1
" About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir
3
" But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word " reason" already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable.If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language.Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts.It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is " absurd" to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be " impossible." You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way.You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn.This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. "
4
" The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.
With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved through art, and through art life reclaimed him. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche , The Birth of Tragedy
5
" A similar experiment may be tried in metaphysics as regards the *intuition* of objects. If the intuition had to conform to the constitution of objects, I would not understand how we could know anything of them *a priori*; but if the object (as object of the senses) conformed to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I could very well conceive such a possibility. As, however, I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become knowledge, but have to refer them as representations, to something as their object, and must determine this object through them, I can assume either that the *concepts* through which I arrive at this determination also conform to the object, and I would again be as perplexed about how I can know anything about it *a priori*; or else that the objects, or what is the same thing, the *experience* in which alone they are known (as objects that are given to us), conform to those concepts. In the latter case, I recognize an easier solution because experience itself is a kind of knowledge that requires understanding; and this understanding has its rules which I must presuppose as existing within me even before objects are given to me, and hence *a priori*. These rules are expressed in *a priori* concepts to which all objects of experience must necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. With regard to objects, insofar as they are thought merely through reason and thought indeed as necessary, and which can never, at least not in the way in which reason thinks them, be given in experience, the attempts at thinking them (for they must admit of being thought) will subsequently furnish an excellent touchstone of what we are adopting as our new method of thought, namely, that we know of things *a priori* only that which we ourselves put into them." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 18-19 "
6
" Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*. "
― Immanuel Kant , Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
7
" The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it is thought, cannot at the same time be regarded as subsisting independently of thinking, incorporate a failure to recognize the consciousness of transcendence peculiar to all intentional acts. This is an instance of the failure to recognize that not only all thinking in the narrower sense, in the sense of grasping an object on the basis of “meanings” and grasping a state of affairs through judgments, but *every* intention in general, whether perception, representation, remembering, the feeling of value, or the posing of ends and goals, points beyond the act and the contents of the act and intends something other than the act [*ein Aktfremdes*], even when what is thought is in turn itself a thought. Indeed, *intentio* signifies a goal-directed movement toward something which one does not have oneself or has only partially and incompletely. Berkeley (following Locke, who was the first to make the basic philosophical error which introduced “psychologism” into epistemology) arrived at the principle *esse est percipi* by making the idea [*Vorstellung*] (and even the sensation) into a thing, an immaterial substance, and by failing to distinguish between the act, the content of an act, and the object. Furthermore, Berkeley confused the being of objects with the fact of being-an-object, even though the latter has only a loose and variable connection with the former. On the other hand, the transcendence of the intentional object with respect to both the *intentio* and its present content is common to every instance of being-an-object. It is, for instance, proper to objects of pure mathematics which are certainly not real but ideal (for example, the number 3). These are produced from the *a priori* material of intuition in accordance with an operational law governing the steps of our thought or intuition. Transcendence is further proper to all fictitious objects and even to contradictory objects, for instance, a square circle. All these sorts of objects, e.g., the golden mountain or Little Red Riding Hood, satisfy the basic principle of the transcendence of objects over and above that aspect of them which is, at any moment, given in consciousness, just as much as do real objects existing independently of all consciousness and knowledge." ―from_Idealism and Realism_ "
8
" Only after the concept of knowledge has been based on an ontological relation [*Seinsverhältnis*] can we work out the particular kind of being from which the principle of immanence-to-consciousness (the starting point of Idealism and Critical Realism) mistakenly proceeds as though from a primary insight. This is the being of " being-conscious" [*Bewusst-Seins*]. All being-conscious must first of all be brought under the higher concept of ideal being, or, at all events, that of irreal being. The mental item which presents itself in the experiences of consciousness may be real; being-conscious itself never is. However, the concept of consciousness is derivative in not only this sense. Consciousness also presupposes the concept of knowledge. Nothing is more misleading than to proceed in the opposite direction and define knowledge itself as simply a particular " content of consciousness," as we see if we oppose, to the particular kind of knowing and having-known which we call consciousness, another kind of knowledge which precedes it and includes no form of being-conscious. We will call this knowledge *ecstatic* [*ekstatische*] knowledge. It is found quite clearly in animals, primitive people, children, and, further, in certain pathological and other abnormal and supra-normal states (e.g., in recovering from the effects of a drug). I have said elsewhere that the animal never relates to its environment as to an object but only *lives in it* [*es lebe nur " in sie hinein*" ]. Its conduct with respect to the external world depends upon whether the latter satisfies its instinctive drives or denies them satisfaction. The animal experiences the surrounding world as resistances of various types. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to contest the principle (in Descartes, Franz Brentano, *et al*.) that every mental function and act is accompanied by an immediate knowledge of it. An even more highly contestable principle is that a relation to the self is an essential condition of all processes of knowledge. It is difficult to reproduce purely ecstatic knowledge in mature, civilized men, whether in memory, reverie, perception, thought, or empathetic identification with things, animals, or men; nonetheless, there is no doubt that in every perception and presentation of things and events we think that we grasp *the things-themselves*, not mere " images" of them or representatives of some sort.Knowledge first becomes conscious knowledge [*Bewusst-sein*], that is, comes out of its original ecstatic form of simply " having" things, in which there is no knowledge of the having or of that through which and in which it is had, when the act of being thrown back on the self (probably only possible for men) comes into play. This act grows out of conspicuous resistances, clashes, and oppositions―in sum, out of pronounced suffering. It is the *actus re-flexivus* in which knowledge of the knowledge of things is added to the knowledge of things. Furthermore, in this act we come to know the kind of knowledge we have, for example, memory, ideation, and perception, and finally, beyond even these, we come to have a knowledge of the relation of the act performed to the self, to the knower. With respect to any specific relation to the self, this last knowledge, so-called conscious self-knowledge, comes only after knowledge about the act. Kant's principle that an " I think" must be *able* to accompany all a man's thoughts may be correct. That it in fact always accompanies them is nevertheless undoubtedly false. However, the kind of being (indeed, of ideal being) which contents possess when they are reflexively *had* in their givenness in conscious acts―when, therefore, they become reflexive―is the being of being-consciously-known." from_Idealism and Realism_ "
20
" In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets. "
― Edward Carpenter , The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women
