... Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.
H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 21
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
Leibniz, quoted in J.R. Newman, The World of Mathematics
What is [the pagan religious conception]? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.
The utopian imagination (as opposed to utopianism) is a constituent part of human nature, rooted in the basic orientation of human desire towards happiness, understood not as a transient satisfaction, but as a complete life of flourishing.
Nathan Schlueter, A Conservative Case for Utopia
Like retrofuturism, paleomodernism, and cybergothic, the word ‘neoreaction’ compactly describes a time-twisted vector that spirals forwards into the past, and backwards into the future. It emerges, almost automatically, as the present is torn tidally apart — when the democratic-Keynesian politics of postponement-displacement exhausts itself, and the kicked-can runs out of road.
Nick Land, Neoreaction (for dummies)
Art isn’t something you need an outside license or a paycheck to pursue. It’s a way of life. It’s a way of adding up what you feel and where you’ve been and what you fear and what you can imagine. It’s a way of seeing your life through a lens that makes everything — good and bad, confusing and clarifying, uplifting and depressing — valuable.
Shame is the opposite of art.
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, -- the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
Wordsworth, "French Revolution"
We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring. Perhaps this sense of fullness is something we just catch glimpses of from afar off; we have the powerful intuition of what fullness would be, were we to be in that condition, e.g., of peace or wholeness; or able to act on that level, of integrity or generosity or abandonment or self-forgetfulness But sometimes there will be moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment, where we feel ourselves there.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 5.
Man's strongest impulse is not to destroy the empirical world; rather it is to transform it into the mythical world, to regain Eden in this life, and to synchronize, once and for all, mythical and empirical reality.
Scholes et al, The Nature of Narrative, p. 135.
... an emancipated society would be capable of evaluating the interrelationship of the machine and human activity, in such a way that ‘labour’, not ‘human beings’ would become the obsolete category. Such an affirmative relationship to life, not reduced to a set of quantitatively captured capacities or objectivities, but understood as the source-spring of action connected to an immediate knowledge of the world, would better resist our technological reduction, and open up to a use of technology as yet undeveloped and still outside of current experience.
Josephine Berry Baker, "Epistemic Panic and the Problem of Life"
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest, IV, 1, 156-8
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstacy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
So the project that Waldvogel has formulated for redesigning the Earth as heaven opens up a perspective seen from which most political, social and urban development projects of our day reveal their basic flaw – their short-term quality. Only an infinite project is a modern project through and through, in that it is able to replace the divine plan definitively – as in Waldvogel’s project the inside of the new Earth, created and occupied by mankind, is in tended to replace heaven.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
[T]he man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man. He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind with a history that disappears in primeval mists. The modern man—or, let us say again, the man of the immediate present—is rarely met with.
Boris Grouys, "Under Modernism's Heaven" (Jan 19/05), in Globus Cassus
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Einstein, The World As I See It, p. 7
Jung, "Modern Man in search of a Soul", quoted in an Althouse blog post
To the Reader by Cornelis de Schrijver
You seek new monsters from the world new-found?
New ways of life, drawing on different springs?
The source of human virtue? The profound
Evil abyss? The void beneath all things?
Read here what's traced by More's ingenious pen,
More, London's pride, and Britain's first of men.
in Thomas More, Utopia, Addenda, p. 129
No comments:
Post a Comment