basis for the conclusion is not objective, but subjective, and it is emotional, not conceptual. The inference here is an act of faith, not the act of knowledge.

The sense of necessity is not the basis for our conclusions, but their outcome; the greater it is, the more conclusions we have drawn. The search for causal conclusions is the instinct that nature has given us. It gave us the instinct without giving the understanding. We conclude about future things without knowing the basis of our conclusions, just as we can move without the knowledge of muscles. But instinct is not knowledge.

Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz – History of Philosophy Volume II Modern Philosophy until 1830.

How to Win Friends?

Fundamental Techniques In Handling People:

  1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
  2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
  3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six Ways To Make People Like You:

  1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
  2. Smile.
  3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
  4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
  5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
  6. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

Win People To Your Way Of Thinking:

  1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
  2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
  3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
  4. Begin in a friendly way.
  5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
  6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
  7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
  8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
  9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
  10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
  11. Dramatize your ideas.
  12. Throw down a challenge.

How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment:

  1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
  2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
  3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
  4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
  5. Let the other person save face.
  6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.
  7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
  8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
  9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Dale Carnegie – How To Win Friends And Influence People

The Cult of Work

A strange mania governs the working class of all countries in which capitalist civilization rules, a mania that results in the individual and collective misery that prevails in modern society. This is the love of work, the furious mania for work, extending to the exhaustion of the individual and his descendants. The parsons, the political economists, and the moralists, instead of contending against this mental aberration, have canonized work. In capitalist society, work is the cause of mental deterioration and physical deformity. Contemplate the wild savage, before missionaries of commerce and the traveling salesman for articles of faith have yet corrupted him with Christianity, syphilis, and the dogma of work, and then compare our strained machine slaves with him.

If we wish to find a trace of the primitive beauty of man in our civilized Europe, it is necessary to go to the nations in which politico-economic prejudice has not yet eradicated the hatred of work. To the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not yet been killed, work is the worst slavery. The Greeks also, during the period of their greatest bloom, had but disdain for work; the slave alone was permitted to labor, the free man knew but physical exercise and play of the intellect. Jehova, the Old Testament God of the Jews, sets his worshipers the most sublime example: after six days’ work, he rests for all eternity.

When the employees shall have thoroughly liberated themselves from the vice that governs them and degrades their nature, it is not to demand the famous Rights of Man which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to proclaim the Right to Work which is only the right to misery, but to forge an iron law forbidding every one to work more than three hours a day. But how can a manly decision be expected from a proletariat corrupted by capitalist morals! Like Christ, the embodied suffering of the slavery of ancient times, our proletariat, men, women and children, for a century has climbed the rough Mount Calvary of suffering.

O, Laziness, have thou mercy upon this eternal misery! O, Laziness, mother of the arts and the noble virtues, be thou balsam for the pains of mankind!

Paul Lafargue – The Right To Be Lazy

The Church

“What is ‘The Church’?” asked Beelzebub severely, reluctant to believe that his servants were cleverer than he.

“Well, when people tell lies and feel that they won’t be believed, they always call God to witness and say, ‘By God, what I say is true!’ That, in substance, is ‘The Church,’ but with this peculiarity: that those who recognize themselves as being ‘The Church’ become convinced that they cannot err, and so whatever nonsense they may utter they can never recant it.

‘The Church’ is constituted in this way: men assure themselves and others that their teacher, God, to ensure that the law he revealed to men should not be misinterpreted, has given power to certain men, who, with those to whom they transfer this power, can alone correctly interpret his teaching. So these men, who call themselves ‘The Church,’ regard themselves as holding the truth, not because what they preach is true, but because they consider themselves the only true successors of the disciples of the disciples of the disciples – and finally of the disciples of the teacher, God himself. They accepted sixty-six different books as being the sacred exposition of the law of God, and declared that every word in those books was the production of the Holy Ghost.

Over the simple and easily understood truth they poured such a heap of pseudo-sacred truths that it became impossible either to accept them all or to find among them the one truth which is alone necessary for man.

Leo Tolstoy – Restoration of Hell

The Willful Child

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn’t help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – Household Tales