“…it is only necessary to conclude that consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. …it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things we do, but who were not conscious at all.”
Posts Tagged ‘humanity’
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, pg 8-9
September 2, 2011“Is this consciousness…this enormous influence of ideas, principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to understand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computres, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies – what have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons? The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology. The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering – are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?
The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.”
Simone de Beauvoir
September 1, 2009“The task of literature is to render the singularity of individual experience as transparent as possible to other human beings, to safeguard the human dimension of experience from alienation by bureaucracy and technocracy.”
Simone de Beauvoir
September 1, 2009“Indicating the human wastage incurred by capitalism, Beauvoir argues that ‘society cares about the individual only insofar as he is profitable.’ This is a moral indictment of society – ‘old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization’ – and she advocates a radical transformation of the conditions of life to remedy the alienation experienced by young and old alike.”
To Have or to Be?
August 29, 2009“Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that ‘free conscious activity’ (i.e., human activity) is ‘the species character of man.’ Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom – should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.
“Marx’s whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.”
To Have or to Be?
August 29, 2009“For Spinoza, mental health is, in the last analysis, a manifestation of right living; mental illness, a symptom of the failure to live according to the requirements of human nature. ‘But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as ‘illness”(Ethics, 4, prop. 44). In this statement, so foreign to the thinking of our time, Spinoza considers passions that do not correspond to the needs of human nature as pathological; in fact, he goes so far as to call them a form of insanity.”
Mere Christianity
February 19, 2009“When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler?”
Mere Christianity
February 19, 2009“What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realize that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”
Mere Christianity
February 19, 2009“Suppose someone asked me, when I see a man in a blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters? I should reply, ‘Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it does contain a letter.’ And if he then objected, ‘But you’ve never seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting,’ I should say, ‘Of course not, and I shouldn’t expect to, because they’re not addressed to me. I’m explaining the packets I’m not allowed to open by the ones I am allowed to open.’ It is the same about this question. The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.”
The Brothers Karamazov
January 31, 2009“Oh, we are spontaneous, we are good and evil in an astonishing blend, we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller and at the same time we go rampaging around the inns and tearing out the beards of the drunken sots, our boon companions. Oh, we too are good and beautiful, but only when we ourselves feel good and beautiful. Indeed, we are positively tempested – yes, tempested – by the most noble ideals, but only upon condition that they be attained of themselves, fall down upon our tables from the sky, and above all that they be gratis, gratis, so that nothing must be paid for them. Paying is something we dislike horribly, while on the other hand we love to receive, and this in everything. Oh, give us, give us every possible blessing of life (it must be every possible one, for more cheaply we will not be reconciled) and in particular do not hinder our disposition in any way, and then we too shall demonstrate that we are able to be good and beautiful.”
