Unless it is prohibited it remains.
or
Unless it is mandated it falls.
Category: Philosophy
existentialist
Person in Random TV show:
You are not the first person to go through this.
Me:
But this is the first time I am going through it.
no “grand system”!
The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument. The aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of discursive logic; the other by arrhythmic leaps and bounds. Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts at the construction of systems. My theory proposes that much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from grand systems through the construction of literary fragments.
A Theory of the Aphorism, 2
some Merton
If I know anything of intellectual honesty, and I am not so certain that I do, it seems to me that the honest position lies somewhere in between. Therefore the meditations in this book are intended to be at the same time traditional, and modern, and my own. I do not intend to divorce myself at any point from Catholic tradition. But neither do I intend to accept points of that tradition blindly, and without understanding, and without making them really my own. For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.
No Man is an Island, Prologue.
more Buber
To leave behind the world of experience is terrifying because the world of experience is predictable, understandable, and easily manipulated, while the world of encounter is none of these things. In order to ready oneself for encounter, then, one must also shed one’s drive toward self-affirmation, the drive toward self-protection and the need to feel that you are in complete control of yourself and the world around you.
SparkNotes. I and Thou
experience and encounter
In experience, we engaging the world as an objective observer rather than as a participant, and we gather data through the senses and organize that data in such a way that it can be utilized by reason. … In encounter (the mode of I–You), we participate in a relationship with the object encountered. encountered. Both the encountering I and the encountered You are transformed by the relation between them.
SparkNotes. I and Thou
at home in the world
Skepticism arises from our desire to know without the self being transformed. … Ironically skepticism is but the result of our anxious desire to secure certainty by being “at home in the world.”
Harvey, Michael G.. Skepticism, Relativism, and Religious Knowledge: A Kierkegaardian Perspective Informed by Wittgenstein’s Philosophy.
hell is other people
Shortly before the end of [No Exit], one of the three strangers puts into words that toward which the whole play is turning from its beginning when he says that: “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people.”
“Hell is other people” means thus that it is hell and unbearable to exist subject to, awaiting, controlled by, and turned toward the Other’s approval, judgements, and opinions.
“Hell is other people” describes an existence existing at the mercy of the Other, the Other’s judgements, and the Other’s accusing gaze. It is hell, tormenting, and unbearable to be unable to escape the Other’s look that objectifies and, in its objectifying, tortures.
Explaining Sartre’s “Hell Is Other People”
objective?
… observer’s paradox is a situation in which the phenomenon being observed is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer/investigator.
aims?
What should also become clear in this study are the ways in which Kierkegaard confronts some of the key errors that arise in overly systematic and reductive accounts of Christian conversion:
Torrance, Andrew B.. The Freedom to Become a Christian, pp. 2-3.
- The inherent weakness of approaches that assume we can dichotomise, and then quantify, the respective contributions of divine and human agency;
- The inclination to objectify human beings in ways that neglect their subjective existence as living persons who require to be conceived diachronically – persons who are called to take up a life-long vocation of becoming Christian;
- The tendency to reduce God to an amorphous concept, postulate or figment of the human imagination, thereby neglecting God’s active involvement in the process of becoming a Christian;
- The attendant impulse to allow a body of Christian teaching or dogma to displace the actuality of God’s personal agency;
- The overemphasis on conversion as a solipsistic event of individual transformation rather than a process of becoming reconciled with God;
- The tendency to prioritise epistemology over ontology (that is, over our relationship with God) in discussions of what is involved in becoming a Christian – to focus on the question of ‘What I come to know as a Christian’ rather than ‘Who I come to be as a Christian’; and
- The propensity to lose sight of God’s loving purpose to draw all human beings into the one true form of existence for which they were created.
a fool and his prayer book 