phenomenal QUOTES

30 " The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs. "

― Immanuel Kant , Critique of Pure Reason

32 " Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.
Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.
It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves.

Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses. "

― Aldous Huxley , Ends and Means

34 " There is no explaining the " pure" experience. There is only the completely unwarranted presupposition that others should others should somehow " understand" that it has taken place. but the judgement whether a " pure" rather than a secondary " experience" has actually occurred can, by definition, only be self-referential.&that would be in order if, simultaneously, there were not the presumption that something objectively meaningful about phenomenal reality had been illuminated.Or, putting it another way,the problem is not what James Joyce termed the " epiphany," the momentary glimpse of meaning experienced by an individual, but rather the refusal to define its existential " place" or recognize its explanatory limits....Insisting upon the absolute character of revelatory truth obviously generates a division between the saved & the damned.There arises the simultaneous desire to abolish blasphemy and bring the heathen into the light.Not every person in quest of the " pure experience," of course,is a religious fanatic or obsessed with issues of identity.Making existential sense of reality through the pure experience,feeling a sense of belonging, is a serious matter & a legitimate undertaking.But the more the preoccupation with the purity of the experience, it only follows,the more fanatical the believer. In political terms,therefore,the problem is less the lack of intensity in the lived life of the individual than the increasing attempts by individuals and groups to insist that their own,particular,deeply felt existential or religious or aesthetic experience should be privileged in the public realm.Indeed, this runs directly counter to the Enlightenment.... Different ideas have a different role in different spheres of social action.Subjectivity has a pivotal role to play in discussing existential or aesthetic experience while the universal subject is necessary understanding of citizenship or the rule of law.From such a perspective,indeed,the seemingly irresolvable conflict between subjectivity and the subject becomes illusory: it is instead a matter of what should assume primacy in what realm....From the standpoint of a socially constructed subjectivity,however, only members of a particular group can have the appropriate intuition or " experience," to make judgements about their culture or their politics...This stance now embraced by so many on the left,however, actually derives from arguments generated first by the Counter-Enlightenment & then the radical right during the Dreyfus Affair.These reactionaries, too, claimed that rather than introduce " grand narratives" or " totalizing ambitions" or " universal" ideas of justice, intellectuals should commit themselves to the particular groups with whose unique discourses and experiences they, as individuals, are intimately and existentially familiar.The " pure" -or less contaminated- experience of group members was seen as providing them a privileged insight into a particular form of oppression. Criticism from the " outsider" loses its value and questions concerning the adjudication of differences between groups are never faced,...Not every person who believes in the " pure experience" -again-was an anti-Semite or fascist.But it is interesting how the " pure experience," with its vaunted contempt for the " public" and its social apathy,can be manipulated in the realm of politics.Utopia doesn't appear only in the idea of a former " golden age" located somewhere in the past or the vision of future paradise...history has shown the danger of turning " reason" into an enemy and condemning universal ideals in the name of some parochial sense of " place" rooted in a particular community, Or, put another way, where power matters the " pure" experience is never quite so pure and no " place" is sacrosanct.Better to be a bit more modest when confronting social reality and begin the real work of specifying conditions under which each can most freely pursue his or her existential longing &find a place in the sun. "

36 " It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. "

― Donna Tartt