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READING JOURNAL
Borges, Jorge Luis The Last Interview and other conversations
Boulton, Jim 100 Ideas that changed the WEB
Bronowski, J. Science and Human Values
Chayka, Kyle The Longing for Less Living with Minimalism
Clagett, Marshall Greek Science in Antiquity: How human reason and ingenuity first ordered and mastered the experience of natural phenomena
Dermot The Husserl Dictionary
Gadamer Hegel's Inverted World
Harari, Yuval Noah Sapiens
Heidegger, Martin Being and Time
Howkins, John The Creative Economy
Kitto, H. D. F. The Greeks
Ritsos, Yannis The Forth Dimension (transl by Rae Dalven)
Wright, Craig How to be a genius
Warburton, Nigel Reading John Gray in war
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Borges, Jorge Luis The Last Interview and other conversations
"It's enough for me to say that if I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather than in certainties. A colleague declares from his chair that philosophy is clear and precise understanding; I would define it as that organization of the essential perplexities of man. " (p5)
"Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side, that means toothache, headache, travelling and so on, and ten you have on the other side, you have imaginary life and fancy and that means the arts. But I don't think that that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life." (p35)
"What you really value is what you miss, not what you have." (p44)
"The Circular Ruins... I went to my regular business. I went to - I was working at a very small and rather shabby public library in Buenos Aires, in a very grey and featureless street. I had to go there every day and work six hours, and then sometimes I would meet my friends, we would go and see a film, or I would have dinner with somebody, but all the time I felt that life was unreal. What was really near to me was that story I was writing. That's the only time in my life I've had that feeling, so that story must have meant something - to me."
"I want to tell you that some people have no literary sense. Consequently they think that if anything literary pleases them, they have to look for far-fetched reasons... instead of saying 'well, I like this because this is fine poetry, or because this is a story that I follow with interest; I'm really forgetting about myself and I'm thinking of the character," they are trying to think that the whole thing is full of half truths, reasons and symbols... But the tale itself should be its own reality, no? People neer accept that. They like to think that writers are aiming at something... When you're hearing music... I suppose you'd just be pleased or displeased or bored. But if you're reading a book, you're hunting for a book behind the book, no?" (p86)
"among these things bitterness and misfortune and disappointment and sadness and loneliness and that, after all, thos ethings are the stuff tha tpoetry is made of, and that if I were a real poet, I should think of my unhappiness, of my many forms of unhappiness, as being really gifts." (p91-92)
"Infinity, yes, because infinity is an intellectual problem. Death means you stop being, you cease from thinking, or feeling, or wondering, and at least you're lucky in that you don't have to worry. You might as well worry, as the Latin poet said, about the ages, and ages that preceded you when you did not exist. You might as well worry about the endless past as the endless future uninhabited by you... Infinity, yes, that's a problem, but death isn't a problem in that sense. There's no difficulty whatever in imagining that even as I go tosleep every night, I may have a long sleep at the end. I mean it's not an intellectual problem." (p118)
"All love is great, love doesn't come in different sizes, whenever one is in love, they're in love with a unique person. Maybe every person is unique, maybe when one is in love they see a person as they realy are, or how God sees them. If not, why fall in love with them? Maybe every person is unique..." (p169)
to read:
Pierre Menard - "he decides to do something very, ver yunobtrusive, he'll write a book that is already there, and very much there, Don Quixote." (p38)
The Theologians - "you have two enemies and one of them sends the other to the stake. And then they find out somehow they're the same man." (p52)
Kafka's The Trial? - "in Kafka, you know that he knew no more about the castle or about the judges and the trial than you do. Because the castle and the judges are symbols of the universe, and nobody is expected to know anything about the universe... Perhaps the strength of Kafka may be in his lack of complexity."
The Maker - a short book originally titled "El Hacedor" which is Borges' favorite book which he wrote.
Wallt Whitman's Song of Myself
Spinoza _? - "Spinoza says that we all feel immortal, yes, but not as individuals. I assume, rater immortal in a pantheist way, in a divine way." (p159)
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Boulton, Jim 100 Ideas that changed the WEB
"Baran's design for an indestructible communications syste was counter to the established norms of telephony. Rather than being based on an end-to-end chain of connections - a relay - Baran proposed dividing messages into blocks, sending them via multiple paths and reassembling them on arrival. In the UK, Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies drew the same conclusion. He called his solution 'packet switching'. Davies and Baran learned of each other's work and decided to collaborate." p10
"These links indicated the relationships between documents, an implementation of what we now call the Semantic Web... In [Paul Otlet's] 1935 book Monde, he describes 'a machinery unaffected by distance which would combine at the same time radio, X-rays, cinema and microscopic photography. From afar anyone would be able to read any passage that would be projected on his individual screen..." p8
"...Postel's Law seems wise beyond the implementation of TCP/IP: 'Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.'" p36
"USER-CENTRED DESIGN. Websites are often designed from a technical or business perspective. Usability is an afterthought. User-centred design (UCD) optimizes an interface or product around the person who is going to be using it... In 1995, [Jakob] Nielsen launched his website useit.com. While his views were controversial, especially among Web designers trying to push back the boundaries of HTML, his ideas were a beacon in the emerging field of Web usability. He advocated user testing and paper prototypes that put the user's expectations at the centre of the design process. He was a champion of minimal designs that spoke the language of the user. This meant following real-world conventions and avoiding system-oriented terminology and functionality. Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen's business partner, describes it well: 'We must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to.'" p85
"Steve Krug's ideas on usability are less contentious. His seminal book from 2000 says everything you need to know about user-centred design: Don't Make Me Think." p85
"Wikis perhaps owe their success to the guiding principles put forward by Ward Cunningham back in 1995. He encouraged people to write only factual information, to avoid abstract advice and to be concise. His most important advice was perhaps contained in the way he signed off - 'Above all, be good and play nice!" p141
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Bronowski, J. Science and Human Values
"Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature." p18
"(quoting Alexander Pope)
Years foll'wing Years, steal something ev'ry day,
At last they steal us from our selves away;
In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end,
In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend:
This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,
What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime?
If ev'ry Wheel of that unweary'd Mill
That turn'd ten thousand Verses, now stands still." p28
"The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations... of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art." p30-31
"The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation... In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness... We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again." p31
"We cannot shirk the historic question, What is truth? On the contrary: the civilization we take pride in took a new strength on the day the question was asked... The sanction of experienced fact as a face of truth is a profound subject, and the mainspring which has moved our civilization since the Renaissance." p39
"Is the world of what is subject to test, and is the world of what ought to be subject to no test? [...] Such concepts as justice, umanity and the full life have not remained fixed in the last four hundred years... In their modern sense, they did not exist when Aquinas wrote; they do not exist now in civilizations which disregard the physical fact... The tradition of the Renaissance is of a piece, in art and in science, in believing that the physical world is a source of knowledge." p54
{ "the ancient civilization of the East still reject the senses as a source of knowledge, and this is as patent in their formal poetry and their passionless painting as in their science." p54 }
"(about Himmler who planned to devote an institution to the belief that stars are made of ice) The state of mind, the state of society is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard it in what a man is. A society holds together by the respect which man gives to man; it fails in fact, it falls apart into groups of fear and power, when its concept of man is false. We find the drive which makes a society stable at last in the search for what makes us men. This is a search that never ends..." p59
"The Scientific Revolution begins when Copernicus put forward the bolder proposition that there is another work of God to which we may appeal even beyond [the demonstrable work of God, the Bible]: the great work of nature. No absolute statement is allowed to be out of reach of the test, that its consequence must conform to the facts of nature." p61
"The positivist would break it into still simpler pieces, and would then propose to verify each. But it is an illusion... to think that he could verify them himself... he could not verify the historical part of this statement without searching the records of others and believing them... he could not verify the rate of expansion of the Crab nebula and the processes which might cause it to glow without the help of a sequence of instrument makers and astronomers and nuclear physicists, specialists in this and that, each of whom he must trust and believe. All this knowledge, all our knowledge, has been built up communally; there would be no astrophysics, there would be no history, there would not even be language, if man were a solitary animal." p73
"Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. And as originality and independence are private needs for the existence of a science, so dissent and freedom are its public needs... The safeguards which [science] must offer [society] are patent: free inquiry, free thought, free speech, tolerance. These values... are self-evident... only where men are committed to explore the truth: in a scientific society." p79
"Independence and originality, dissent and freedom and tolerance: such are the first needs of science; and these are the values which, of itself, it demands and forms. The society of scientists must be a democracy. It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and repect, between independence from the views of others and tolerance for them." p80
"...like the other creative activities which grew from the Renaissance, science has humanized our values. Men have asked for freedom, justice and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread amon gthem... Our conduct as states clings to a code of self-interest which science, like humanity, has long left behind." p90
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Chayka, Kyle The Longing for Less Living with Minimalism
"'People come up and ask me what [New York Earth Room] means,' Dilworth said, sardonically pleased with his strategy: 'I really just turn them back to the Earth Room so they can look for that answer.' The caretaker feels the interpretation isn't up to him, that it would be irresposible for him to influence how other people see it. There is no answer or solution to the mystery; it just is what it is. Accepting the lack of resolution iscore to Minimalism's philosophy, and Dilworth is adept at it." p88
"During his research Cage also came across the I Ching, or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese system in which sixty-four geometric diagrams are used to predict fate. By tossing a set of yarrow stalks or coins one lands on a particular diagram whose associations will determine a future fortune. Cage first took advantage of the technique for his 1951 'Music of Changes.' The choppy, discordant, forty-five-minute-long work was created by slotting various rhythms, melodies and compositional strategies into a chart and ordering them according to I Ching coin throws... Cage said he composed the lengths of the movements in 4'33" through the same I Ching method, but this time the system of chance was set up so that the coin throws resulted only in duration, not pitch or rhythm. If music is just organization of sounds, then the material choice of no-sound is as valid as the choice of sound. Instead of thinking of 4'33" as a composition of nothing, it might be more accurate to think of it as an empty one, a box that can be filled." p144
"Lost in Translation was a world of blank spaces."
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Clagett, Marshall Greek Science in Antiguity: How human reason and ingenuity first ordered and mastered the experience of natural phenomena
(In regards On the Soul by Aristotle) "The soul for Aristotle is the life principle. 'It is the form of a natural body having in it the capacity of life.'...
"Now a plant possesses life in the sense of growth, decay, and reproduction only... All living things possess this faculty in common with the vegetable soul, but the vegetable soul possesses only this faculty. The animal soul ordinarily possesses, in addition to the faculty of growth and decay, the faculties of lcal motion and sensation, 'but it is sensation primarily which constitutes the animal...' lly, the rational soul of man possesses, in addition to the faculties of growth and decay, motion and sensation, that of intellect. This analysis, based in part on prior views of Plato, was the starting point for much discussion in the Middle Ages, in which the vegetative, animal, and rational souls emerged much more clearly as distinct and separable entities." p68
"... after noting the equivalence of the two systems for the sun's movement, [Ptolemy] decided for the eccentric system, because it was the simpler of the two hypotheses... This observation... represents an interesting point of view... Economy, then, is a rule of rational procedure.Occasionally we find in antiquity and the Middle Ages the complementar but different idea that we adopt the most economical system because God or nature operates with the fewest possible causes - ie. in the simplest way; hence economy of thought is necessary because of the economy of nature." p121
re: Latin writers following classical Greek thought
"[In Book V of On the Nature of Things, Lucretius] recounts how the world arose: not by design but by a chance assembly of atoms." p132
"[Seneca wrote that] 'The day will yet come when the progress of research through the long ages will reveal to sight the mysteries of nature that are now concealed (Seneca, Natural Questions, Book VII, Chap 25, translation of J. Clark, London, 1910)'" p138
(of the cult of Isis) "Isis was the all-merciful mother 'who identified all the Divinities within herself' and 'who was the power underlying all nature.'" p148
"[In Augustine's time[, many of the fathers held, that truth ultimately comes from God... The truth revealed by God was, when properly interpreted, true wisdom of a kind superior to the results of human reason...
"But if the fathers thought of revealed truth as the more certain knowledge, the early Christian father, and Philo before him, often made the important supplementary assumption that there is really only one truth, and properly conducted philosophy or human reason will also arrive at that truth... the double faith doctrine... [als] a fundamental view of St. Thomas Aquinas." p165
"One of the fundamental views taken over by the fathers from Greek philosophy, but radically modified in the Christian writings, was that there exists in nature a generally fixed order expressible in terms of laws, for the most part immutable. This fixed order with its laws may, however, be set aside in miraculous fashion at God's pleasure. The introduction of the idea of the miracle, of God' complete freedom of action with respect to the natural order of things, was a distinct modification of the Greek concept of natural order... God as [the law's] order can suspend them, reverse them, or operate in any fashion he desires outside of them." p170
"[According to St. Augustine,] time is the duration in which these movements [of celestial and other bodies] take place and by which they are measured... Yet we do affirm tha tpast, present, and future exist. How do they exist? They exist in the mind... Augustine says (Confessions, Book XI, 27), 'It is in thee, O my mind, that I measure my times.'" p173
"[Boethius] defines an axiom in the manner of Aristotle an dEuclid. He says 'a common conception (axiom) is a statement which anyone (immediately) affirms upon hearing it.' He goes on to say that such common opinions are of two kinds: One is generally acceptable to all people; for example 'if equals are taken from equals the remainders are equal.' And the second is a conception generally known to the learned only; his example of such a conception is, 'Things which are incorporeal cannot occupy space.'" p188
"[One critic of the liberal arts] comes finally to the astronomers, 'who have wished to soar heavenwards, but so conspicuously have they failed to mount thither by their ideas that rather they have placed earthly reason in heaven an dheavenly reason in earth. For the while thye have set rams and bulls, scorpions an dcrabs, lions and bears, she-goats and fishes in the realm of the sky, they have done naught but raise up earthly things into the sky.' (M.L.W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe 500-900, Loneon, 1931, p168)" p203
"... Simplicius on more than one occasion appealed to the evidence of experience and experiment to oppose or confirm a scientific judgment. His attempt to settle the question of whether air or water has weight in its own place by an experiment is noteworthy although indecisive. 'Now Ptolemy seeks to prove the proposition that air has non weight in its own medium by the same experiment of the inflated skin... I performed the experiment with the greatest possible care and found that the weight of the skin when inflated and uninflated was the same.'" p216
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Dermot The Husserl Dictionary
"Active genesis involves the ego explicitly, whereas passive genesis is a kind of meaning-connecting that
takes place without the active engagement of the ego and things have the character of already being formed in a particular sense-formation."
"The adumbration (Abschattung) or ‘profile’ is the side or ‘aspect’ through which a material object presents itself to the perceiver... There is therefore no ‘God’s eye’ view possible because such an a-perspectival view would contradict the essence of the object’s self-revealing. Husserl frequently announces this insight as having the status of an a priori eidetic law: ‘even the most intuitively vivid and rich presentation of
a real thing must be in principle one-sided and incomplete’... a lived experience, a cogitatio, e.g. an act
intending, hoping, fearing, and so on, does not appear in adumbrations, but gives itself as it is, its esse is percipi, it is as it is perceived."
"If the entire experience of the harmonious flow of the world were disrupted so that it became a meaningless chaos, the experience of the ego would be profoundly modified and altered, but it would still exist, even if its flow of temporal experience was chaotic. On this basis, Husserl concludes that pure consciousness is absolute and independent of all objective being... Husserl is not saying that consciousness survives the non-existence of the world but that consciousness and its flow of experiences still makes sense in a coherent way even if its experiences are no longer coherent."
"For Husserl, apodicticity characterizes the mode of givenness of the object in consciousness...
Husserl even speaks of leading ‘a life of apodicticity’ by which he means a life guided by judgements that are based on phenomenologically purified insights secured by evidence"
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Gadamer Hegel's Inverted World
Here is something I misunderstood when I first encountered it - I misunderstood the title. I thought "Inverted World" meant that the representation could show the opposite of what was meant due to the limitations of language. There is no such negational effect on meaning as could be mistaken by the title. I think it is closer to talking about the difference between behaviorally repeating the same initial impulse to gain an immediate impression, which because it is necessarily limited, leads to forgetting what had been previously thought as one moves forward into the next thought. It is in the forgetting, which is led on by the incompleteness of early thoughts, that leads to the mistake of leaving behind what had been preliminarily understood. The act of abandoning each passing representation is pathological because it closes off the possibility of building on what had been observed before.
in the realization of thinking toward self-consciousness, the certainty attained in the self as a thinking being that knows it is thinking is extended to the certainty of what is there, such as nature, which it thinks
"The living... understands [what is there] from the inside as it understands itself as a self." (p53)
how does consciousness first realize itself as self-consciousness? how does a thinking being know that it is thinking?
"mediation...in his dialectical exposition of consciousness" (p53)
through a mediation thinking what is by following a dialectical exposition that serves to illustrate the intermediary steps of thought
in the beginning, the true world is perceived as simply a self-same "true world": what is perceived is taken at face value - the objects of perception are mistaken as constituting a true world in what is given in perception.
perception is naive in taking reality as given
understanding has not yet happened as knowing does not know itself to be grasping what is there as subject
even perception that is analytical in resolving what is there into identity and properties has not yet understood the essential nature in which what is there is existent
when experiencing the object through perception, the forms appearing in consciousness seem to relate to the actual thing in an external way because the object seems to be separate from the consciousness thinking the object
when striving to understand what is there, consciousness try to get behind the exteriority to see what lies behind the exteriority to the essence of it
determinations of what the thing is comes from how the thing appears to consciousness
the determination is a representation
as soon as a determination is made, the determination seems to represent what is there in only a delimited way and does not depict the whole of its reality - "the object is not at all what it appeared to be" (39)
dealing with only the exterior seems unavoidable, the reason being the thought that the consciousness and the thing do not have a common denomination
consciousness cannot advance if it progresses by always abandoning its previous determinations because they appear false or incomplete: because it is constantly forgetting in this way, it can only remain the same consciousness
Gadamer points out: "such knowing is not all knowing and the world comprehended by it, not the entire world." (39)
How does consciousness advance? Through "a dialectic of the concept" (39)
through a transitionary thought process that goes through a series of steps
first determination is that to think purely is distinguish from thinking from sense data
to think is an act of the mind, which is distinguished from thinking that take its primary basis from sense data
"above the disappearance of this world, the constant world beyond" (40, direct quote from PS)
the "disappearance" occurs because consciousness is discarding the discrete representations or determinations it finds to be incomplete and therefore false
second determination: the "constant world" consists in a conceptual abstraction that posits an ideal realm containing what is capable of supplanting the content given by perception's grasp of what is. the ephemeral and changing thought content regarding what is is given a counter thought about the unchanging and self-same nature of what is as opposed to changing representations of what is
what is the ideal realm, or the "beyond" (41)?
third determination: the "beyond" is "the appearance as appearance" (41)
as human beings, part of our disposition is determined already. for example, the brain has structures which constitute a disposition in how perception and understanding proceeds. a nonhuman subjectivity has a different disposition in processing information. what is there to be perceived does not change just because two differently disposed entities are perceiving it, yet what appears to each of the two are different. in how what is there coincides with two differently disposed entities, two different appearances form. so to know appearance as appearance requires the recognition that a perceiving entity, or consciousness, has a disposition that contributes to generating the appearance, perhaps with the contribution being as important as what is given by what is there.
the phenomenon which is the "essence showing itself" or what is as it appears to a subjective consciousness is the "truth of appearance" (41). perception without self-consciousness grasps the phenomenon as true and same as what is there, while conscious thinking grasps the phenomenon as unique to its disposition and distinguish the phenomenon from what is there
forth determination: to hold that all the phenomena appearing to perception constitutes the entire reality of what perception can grasp - the postulation that all appearances in its entirety can be denominated as how that which is shows itself to perception, it's possible to project the "concept of law" (41) as that which is unchanging across the showing of the myriad. the law as what is is constantly disappearing from perception because it invisibly drives the expression of appearances
the distinction between the law that determines the reality and that reality of what is there can be made only in the understanding
arrive at the first supersensible realm: this consists in the law of appearance
but in that the "law" is unchanging necessarily means it does not encompass what is there because what is there is characterized by its fluctuating appearance.
an illustration of this paradox is where Aristotle critized Plato's eidos in that they are the answer to 'What does not change in nature' rather than "What is nature"
"The eidos is only an aspect of the tode ti" (45)
"eidos" is here the equivalent of the "law" - eidos of something there, the tode ti (this something), is one aspect of it. it is the form appearing to consciousness as a self-same thing
(again, the "law" is a concept, constructed and projected in the first supersensible realm)
the "law" is compared to a "genus" - just as a genus does not exist separated from the individuals belonging to it, the law is not separated from the instances that express it
"The law is not beyond the appearance, but rather present in it immediately" (47, from PS)
fifth determination: an inverted world contains both the unchanging concept of law as appearance as appearance, and the perceived world in all its changes and fluctuations
"The first realm of laws was lackng in [original change], but as the inverted world it now contains it." (44)
in the second supersensible world, both aspects of reality, the changing appearances and the law of appearance as appearance, are encompassed and synthesized
what appears to consciousness is that the eidos, form, or law is the same as the totality of instances
"the reversal is much more reflection into self and not opposition of one thing to another" (46)
the "reversal" is to reverse thinking that the law is the primary substance that gives rise to manifestation of instances to thinking that the law is the outcome from the various
while understanding sees the law as primary in the first supersensible realm, in the inverted world the law is not the origin of instances but rather inheres only in the various manifestations
What is perceived and what is thought
What are the changing phenomena considered natural and the law of nature which does not change
What forms appear as thoughts and perceptions in consciousness and what is the thinking entity of the self
the differences between each of the pairs are sublated through understanding at a higher level of consciousness
"the law of a world which has opposite it a verkehrte (misplaced) supersensible world in which that which is scorned in the first is honored in the second and vice versa." (48)
no longer fixating on the unchanging in particularly, nor fixating on the constantly changing in particularly - consciousness achieves the misplaced reality where the being of what is there and the being of consciousness are in motion from the same ground. consciousness and what is there are denominated. what understands has recognized the self is in being (ie. self-consciousness) alongside with whatever is, and that the thought of what is there is of the same nature as the thought of the self that thinks
"it is the 'true, supersensible" world which contains both aspects and which divides itself into this opposition and thereby relates itself to itself." (49)
sixth determination: conceptualizing the unchanging and the changing as a unity - a consciousness that can represent the changing perceptions and the unity of self-consciousness as a united concept and see certainty in self-consciousness as a finite subjectivity - it can see other finite phenomena as similar "selves" or finite phenomena which are part of a virtually infinite nature
the substance of the "tode ti" is the primary substance from which all phenomena arises, including the phenomenon of self-consciousness and the various phenomenon in what is
the sequence of determinations taken that finds the perceived objects as appearing to a disposition, that knows the concept of law as expressed in instances of appearances, and that the law inheres in the manifold things that appear, it achieves a higher form of knowledge - the knowing of knowing.
?:
"the proper basis [of universal attraction] is the essential determination of every body as constituting a force field"
i don't understand how the law of appearances can be extended to a physical law of nature. and how the inverted world factors into the conceptualization of a law of nature.
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Harari, Yuval Noah Sapiens
"the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants" 113
"first seafaring societies...brought about an unprecedented transformation i numan capabilities an dlife styles. every othe rmammal that went to sea...had to evolve for aeons to develop specialised organs and a hydrodynamic body" 143
"were the australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. but the historical record make shomo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer" 150
"The imagined order is embedded in the material world." 243
"just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity... such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. in fact, they are culture's engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species." 341
"the trust in Rome's coins was so strong that even outside the empire's borders, people were happy to receive payment in denarii... the indians had such a strong confidence in the denarius and the image of the emperor that when local rulers struck coins of their own they closely imitated the denairus." 380
"money is more openminded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and tha tdoes not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age, or sexual orientation. thanks to money, even people who don't know each other and don't trust each other can nevetheless cooperate effectively" 384
"most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empires inhabitants." 410
(book incomplete)
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Heidegger, Martin Being and Time
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Howkins, John The Creative Economy
"A network space is a base camp for further exploration because a network company needs to extend far beyond its physical location. Creative people need the freedom to go talk to anyone they want, whether inside or outside the office... The Italian company Alessi, which is renowned for its striking, innovative designs, doesn't employ any designers but buys in ideas from elsewhere and provides skilled technicians who act as intermediaries between its staff and outside designers...
"The demand for tepmorary lodging with coffee and Wi-Fi has driven the growth in city centres of business clubs, cafes and short term office rentals as well as co-working spaces where anyone can rent a workspace or a room for multiples of an hour, like the Hub in London and XanWei in Shanghai.
"A well known management expert liked to ask his audiences where they would go for advice about a new idea. Who would you discuss it with first: your boss, your colleagues, or the people who report to you? ...The right answer is, I'll discss it with anyone who might know what to do, whether they are inside or outside the company." p59
"freelance work, portfolio part time work, sole trading, partnerships and micro-companies are becoming more common... In America, 6.7 million people work this way, 14% of the working population, and in Europe, the percentage is 15%. In the heartlands, the percentages are much higher, about 50%... many governments offer tax incentives to self-employed people to set up their own company, which has the effect of hiding the true figure." p48
"As each new deal is negotiated so more people gain an opportunity to put forward their own estimate of its meaning and value. Someone who says convincingly why an idea is interesting and valuable gains the right to take it to the next stage. >Saying what an idea could be is just as influential as having the idea in the first place, as the new meaning can spur people to action in a new direction and unlock more value." p72
"Peter Martin... set out to describe the internet's impact on business he caught this spirit of open, obedient service.
'The internet's ad hoc, flexible, consensual structure offers powerful lessons to everyone in business. It is, in some ways, a prototype of the way companies will have to operate in future. The consensus stems from a shared purpose: the creation of a network that allows easy communication. This is in part a technical vision, and it requires deep knowledge of computer science. But it is also an ideological one, requiring a humanistic commitment to freedom of expression and to a medium of communication that rises above the interests of government and commerce. An ethic of collaboration and open discussion around a common purpose is an extraordinarily powerful and creative force.'" p135
"Everyday usage generates vast quantities of data that are stored on cloud servers. Data-owners use algorithms to make connections between data and generate new meanings. Each network opens doors to other networks, each with its own data and algorithms. The forth trend, integration follows these three...
"brand owners fight to promote their ecosystem to their customers and erect patent-protected barriers to restrict access to others even if they are willing to pay. It is unclear whether this tactic will succeed. The immense rewards of universal access are likely to force them to let anyone in. If not, they are vulnerable to public indifference... or anti-trust policy." p136
"Two, many managers had talent and skill which were obvious to them but hidden to others and so wasted. Three, these managers needed an ecosystem, structural capital, so they could not only have ideas but do something about them." p231
"The United Nations' annual wealth report is an ambitious attempt to put some numbers to these varieties of capital. It defines human capital as >education, skills, tacit knowledge and health." p231
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Kitto, H. D. F. The Greeks
"We have now learned enoguh about the word polis to realize that there is no possible English rendering of such a common phrase as, 'It is everyone's duty to help the polis'...
But the 'polis' every Greek knew; there it was, complete, before his eyes. He could see the fields which gave it its sustenance - or did not, if they crops failed; he could see how agriculture, trade and industry dove-tailed into one another; he knew the frontiers, where they were strong and where weak; if any malcontents were planning a coup, it was difficult for them to conceal the fact. The entire life of the polis, and thd relation between its parts, were much easier to grasp, because of the small scale of things. Therefore to say 'It is everyone's duty to help the polis' was not to express a fine sentiment but to speak the plainest and most urgent common sense. Public affairs had an immediacy and a concreteness which they cannot possibly have for us." (p73)
"the democratic institutions under which Athens conducted it, preceded by two sketches of the Athenian character, taken from Thucydides' history of the war. The first was given by a Corinthian delegation chich came to Sparta to urge Sparta to declare war.
'You have no idea what sort of people these Athenians areeeee.. They are always thinking of new schemes, and are quick to make their plans and to carry them out: you ar econtent with what you have, and are reluctant to do even what is necessary. They are bold, adventurous, sanguine: you are cautious, and trust neither to your power nor to your judgment. They love foreign adventure, you hate it: for they think they stand to gain, you that you stand to lose something. When victorious they make the most of it: when defeated, they fall back less than anyone. They give their bodies to Athens as if they were public property: they use their minds for Athens in the most individual way possible. They make a plan: if it fails, they think they have lost something; if it succeeds, this success is nothing in comparison with what they say they are going to do next...'
... Pericles becomes more general agan. In Athens, wealth gives opportunity for action, not reason for boasting, and it is idleness, not poverty, which is disgraceful. A man has time both for his private affairs and for the affairs of the city, and those engaged in bsuiness are yet quite competent to judge political matters. A man who takes no part in public business some call a quiet man: we Athenians call him useless. Speech we do nto regard as a hindrance to action, but as a necessary preliminary: other people are made bold by ignorance, timid by calculation; we can calculate, and still be udacious. Also, we are generous, not out of expediency, but from confidence. In fact, our polis is an education to all Greece." (p123-124)
"many forms of public service were paid for, including eventually attendance at the Assembly. Athens in fact foudn what we have found during this century, that if we want the ordinary citizen to give up time for public work wemust indemnify him for the loss of his time..." (p135)
"This experiment in democratic government is one that can never be repeated, unless once again there should arise independent states small enough to walk across in two days. The confident way in which the Athenians carried to its logical extreme their desire to participate directly and personally in every aspect of government sounds almost like a deliberate challenge to the weakness of human nature. Is it possible for a whole people to have the sustained wisdom and self-control to manage its own afairs wisely? Can a people control an empire and its own finances, without becoming corrupt? Can it run a war? What are the temptations and dangers that assail a democracy? Athens provides almost a laboratory experiment in popular government: except that it all happened so long ago, and so far away, and in a language which is so very dead, it might almost be worth our while today to pay it some attention." (p135)
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Ritsos, Yannis (transl by Rae Dalven) The Forth Dimension
"In his poem 'This Alone,' written many years later, Ritsos writes: 'I don't believe in death / not that I don't know him. I know him well. I will not grant him my eyes.'" pX
"AT THAT TIME they made speeches on wooden platforms, on balconies,
radios blasted away, repeating the speeches,
fear was hidden behind the flags;
inside the drums the murdered kept vigil;
no one understood what was happening;
the bugles may have provided the rhythm for the footsteps -
they didn't provide the rhythm for the heart. We were searching for the rhythm."
(The Blackened Pot) p15
"LATER we learned much more, but if I sat and narrated everything to you
my song would never end
just as our love never ends, life, the sun...
"WE KEPT LOOKING at the same point for many hours;
many life-timeswe sought this sign
before we entrsusted our hearts and our hands to it.
And that sign looked at by thousands of pained pepole
takes something from our eyes and the meeting of our eyes
and it grows, it grows, it grows..."
(The Blackened Pot) p17
"HERE IS a brotherly light - hansd an deyes are simple.
Here it's not a matter of my being over you or you over me.
Here everyone is over himself...
"Their movement is simple, full of precision."
(The Blackened Pot) p20
"There are certain verses - sometimes entire poems -
whose meaning even I don't know. What I don't know sustains me still. And you are right to ask. Don't ask me.
I don't know, I tell you."
(Necessary Explanations) p32
"The rain came abruptly at a time when no one expected it,
in the very heart of luminous days and glorious fruit crops. At daybreak
when the women opened the windows, everything
was changed - leaden and damp. And everybody felt
as if someone had deceived them. However they were not
enraged at all - only surly and speechless.
"The soothing fragrance of the fields entered the houses
like a broad pardon before they knew their error. Then
with the sacks they once used to carry grapes,
they made a coarsely cut effigy of the summer and filled it
with straw and scattered memories. For a moment
you thought they were going to burn it in the upper square
like an ultimate splendor, like an inexplicable revenge. But no -
they left it there forsaken in the yellow solitude of September,
a straw statue, getting soaked, unprotesting, in the noiseless rain."
(First Rain) (complete poem) p44
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Wright, Craig How to be a genius
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-secret-habits-of-genius
"Genius is not an absolute but a human construct that’s dependent on time, place and culture. Similarly, genius is relative. Some people simply change the world more than others. Accordingly, genius presupposes an inequality of output (the exceptional thoughts of an Einstein, or the music of a Bach) and generates an inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous riches for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). That’s just the way the world works. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress."
"If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not. Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door. Finally, if you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade."
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Warburton, Nigel Reading John Gray in war
https://aeon.co/essays/how-john-grays-philosophy-helped-me-understand-my-war-experience
"Yet it’s the penultimate maxim that likely best encapsulates his political philosophy, and the maxim probably least obviously gained from watching cats: ‘Beware of anyone who offers to make you happy.’"
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Musk, Elon Advice from
youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0bj4UZ3zWg
1. Work Like Hell
2. Have a High Pain Threshold
3. Critical Thinking
4. Add Value to Society
5. Take Risks
6. Have a Great Product / Service
7. Attract Great People
8. Constantly Seek Criticism
9. Don't Follow the Trend
10. Overcome Critics
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