Begin It Now

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

[W.H. Murray]
The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
(There is some dispute over the accuracy of the Goethe quote used by Murray, for more information see here)

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No matter what your intentions, announcing them is an important step. I can say this with confidence based on many years of experience in business. 

From the time when I was a child, I was always telling people what I was thinking and what I wanted to do, and I was constantly being told that I talked too much. But the simple act of saying something is a way to gather energy towards you. Especially when you say something to other people, energy flows in your direction and helps you achieve your aims.

If you express your intentions, the realization of those intentions will follow. Of course, I'm not proposing that you make irresponsible statements - it's important to say what you really feel inside. Your word is your promise, so when you say something you must have the determination to commit yourself. Letting other people know your intentions also often leads to the arrival of required assistance from unexpected sources.

[Masaru Emoto]
The Hidden Messages in Water, p. 141-2


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Take Aim

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Goal directed [Selective] attention

One's currently active goal drives what one attends to in the busy real world.

An active goal (e.g., to find something to eat) caused the mental representations relevant to attaining the goal (e.g., restaurants, bodegas) to become somewhat more active than usual and thus more ready to become activated by corresponding stimuli in the environment.

Selective attention is a powerful tool in the reduction of the often overwhelming abundance of information available in the current environment.

It is sometimes quite striking how powerful this selective attention process is in reducing what 'gets through' to influence us; the phenomenon of 'inattentional blindness' being a dramatic example.

In one study, for example, participants involved in a computer-simulated three person 'ball toss' game very often did not notice - and were surprised to find out later - when a large gorilla walked right through the game across the middle of the screen.

[John A. Bargh]
'What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behaviour' published in European Journal of Social Psychology, Jan 2006, p.158, 159


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From a self-organizing systems perspective, goals [...] operate as the attractors around which human behavior is organized (Carver & Scheier, 2002) […] 

[…] the entropy experienced by a goal-directed system is inversely related to the amount of perceptual and behavioral constraint provided by a goal. 

Poorly defined or vague goals are therefore less likely to provide effective uncertainty-reducing effects, as they are incapable of sufficiently narrowing the range of potentially relevant affordances [...] In such cases, it becomes impossible to specify the motivational significance of any given event, as there will be no clear reference value by which to judge the experience. 

While the natural tendency of all information systems is to return to a state of dissolution and energy dispersal, behavioral plans help organisms to minimize their overall entropy levels (i.e., strengthening their coherence as a functional entity) by providing clear and specific strategies for acquiring needed resources in the face of uncertainty and determining the appropriate way to interpret and respond to environmental input.

Calculating the appropriate response without [a high level] goal becomes extremely difficult, as the number of potential options grows exponentially and the distribution of possible actions and perceptions extends beyond the individual’s computational capacities.

Effective plans are thus essential tools for combating the inevitable thermodynamic dissolution that comes with time, as they help to maintain the structural integrity of complex biobehavioral systems.

The work that is required during goal pursuit can be considered in terms of the path length to goal attainment. In some cases, the path length is relatively short, requiring minimal effort, few steps, or transformations of state to achieve the goal and typifying an efficient low-entropy situation of high stability.

Behaviors that appear to provide the optimal (i.e., most efficient) path to a goal in any given moment thus come to be weighted more heavily in the distribution of possible actions.

Psychological entropy appears inversely related to the integrity of an individual’s existence in the world, as reflected in his or her ability to successfully perform work and obtain rewards through goal-directed perception and action. Much of our lives is spent trying to reduce and manage the uncertainty that we encounter.

[Jacob B. Hirsh, Raymond A. Mar, and Jordan B. Peterson]

'Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety'


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Bohr claimed that an experimental apparatus must always be treated as a classical object and described using ordinary language. He thought that specific experiments could reveal only part of the quantum nature of microscopic objects.

For example, one experiment might reveal a particle's dynamical properties such as energy, momentum, position, etc. Another experiment might reveal wavelike properties.

But no one experiment could exhaustively reveal both. 

'Complementarity'


The wave and particle models are both required for a complete description of matter and of electromagnetic radiation.

Since these two models are mutually exclusive, they cannot be used simultaneously. Each experiment, or the experimenter who designs the experiment, selects one or the other description as the proper description for that experiment.

[Nils Bohr]
'The Complementarity Principle'


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Reinterpretation




Complete     -      Incomplete
State            -       Process




A stable culture allows us to 'relax' and forgo reinterpretation. An unstable culture puts us on 'alert' and necessitates reinterpretation. There are no entirely 'stable' cultures, but as cultures become more complex the potential for instability grows. In small-scale cultures, reinterpretation (novelty) often comes in the form of dreams and visions.





[...] according to Nietzsche, to reinterpret events is to rearrange effects and therefore generate new things. Our “text” is being composed as we read it, and our readings are new parts of it that will give rise to further ones in the future.

Even the reinterpretation of existing formulas adds to the world, especially since Nietzsche often thinks of interpretation as “the introduction of meaning - not ‘explanation’ (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign).”

To introduce new interpretations, therefore, it is necessary to reinterpret old ones. Our text, even though it will someday come to an end, is still and forever incomplete. 

[…] in Nietzsche’s own view, reinterpretation is the most powerful theoretical and practical instrument. It is the literal analogue of “the hammer” with which he proposes to do philosophy in the Preface to The Twilight of the Idols: part tuning fork to sound out hollow idols, part instrument of their destruction, and part sculptor’s mallet to fashion new states out of the forms as well as the materials of the old.

Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 91





We are very much the creation of the stories we tell ourselves.

... just turn around any of the major psychological stories you tell about your own life.
Read them backwards. You picked your wife because she was very different from (or very much like) your mother. This is an old saw in psychology. But suppose your soul gained practice with your mother for the life later lived with your wife.

Or suppose a person conceives of her childhood illness (that kept her bedridden and out of touch during crucial socializing years) to have been early practice at the work she does now, like writing in solitude or inventing electronic devices or becoming a therapist. She had to be isolated for those years in order to follow her seed.

This way of seeing removes the burden from those early years as having been a mistake and yourself a victim of handicaps or cruelties; instead, it's all the acorn in the mirror, the soul endlessly repeating in different guises the fundamental pattern of your karma.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.27, 68, 69




These coincidences amaze her. Never does she feel so thoroughly suffused with beauty as when the nostalgia for her past love blends with the surprises of her new love.

The intrusion of the previous boyfriend into the story she is currently living is to her mind not some secret infidelity; it adds further to her fondness for the man walking beside her now.

[Milan Kundera]
Ignorance, p.80




People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void, of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

[Milan Kundera]
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting




All messages and parts of messages are like phrases or segments of equations which a mathematician puts in brackets. Outside the brackets there may always be a qualifier or multiplier which will alter the whole tenor of the phrase. Moreover, these qualifiers can always be added, even years later.

In the realm of communication, the events of the past constitute a chain of old horseshoes so that the meaning of that chain can be changed and is continually being changed.

What exists today are only messages about the past which we call memories, and these messages can always be framed and modulated from moment to moment.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia'), p.232-3




Personal memories are more like mental reconstructions where the original details are contorted, at least to some degree, by who we are today.

Recalling a memory, in fact, appears to be a collaborative effort of different parts of our brains. It also seems to be strengthened and modified each time it’s retrieved.

Scientists have a term for this – reconsolidation. And they’ve found that a memory is not only a reflection of the original event, but also a product of each time you call it up.

So memories, it turns out, aren’t fixed; they’re dynamic, reshaped by our current emotions and beliefs.

And that’s not a bad thing. As Fernyhough posits, the purpose of memory is about adapting and looking into the future as much as into the past.





What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called "reality.” 

We can destroy only as creators. - But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 58




Within a stable frame of reference, as Eco (1990) insists, the process of interpretation is limited. 

So, too, with people. Within a stable framework, as we saw, contextual dependencies established through persistent interactions with that environment limit our need to constantly interpret the world. 

But this efficiently slack attitude can be successful only while the contextual frame of reference is not undergoing radical transformation. When the context alters so radically that the earlier interdependencies no longer apply, organisms must be on constant "alert" or risk extinction.

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p. 255




As Latour concluded:

The fate of what we say and make is in later users' hands. . . . By themselves, a statement, a piece of machinery, a process are lost. By looking only at them and at their internal properties, you cannot decide if they are true or false, efficient or wasteful, costly or cheap, strong or frail. These characteristics are only gained through incorporation into other statements, processes and pieces of machinery.


Or in my terms, they only acquire significance by being taken up into the continually reconstructed narrative within which scientific action makes itself intelligible.

How one's work gets reinterpreted in the course of further research is largely out of one's own hands, of course, despite all efforts to write scientific papers in ways which preempt criticism and constrain possible interpretations. Scientific work proceeds from the researchers' practical grasp of their situation within an ongoing narrative, but that narrative is being developed simultaneously by others as well, frequently in ways which do not fully mesh with one another.

[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’



Respect your Selves

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Ventura: The more I think about it, you do have an image of what your face will look like. You do feel other people in you, who are older, and they talk to you - they talk to me, at any rate. In have a much older man inside me who talks to me every day, quietly, usually kindly, tolerantly, sometimes sternly when I'm really fucking up, always with humour. I like him enormously; he seems very much the best part of me.

I know several men who are, like me, in their forties, and they're starting to feel middle-aged in the flesh, and they say, "My body is betraying me." They even dye their hair and lie about their age. And I know women the same age, not Beverly Hills housewives or movie stars but women whom I never thought would do this, getting breast implants, tucks, that kind of thing - and I'm afraid for them, because they are deeply insulting the older people in them. And those insults are weakening the older people in them.

So when they finally turn sixty-five, when it's their sixty-five-year-old's turn to be, that sixty-five-year-old has been so insulted and weakened that he or she may not be able to do the job.

Hillman
: I saw a drawing of a woman - she was about forty-four. It was a pencil drawing, very touching. She didn't like it because it made her look too old. I said, "That drawing, that's the old woman who is waiting for you at the end of the corridor." They're there. Those figures are our companions, they're always around, and they need strengthening all the way down the line.

Ventura
: And if we've insulted the older people in us sufficiently and attacked them every time we, say, cursed an older driver -

Hillman
: - or the person in front of you in the supermarket who doesn't put her money away quickly enough -

Ventura
: Every time we've done that we've frightened and diminished the old ones in us, and those figures shrink until maybe there isn't anyone there.

And when we attack young people, in the same impatient way we've attacked old people, we weaken our young selves who are still in us, the way the older selves were in us when we were young.

Hillman
: Absolutely. We attack the younger people in us. As you say, the young ones who give us urges, send us fantasies. And so we no longer allow ourselves to feel or to imagine sexuality, we no longer allow ourselves to imagine risk - the incredible risks that young people take! They just do it! We don't allow ourselves to risk in the sense of abandon, letting go.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.21, 22, 23


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Communal Benefits

Hillman: The thing therapy pushes is relationship, yet work may matter just as much as relationship. You think you're going to die if you're not in a good relationship. You feel that not being in a significant, long-lasting, deep relationship is going to cripple you or that you're crazy or neurotic or something. You feel intense bouts of longing and loneliness.

But those feelings are not only due to poor relationship; they come also because you're not in any kind of political community that makes sense, that matters. Therapy pushes the relationship issues, but what intensifies those issues is that we don't have (a) satisfactory work or (b), even more important perhaps, we don't have a satisfactory political community.

You can't just make up for the loss of passion and purpose in your daily work by intensifying your personal relationships. I think we talk so much about inner growth and development because we are so boxed in to petty, private concerns on our jobs.

Ventura: In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there's nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs into a relationship or expect them to be met by our family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.

... even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient. Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community - the tribe or the village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families.

It's not only that everyone worked together, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn't confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.13

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In stark contrast to the nuclear family, which tends to seal itself off from the outside world, relationships within the Ladakhi family naturally extend themselves into the broader community. It is sometimes hard to say where family ends and community begins.

Any woman old enough to be your mother is called "Mother," anyone of the right age to be your brother is called "Brother." We still see remnants of this in industrial society. In the more traditional parts of Sweden and Russia, for example, a child will call any familiar adult "Uncle" or "Auntie."

Most Westerners would agree that we have lost our sense of community. Our lives are fragmented, and in spite of the number of people with whom we come into contact in the course of a day, we are often left feeling sadly alone, not even knowing our neighbours. In Ladakh, people are part of a community that is spiritually, socially, and economically interdependent.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.186

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Shedding Skin

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Hillman: And becoming more and more oneself - the actual experience of it is a shrinking, in that very often it's a dehydration, a loss of inflations, a loss of illusions.

Ventura: That doesn't sound like a good time. Why would anybody want to do it?

Hillman: Because shedding is a beautiful thing. It's of course not what consumerism tells you, but shedding feels good. It's a lightening up.

Ventura: Shedding what?

Hillman: Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you've accumulated. Shedding dead wood. That's one of the big sheddings. Things that don't work anymore, things that don't keep you - keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you've had too long. People that you don't really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality. That's a very big one, 'cause if you're still making love at forty the way you did at eighteen you're missing something, and if you're making love at sixty the way you did at forty you're missing something. All that changes. The imagination changes.

Or put it another way: Growth is always loss.

Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits that you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity. That's a big one, when you begin to move into the unfamiliar.

You know, in the organic world when anything begins to grow it's moving constantly into unfamiliar movements and unfamiliar things. Watch birds grow - they fall down, they can't quite do it. Their growing is all awkwardness. Watch a fourteen-year-old kid tripping over his own feet.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.8


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Certain / Uncertain




Certain                                 -                      Uncertain
Solid                                     -                      Liquid
Ideology                               -                      Mythology
Committed                           -                      Uncommitted




As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

[Albert Einstein]
Sidelights on Relativity




What we need now is something for which there isn't a precise word; a form of interpretation in which conviction is compatible with the misgiving that should accompany it.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 106




Strauss too perceives an inner insincerity and a subjective tyranny in the romantic. He explains it […] in terms of the inner uncertainty in a conflict between antagonistic forces.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p.151
 



Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement.

Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say “I don’t know.” He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonises over the consequences of being wrong.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 190




Dogmatism: unfounded positiveness in matters of opinion; arrogant assertion of opinions as truths.

Dogmatism is an enemy to peace [...] In the present age [...] it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to a man, but is nethertheless an intellectual vice.

If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure. The same sort of assurance is demanded, in later life, of those who undertake to lead populations into the Promised Land. 'Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss.' 'Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous.' 'Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign.' 'Kill the Serbs and let the Croats reign.'

These are samples of the slogans that have won popular acceptance in our time. Even a modicum of philosophy would make it impossible to accept such blood-thirsty nonsense.

But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgement in the the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.

To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgement the best discipline is philosophy.

Dogmatism and scepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance.

Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. It is true that this proviso is hardly necessary as regards the multiplication table, but knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

Suppose I say 'democracy is a good thing': I must admit, first, that I am less sure of this than I am that two and two is four, and secondly, that 'democracy' is a somewhat vague term which I cannot define precisely. We ought to say, therefore: 'I am fairly certain that it is a good thing if a government has something of the characteristics that are common to the British and American Constitutions', or something of the sort. And one of the aims of education ought to be to make such a statement more effective from a platform than the usual type of political slogan.

Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetising diet.

Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias.

If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.

If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

A good way of ridding yourself of certain types of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own [...] If you cannot travel seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours.

[Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('Philosophy for Laymen', 'An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish'), p.38, 39, 115, 116




Perhaps we're afraid to consider contrary viewpoints because we know that within them is contained a measure of sense. After all, if we spend too long abroad then our own customs may begin to appear strange.

What the traveller, the nomad, knows, is that all positions are relative, and arbitrary; and that every land has its charms.




We have to admit that, strictly speaking, scientific laws cannot be proved and are therefore not certain.

Even so, their degree of probability is raised by each confirming instance; and in addition to the whole of the known past every moment of the world's continuance brings countless billions of confirming instances - and never a single counter example.

So, if not certain, they are probable to the highest degree which it is possible to conceive; and in practice, if not in theory, this is indistinguishable from certainty.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 21-2




In a beautiful treatise now vanished from our consciousness, Dissertation on the Search for Truth, published in 1673, the polemist Simon Foucher exposed our psychological predilection for certainties.

He teaches us the art of doubting, how to position ourselves between doubting and believing. He writes: “One needs to exit doubt in order to produce science - but few people heed the importance of not exiting from it prematurely… It is a fact that one usually exits doubt without realising it.”

He warns us further: “We are dogma-prone from our mother’s wombs.”

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 129




We can see an ideal of precision, to which we can approximate indefinitely; but we cannot attain this ideal.

Logical words, like the rest, when used by human beings, share the vagueness of all other words. There is, however, less vagueness about logical words than about the words of daily life, because logical words apply essentially to symbols, and may be conceived as applying rather to possible than to actual symbols. We are capable of imagining what a precise symbolism would be, though we cannot actually construct such a symbolism.

Hence we are able to imagine a precise meaning for such words as "or" and "not." We can, in fact, see precisely what they would mean if our symbolism were precise.

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life, but only to an imagined celestial existence.

[Bertrand Russell]
'Vagueness', The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1:2, p. 88-9




EpochÄ“, in Greek philosophy, “suspension of judgment,” a principle originally espoused by nondogmatic philosophical Skeptics of the ancient Greek Academy who, viewing the problem of knowledge as insoluble, proposed that, when controversy arises, an attitude of noninvolvement should be adopted in order to gain peace of mind for daily living.

'Epochē'




We are cautious, we modern men, about ultimate convictions. Our mistrust lies in wait for the enchantments and deceptions of the conscience that are involved in every strong faith, every unconditional Yes and No.

How is this to be explained? Perhaps what is to be found here is largely the care of the "burned child,” of the disappointed idealist; but there is also another, superior component: the jubilant curiosity of one who formerly stood in his corner and was driven to despair by his corner, and now delights and luxuriates in the opposite of a corner, in the boundless, in what is "free as such.” 

Thus an almost Epicurean bent for knowledge develops that will not easily let go of the questionable character of things; also an aversion to big moral words and gestures; a taste that rejects all crude, four-square opposites and is proudly conscious of its practice in having reservations. 

For this constitutes our pride, this slight tightening of the reins as our urge for certainty races ahead, this self-control of the rider during his wildest rides; for we still ride mad and fiery horses, and when we hesitate it is least of all danger that makes us hesitate.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 375




New, emergent potentials and capacities appear in some processes of creative destruction. Learning to embrace that promise of novelty and creativity must be the twenty-first century's rallying cry. 

Newton has been called the "god of the gaps" (Hausheer 1980) for trying to close the conceptual potholes that continually open up at our feet so as to produce a certain, fail-safe world. Can we learn instead to spot - on the spot - the chance fluctuation around which a system (be it a personal relationship, a business, or a social or political organization) could advantageously reorganize, and then embrace and "amplify" it, to use dissipative structure language? Or will we continue to hang on to persons, theories, and institutions that promise certainty and predictability? 

Is it possible, that is, to learn to embrace uncertainty? Because the price we pay for the potential of true novelty and creativity is uncertainty.

[…] in a world with room for unique individuals and the creativity and novelty they promote, precise prediction is impossible - thankfully. And this is the point the unhappy jurors must not forget. 

Too often we long for Newton's simple, clockwork universe, whose unambiguous, tidy formulas can resolve once and for all our uncertainty. 

The answer to the question, "When will the eclipse occur?" can be determined with astounding precision: "At 3:45 P.m. on December 11, 4022." We yearn for a metaphysics and an epistemology that will provide similar certitude when answering the question, "Was it first- or second-degree murder, or manslaughter?" 

For centuries, the theories of philosophers and scientists encouraged such yearnings. They are blameless, however (by reason of ignorance!), for not having understood that such a wish can be granted only to closed, linear systems, that is, to a determinist universe of cookiecutter automata […]

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p. 258-9




Hume took the position that scientific procedures could never answer questions pertaining to the “end of man” and concluded for that reason that such questions were not worth asking, since they would always give rise to "pretty uncertain and unphilosophical” thoughts.

Like Descartes, he took it for granted that philosophy had to rest on intellectual foundations unassailable by doubt - on “principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal.”

These principles, which could be gleaned only from the scientific study of nature, represented the "foundation of our thoughts and actions," without which "human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin." Everything else, Hume thought, was "changeable, weak, and irregular."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.125



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