Silly Cautions

On the frozen pizza box:

         ... Really??

Ooooh! Halloween!

🎵🎶 ...An immaterial girl,

    Living immaterial world! 🎶🎵

This (*snap*) For Your Thoughts, René!

    “Je pense, donc je suis”

  "I think, therefore I am" 

René Descartes famously narrowed the conversation about human consciousness with this witticism. Because he didn't want to add to the ages-old history of philosophy, he wanted to shut it down. 

For one thing, human existence is a lot more than thinking. Yeah, the cerebrum is upwards of eighty percent of the human brain, but that might only be because it has more static storage and is more inefficient than inner brain parts. Old René DIDN'T say, "I have feelings, therefore I am" or "I have yearnings, therefore I am." There's a prior assumption by René and his materialist encyclopedist friends that thoughts are everything. Pack your mind not with knowledge but with information, and you've got it made. Cerebrum supremacy! Control the schools, control the thoughts, control the people!

But: Affect. The affective activity that goes on in my head is human affective activity, programed by human genetics and human experience. Deep down (even in the head of Monsieur Descartes) much "thinking" is less cognitive and more affective; often it's how we feel/react to comparisons mined from veins of cerebral ore. Less logical than analogical. And the heights of human experience — intimacy, serenity, self-sacrifice — make all the data, all the encyclopedic information, "so much straw" in comparison. (I have that on good authority!)

Poor old Descartes! Somehow historically larger than his narrow life. He did do some beautiful mathematics. Not much of a philosopher. Hack pedagogue (?).

Well, I started out thinking about the enduring human dignity of people with Alzheimer's and ended up sniping at René Descartes. How do I feel about that?

À bas les encyclopédistes !

Down with the encyclopedists!

High Clouds

This kind of sky always reminds me of old and much-washed cotton batting. 

Today I Learned

...That I was born the same day as theologian and apologist Scott Hahn. This day, in fact (Happy birthday to Me, and to Mr. Hahn). Which is basically meaningless. Unless you believe in astrology. It might be an argument against the astrology thing when two people born with the same star chart are so fundamentally different. For instance, I could never talk as fast as Mr. Hahn. 

Zurn

What unthrifty creations are Zurns! 

At their stations the men take their turns,

To make a deposit, 

And flush, which will cause it

To spend much more than it earns!

More Than 20 Years Ago...

Mark Steyn in The Irish Times, 25 July 2005:

...[O]ne notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists".

"We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained, "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be?

"One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true." Hmm.

Lady Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

       (Link to full article is here)

Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance...

Seems to be a lot of that mind virus going around these days. But maybe what the Normals need is more intolerance.