THOUGHTSCAPES
This section is devoted to favorite quotes from my favorite thinkers.
OH! The things this young boy in 1957 would do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, and think! Oh my!
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One of the tings I like to do is to take notes in the books I am reading, while I am reading them. Sometimes I write direct quotes I like in the back blank pages, sometimes they are my own thoughts or reflections. Here are some I found.
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The Anguish of My Late Teen Years: The thing I thought I was seeing in social, psychological, philosophical space was not the thing that was going on there . . . but I felt I was coming up short with what I thought was there, not getting it . . . but the thing I was seeing was bigger, deeper, more profound, richer-in-being than what was there . . . although I felt judged as having come up short of what everybody else seemed to know more deeply. Looking back, I am glad that I was stuck with that erroneous thinking. In fact, they weren't what I thought they were; I didn't understand the "attitude" - "putting on an attitude" of those around me at all. I was feeling poor-in-being and didn't like it . . . but by seeing more than was there -- a bigger "there" -- I had set myself a standard for myself by projecting the rich-in-being out into the world and then making my private, personal project to overcome my sense of the inferiority to this misnamed external "rich" world that wasn't rich. In the end, this "unthought" relationship between internal and external perceptions led to my internal landscapes being enriched by this self-ruse. I suffered in the process.
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. . . the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes. - Nietzsche
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. . . obsession with universalist grandeur . . . - R. Rorty (PCP, p. 80)
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The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. - R. Rorty (PCP, p. 94)
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. . . objectivity as intersubjectivity . . . - R. Rorty (PCP, p. 101)
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Reason can only follow paths the imagination has broken. - R.Rorty (PCP, p. 105)
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What has been called rationality are merely disguised attempts to eternalize custom and tradition. - R. Rorty (PCP, p. 85)
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A self is a center of narrative gravity. - D. Dennett (PCP, p 45)
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To grasp a concept is just to know how to use a word. R. Rorty (PCP, p. 185)
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[we do not change because we are] unable to imagine a new practical identity . . . the process of cobbling together a new identity [story] of self. - R. Rorty (PCP, p. 197)
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[Counseling involves helping others toward a] detailed comparison of imagined selves . . . R.Rorty (PCP p. 201)
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things,” the philosopher William James wrote: “in a world where we are certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness.”
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"We all took less, and then it closed." You can put that on my epitaph. - Ry Cooder
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5 Minds for the Future:
Respectful Mind: Is the unreflective mind the only authentic mind?
I as thinking I was questioning my identity: was it groundless - free floating - made up - false -- but I doubted the doubt . . . . What choices does one have? What 'fantasy of correct correspondence" to what has happened to us - is available once one has thought of "self as story" . . . only the unreflective. What "spirit spirit" spoke there? - Where was the spirit spirit standing? What "other" was being recommended/suggested (a "step up") or remembered (a "step back"). What was the critique? The gift? I am left very energized.
Free as that missing Hong Kong bird.
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"Fifteen years ago, I concluded that Friedlander’s work was quintessentially ‘photographic.’ It was, I said:
‘…about photography – not about pseudo-painting, not about graphic schema or chemical manipulation, not about social or political propaganda, not even about itself as an art medium, though it can embrace all of these things – but essentially about the act of taking a photograph, not in a physical but in a psychic sense. It is about the act of seeing, knowing and understanding some small part of the world or fragment of experience, and placing oneself in a singular physical relationship to it in order to make a record of that experience with the camera.’18 -- By Gerry Badger, from Creative Camera (1991)"
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