Sceptics and Ordinary Life
In their ordinary lives sceptics find themselves under the humiliating necessity of imitating the behaviour of the same simple dogmatists to whom they feel theoretically superior. Sceptics may be giants in argument, but ordinary life cuts them down to size.
Sayfa 18 - University of Toronto PressKitabı okudu
Kitaplar, sanki asla geri dönemeyeceğimiz bir anın tanıkları gibi, bir ihtiyaç ve unutkanlık anlaşmasıyla tutunurlar insana.
Books, like witnesses of a moment we can never return to, cling to us with a pact of necessity and forgetfulness.
In fact, the need to be near someone special is so important that the brain has a biological mechanism specifically responsible for creating and regulating our connection with our attachment figures (parents, children, and romantic partners). This mechanism, called the attachment system, consists of emotions and behaviors that ensure that we remain safe and protected by staying close to our loved ones. The mechanism explains why a child parted from his or her mother becomes frantic, searches wildly, or cries uncontrollably until he or she reestablishes contact with her. These reactions are coined protest behavior, and we all still exhibit them as grown-ups. In prehistoric times, being close to a partner was a matter of life and death, and our attachment system developed to treat such proximity as an absolute necessity.
Sayfa 16
There are no spirit-women in the trees, there are no gods below the dirt, else that they be as daft as Hurna. People all are born with no more why to it than some poor sagging fieldgirl shows her arse off in the high weeds, and there’s scarcely better reason in the dying of us neither. Where is there a god that strikes us down with venom from a trampled bee? Who puts us in this place then floods the crop that there is not enough to feed us with; drops ashes from the sky and strikes our cattle blind? If it be gods, they have queer sport.
And yet in every willage there are fat-faced little men and sickly girls who scourge themselves and fast to please some spirit-bear, or else a tree they fancy speaks with them. How can the gods demand starved ribs and lash-striped backs above the sufferings that they already fashion for us? If we in this world are cruel by harsh necessity, how much more wicked are the gods who want for nothing yet torment us to the death? Such things there may not be.
It is not gods that welcome us beyond the grave, but only worms.
Sayfa 119
If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.
"Communism ... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and selfaffirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution."
Sayfa 37 - Marx
