"People in the great wisdom traditions and seriously important philosophers have said that wisdom has to do with stopping doing what you commonly mean by knowing things"
do not forget the right brain
"Through the fragmenting lens of social media we are living, increasingly, in the left-brain’s world. By stripping information of context and then actively manipulating it, social media has the power to prey upon left-brain tendencies and preferences by transforming bits of information into world-historic conspiracies."
[...]
"The forces driving left-brain analytical fragmentation are immense and embedded throughout our society and economy. One example is our obsessive focus on STEM skill development while we devalue and reduce investment in subjects like art, literature, and philosophy—a kind of tripling-down on left-hemisphere preferences. This is all happening despite pleas from employers for workers with better right-hemisphere social capacities. Through these policy choices, and the accelerating demands for narrow, technical understanding of the world, we are unwittingly leaving ourselves increasingly vulnerable to false digitized information and the growing social and political conflict it generates."
Other Links:
Chance and achievement
Each and every one's intrinsic value is beyond (independent from) what each and every one eventually manages to achieve. Achievement necessarily depends on chance and opportunity.
2021/01/24
O neoliberalismo e a cultura do ódio – Dos postulados inverificáveis
[...] "Ora, tão preocupante como a ascensão de André Ventura é a sublimação que é conferida a esse novo delfim do liberalismo, Tiago Mayan, pela comunicação social. Ainda que a pandemia tenha refreado os ânimos neoliberais, face à súbita descoberta da necessidade de Estado, agora que um novo inimigo externo entrou nos cálculos e considerações do pensamento político, a celebração épica da nova “onda liberal” portuguesa, como se estivéssemos a falar de um canto dos Lusíadas, demonstra apenas a “dificuldade” em perceber como Mayan não é senão a outra face de André Ventura."
[...] A luta política contra a extrema-direita não se fará através da denúncia das suas mentiras, das suas inconsistências ou mesmo da oligarquia das suas máquinas partidárias – está visto, aliás, que esta estratégia redundou num fracasso – mas tem de ser a luta política contra os princípios e fundamentos do próprio liberalismo, a exposição sem fim da sua lógica de desigualdade política, social e económica; a exposição crítica dos seus postulados ideológicos elevados à categoria de entidades inverificáveis, metafísicas e transcendentes.
[...] O discurso de esquerda tornou-se, hoje, mais do que nunca impossível, internamente ameaçado pelas tensões históricas que o constituíram e o desmultiplicaram, externamente descredibilizado pelo aparato mediático: nem os valores mais altos da Constituição Portuguesa e do Estado social, são suficientes para construir uma agenda política eficaz, subjectivadora e mobilizadora.
[...] não é possível uma critica ecológica sem uma crítica do capital, não é possível uma critica feminista sem uma crítica dos modelos de dominação patriarcais do capital, não é possível uma crítica de classe sem compreender a sua composição, a sua multiplicidade étnica, sexual, racial.
...
"– Não sei. Não sei porque foi.
– Só me lembro de te ver dar um salto de repente e perguntares "Já tiveste uma irmã?" e quando ele disse que Não, atiraste-te a ele. Reparei que não tiravas os olhos dele, mas parecia que não estavas a ligar a nada do que se dizia até ao momento em que deste um salto e lhe perguntaste se ele tinha alguma irmã.
– Ora, ele tinha começado com os seus trocadilhos, como de costume – disse o Shreve –, a gabar-se das suas conquistas. Tu sabes como é: como ele faz sempre que há raparigas, para elas não perceberem bem do que se está a falar. Tudo subentendidos e mentiras e uma data de histórias sem sentido. A falar-nos duma gaja qualquer com quem combinou encontrar-se num baile em Atlantic City e que deixou pendurada porque resolveu ir para o hotel dormir e os remorsos que sentiu por estar ali na cama e ela no pontão à espera dele, sem ninguém para lhe dar o que ela queria. A falar da beleza do corpo e do triste fim a que conduz e da má sorte das mulheres que não podem fazer mais nada senão passar a vida deitadas de costas. Não sei se estás a ver. Tipo Leda no bosque, a gemer e a chorar pelo cisne. O filho da puta. Eu também lhe dava. Só com uma diferença: eu agarrava na cesta do vinho que ela trouxe e dava-lhe com ela na cabeça como se fosse minha."
O som e a Fúria, William Faulkner [pg155]
Sinestesias e outras sensações
 |
| Gérard Castello-Lopes, Portugal, 1957 |
"O campo de batalha apenas revela ao homem a sua própria loucura e desespero, e a vitória é uma ilusão de filósofos e de loucos."
O som e a Fúria, William Faulkner [pg75]
"Depois o comboio continuou, com uma corrente de ar persistente a entrar pela porta aberta até se espalhar por todo o interior transportando o odor do verão e da escuridão, mas não da madressilva. O odor da madressilva era o mais triste de todos, acho eu. e lembro-me de tantos. O das glicínias era um. Nos dias de chuva quando a Mãe não se sentia tão doente que tivesse de ficar sentada à janela costumávamos ir brincar para a chuva. Quando a Mãe ficava na cama a Dilsey vestia-nos roupas velhas e deixava-nos ir para a chuva porque dizia ela a chuva nunca fez mal aos catraios. Mas se a Mãe estava levantada começávamos por ficar a brincar no alpendre até ela dizer que estávamos a fazer muito barulho, e então íamos brincar lá para fora para debaixo do caramanchel das glicínias. Aqui foi onde vi o rio pela última vez esta manhã, foi mais ou menos por aqui. Sentia a água para lá do crepúsculo, sentia-lhe o cheiro. Quando as árvores estavam em flor na primavera e estava a chover o cheiro espalhava-se por toda a parte não se notava tanto nas outras vezes mas quando chovia o cheiro entrava pela casa dentro com o crepúsculo ou chovia mais à hora do crepúsculo ou então era qualquer coisa que a luz tinha mas cheirava sempre mais nessa altura e eu na cama a pensar quando é que isto acaba quando é que isto acaba."
O som e a Fúria, William Faulkner [pg158]
Capitol Rioter
Trump Rioter "Elizabeth" Cries After Being Maced By Police After Storming US Capitol In "Revolution"
"Entendeis vós a teoria desta matéria? inquiriu o meu pai.
Eu não, disse o meu tio.
––– Mas tendes vós alguma ideia, insistiu o meu pai, daquilo de que estais a falar? –––
Não mais do que o meu cavalo, respondeu o meu tio Toby.
Santo Deus! exclamou o meu pai, olhando para cima, e unindo as duas mãos, –– há tal valor nessa vossa ignorância sincera, irmão Toby,–– que seria quase uma pena trocá-la por conhecimento. –––––"
Laurence Sterne, in A Vida e Opiniões de Tristram Shandy
Keeping markets in their proper place... Moray reinvigorating public discourse
Economics should be seen as a sub-field, as a branch of moral and political philosophy.
What's missing is engaging with big ethical questions. Questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices. So... Why do we shrink from this?
Morally invigorate the terms of public discourse. To overcome the bad habit of outsourcing our moral judgements to markets what we need is a politics of mutual respect that engages with competing views, including competing moral and even spiritual conceptions.
The end of neoliberalism - Reflecting the empirical reality of the economy
"New economics does not accept the orthodox theory that has dominated economics for the past several decades that humans are perfectly rational, markets are perfectly efficient, institutions are optimally designed and economies are self-correcting equilibrium systems that invariably find a state that maximises social welfare. [...] Rather new economics is best characterised as a research programme that encompasses a broad range of theories, empirical work, and methods. It is also highly interdisciplinary, involving not only economists, but psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others across the social and physical sciences."
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant: here
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)
"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking but, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
– What Wittgenstein was saying was, "forget all this nonsense about knowledge and uncertainty and all that stuff. What we all believe, to start with, is fine, and that is all there is to it."
Attention seeking
"Curiosity never comes with a guarantee."
"Attention seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."
"One of the child's fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives."
"I was educated in the culture that is being defended here --a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative -- which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one's self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is a coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose."
"What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?."
"psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves."
"Dreams are the counter-culture of culture."
"Psychoanalysis is one way of describing what happens to us despite what we want to happen to us; and a way of describing what we are doing despite what we think we are doing."
"Shame, then, is also a sign of self-deception [...] If you want to know what you want to be, pay attention to what makes you feel ashamed of yourself. It is a revelation, so to speak, of your ego-ideal (who you, in the fullest sense, wish to be: how you would like to look). But it is also, by the same token, a revelation of an assumed self-knowledge (someone who had no idea who they were or wanted to be could not feel shame."
"Behaviour that is in conflict with the super-ego, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, 'evokes guilt, while that which conflicts with the ego-ideal evokes shame.' [...] In the Freudian story, broadly speaking, the super-ego represents the internalised rules of the parents, the ego-ideal the internalised, preferred version of oneself: 'a model to which the subject attempts to conform'. [...] The ego-ideal, that is to say, creates an essential perplexity. Is it safeguarding and sustaining what is best about us -- what we value above all about ourselves, about life -- or is it humiliating us with unattainable ideals? And are we able to talk about the values it promotes, or have we been, as it were, brainwashed or enchanted by our ideals? Are we suffering from our obedience -- our indebtedness -- or for our values? If, for example, we started from the principle that no one owes anyone anything, we could begin to think about what we want to give each other. Are we setting ourselves up to fail, or bringing out the best in ourselves?"
"What Freud is describing is the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want, when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking
Burnt Norton - T. S. Eliot
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden
:T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, read by Jeremy Irons: I. Burnt Norton (extracts of)
"... Eliot's question in Burnt Norton is: what kind of attention – intelligent or otherwise – can we give to distraction." Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 116]
A change of attention is a change of experience
Protect me from what I want / motivated exclusion
"Freud [suggests] that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion; that we concentrate and focus in order to occlude and temper what we might see.
[...]
"Psychoanalysis tracks what attention wants and doesn't want to omit."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 96]
Zerkalo (The Mirror) 1975 - Second scene
on 'hobby horses' and 'tantrums'
"I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state 'I hurt' or 'I hate' or 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this for once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 84]
"For if one is serious, one is rarely a welcome guest. Everything must be converted, somehow, into entertainment."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 165]
"What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention we pay to their hobby horses?."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
"Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by a felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts (Official Music Video)
Satisfaction sabotaging desire...
"... the terrors of some versions of social engineering, in which we are entombed within our supposed preferences and ideals. What is absent in what is called notably Happy Valley is the tension of desiring; the freedom to think about what is missing and what might be missed (the inventiveness born of frustration). [...] 'I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire'"
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 82]
... on flow[ting] and diving
"... to what should we give our attention, and to what do we give our attention (and who decides)?
[...] What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention people pay to their hobby horses? Hobby horses [meaning] absorption with a view to the stopping of time; a form of arrested development or arrested attention; a refuge from the future.
[...] Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by the felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences.
[...] All morality depends upon knowing where and how to pay attention. And to pay attention to morality is also always to pay attention to attention.
[...] Attention nourishes us; distraction depletes us. Attention redeems the time. It makes it feel worth living, and living out. Good attention makes a good life."
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pgs 91, 92, 93]
Creation comes out of vulnerability
Björk to Timothy Morton:
"Hi Timothy,
I wanted to write this letter for a long time.
I have been reading your books for a while and I like them a lot.
Next year there will be a MoMA exhibition on my work including a book.
I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking part in it?
Warmth, Björk.”
Timothy Morton to Björk:
“Dear Björk,
It was very kind of you to write to me, and I’m very touched by your kind words.
I am always quite surprised anyone reads my stuff!
I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue.
Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general.
I like to be given homework in terms of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about what specifications you might like.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness – not just in terms of PR for the science.
I have heard this in your work since I started to listen to it.
Yours, Tim”
The rest is here.
