Friday, September 10, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
人生的基本规则之一
人生的规则在自然的规则之下。遵守人生的规则首先要遵守自然的规则。自然的力量大于人的力量。不要在自然面前忘乎所以。人生要学会顺乎自然，懂得自然，适应自然，使自己成为自然的一部分，成为自然的朋友，而不是成为自然的敌人。我们的任务是如何利用自然，使用自然，不被自然现象所吓倒，在自然的变幻之中找到规律，使自己在千变万化之中，沉稳地应付已经发生的和将要发生的变化，成为自己的主人，成为自己精神上的主人，一个有意识有目的生活的人。
自然是无限的，人生是有限的。跟自然相比，一切人为的东西都是相对的，也都是有限的.
我们要学会把自然作为我们的助手。
自然是无限的，人生是有限的。跟自然相比，一切人为的东西都是相对的，也都是有限的.
我们要学会把自然作为我们的助手。
人生的基本规则
There are so many topics to write, I have a few lineups.
古希腊哲学与修身养性
论幸福
什么是一个完美的人？
但是哪里是我的起点哪？好象那三个还不在最后的根上，这个根，我好像在上个星期找到了。其实，我觉得对一个人来说，最重要的是能够弄明白人生的一些最基本的规则，就像玩游戏一样，如果要想玩得好，玩得有意思，有规则 并且懂规则，是非常重要的。
有人说，人生是一场游戏，言外之意是不必对人生过于认真。不过，细心品味这句话，却无意中体会到了另一层含义。沿着游戏二字，我想到了人们通常最喜欢玩的几种游戏，比如说篮球、足球、乒乓球等运动项目，象棋、桥牌、扑克等娱乐项目，还有计算机游戏等等，似乎每一个游戏都有很多规则，你如果要玩的话，是一定要遵守规则的，作为一个观众，要想看得明白，看得过瘾的话，也是一定要懂得规则的，不然的话，不仅看不出什么门道，也不可能把自己溶入到游戏中去。我在美国住了二十年，也没有学会看这里的橄榄球比赛，所以一到橄榄球比赛季节，好像每个人都在为每场比赛激发得热血沸腾，情绪高昂，而我觉得自己永远是门外汉，冷冰冰的，好无趣味。
古希腊哲学与修身养性
论幸福
什么是一个完美的人？
但是哪里是我的起点哪？好象那三个还不在最后的根上，这个根，我好像在上个星期找到了。其实，我觉得对一个人来说，最重要的是能够弄明白人生的一些最基本的规则，就像玩游戏一样，如果要想玩得好，玩得有意思，有规则 并且懂规则，是非常重要的。
有人说，人生是一场游戏，言外之意是不必对人生过于认真。不过，细心品味这句话，却无意中体会到了另一层含义。沿着游戏二字，我想到了人们通常最喜欢玩的几种游戏，比如说篮球、足球、乒乓球等运动项目，象棋、桥牌、扑克等娱乐项目，还有计算机游戏等等，似乎每一个游戏都有很多规则，你如果要玩的话，是一定要遵守规则的，作为一个观众，要想看得明白，看得过瘾的话，也是一定要懂得规则的，不然的话，不仅看不出什么门道，也不可能把自己溶入到游戏中去。我在美国住了二十年，也没有学会看这里的橄榄球比赛，所以一到橄榄球比赛季节，好像每个人都在为每场比赛激发得热血沸腾，情绪高昂，而我觉得自己永远是门外汉，冷冰冰的，好无趣味。
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
The philosophy of Despair
It is written in the very structure of the brain that each impression of the senses must bring with it the impulse to act.
One of the few things that we may know in life is this, that it is impossible for man to know anything absolutely.
To reach for the ultimate end of action is never to begin to act.
Greater sensitiveness to external things means greater capacity for pain, hence greater suffering, when the natural channels of effort are closed.
That the joys thus produced had no real objective existence, man was not long in finding out, and it soon appeared that for each subjective pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective sorrow, likewise unrelated to external things.
What, then, are you doing under these blue skies? The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world.
It does not matter if the greatest thing for you to do be not in itself great. The best preparation for greatness comes in doing faithfully the little things that lie nearest. The nearest is the greatest in most human lives.
It is not that "I come like water and like wind I go." I am here today, and the moment and the place are real, and my will is itself one of the fates that make and unmake all things.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
The book was written by David Starr Jordan.
One of the few things that we may know in life is this, that it is impossible for man to know anything absolutely.
To reach for the ultimate end of action is never to begin to act.
Greater sensitiveness to external things means greater capacity for pain, hence greater suffering, when the natural channels of effort are closed.
That the joys thus produced had no real objective existence, man was not long in finding out, and it soon appeared that for each subjective pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective sorrow, likewise unrelated to external things.
What, then, are you doing under these blue skies? The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world.
It does not matter if the greatest thing for you to do be not in itself great. The best preparation for greatness comes in doing faithfully the little things that lie nearest. The nearest is the greatest in most human lives.
It is not that "I come like water and like wind I go." I am here today, and the moment and the place are real, and my will is itself one of the fates that make and unmake all things.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
The book was written by David Starr Jordan.
Seven Principles
Thesis and antithesis are identical in nature, but different in degree"; "opposites are the same, differing only in degree"; "the pairs of opposites may be reconciled"; "extremes meet"; "everything is and isn't, at the same time"; "all truths are but half-truths"; "every truth is half-false"; "there are two sides to everything," etc., etc., etc.
1. The Principle of Mentalism. 2. The Principle of Correspondence. 3. The Principle of Vibration. 4. The Principle of Polarity. 5. The Principle of Rhythm. 6. The Principle of Cause and Effect. 7. The Principle of Gender.
The Principle of Mentalism
"THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental."—The Kybalion.
2. The Principle of Correspondence
"As above, so below; as below, so above."—The Kybalion.
3. The Principle of Vibration
"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."—The
Kybalion.
4. The Principle of Polarity
"Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."—The Kybalion.
6 The Principle of Cause and Effect
"Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law."—The Kybalion.
1. The Principle of Mentalism. 2. The Principle of Correspondence. 3. The Principle of Vibration. 4. The Principle of Polarity. 5. The Principle of Rhythm. 6. The Principle of Cause and Effect. 7. The Principle of Gender.
The Principle of Mentalism
"THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental."—The Kybalion.
2. The Principle of Correspondence
"As above, so below; as below, so above."—The Kybalion.
3. The Principle of Vibration
"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."—The
Kybalion.
4. The Principle of Polarity
"Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."—The Kybalion.
6 The Principle of Cause and Effect
"Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law."—The Kybalion.
The Kybalion
Now for a second proof. Three kinds of pleasure correspond to the three elements of the soul—reason, spirit, desire. In each man one of the three is in the ascendant. One counts knowledge vain in comparison with the advantages of riches, another with those of honor; to the philosopher only truth counts. But he is the only one of them who makes his choice from experience of all three kinds. And he, the only qualified judge, places the satisfaction of the spirit second, and of desire lowest. And yet a third proof: I fancy the only quite real pleasures are those of the philosopher. There is an intermediate state between pleasure and pain. To pass into this from pleasure is painful, and from pain is pleasurable. Now, the pleasures of the body are really nothing more than reliefs from pains of one kind or another. And, next, the pleasures of the soul, being of the eternal order, are necessarily more real than those of the body, which are fleeting—in fact, mere shadows of pleasure.
Greater far are the rewards of virtue than all we have yet shown; for an immortal soul should heed nothing that is less than eternal. "What, is the soul then immortal? Can you prove that?" Yes, of a surety. In all things there is good and evil; a thing perishes of its own corruption, not of the corruption of aught external to it.
In a word, love is the nourishment of the heart as food is of the body; to love is to fulfill the desire of nature, to satisfy a need. But if possible, manage it so that it will not become a passion.
Disgust and weariness follow you everywhere. You seek solitude, and as soon as you are enjoying it, it wearies you.
The people of Ancient Greece also made him one of their many gods—calling him "Hermes, the god of Wisdom.
The legends of the "Philosopher's Stone" which would turn base metal into Gold, was an allegory relating to Hermetic Philosophy, readily understood by all students of true Hermeticism.
Greater far are the rewards of virtue than all we have yet shown; for an immortal soul should heed nothing that is less than eternal. "What, is the soul then immortal? Can you prove that?" Yes, of a surety. In all things there is good and evil; a thing perishes of its own corruption, not of the corruption of aught external to it.
In a word, love is the nourishment of the heart as food is of the body; to love is to fulfill the desire of nature, to satisfy a need. But if possible, manage it so that it will not become a passion.
Disgust and weariness follow you everywhere. You seek solitude, and as soon as you are enjoying it, it wearies you.
The people of Ancient Greece also made him one of their many gods—calling him "Hermes, the god of Wisdom.
The legends of the "Philosopher's Stone" which would turn base metal into Gold, was an allegory relating to Hermetic Philosophy, readily understood by all students of true Hermeticism.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Getting old is not for the weak hearted
A friend of mine sent me this today:
I'm retired. I was tired yesterday, and I'm tired again today.
Someone had to remind me, so I'm reminding you too. Don't laugh.....it is all true.
Perks of reaching 50 or being over 60 and heading towards 70!
1. Kidnappers are not very interested in you..
2. In a hostage situation you are likely to be released first.
3. No one expects you to run--anywhere.
4. People call at 9 pm and ask, did I wake you?
5. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.
6. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.
7. Things you buy now won't wear out.
8. You can eat supper at 4 pm.
9. You can live without sex but not your glasses.
10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.
11. You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.
12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the room.
13. You sing along with elevator music.
14.. Your eyes won't get much worse.
15 . Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off..
16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather service.
17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember them either.
18. Your supply of brain cells is finally down to manageable size.
19. You can't remember who sent you this list.
And you notice these are all in Big Print for your convenience.
Forward this to every one you can remember right now! And Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
I'm retired. I was tired yesterday, and I'm tired again today.
Someone had to remind me, so I'm reminding you too. Don't laugh.....it is all true.
Perks of reaching 50 or being over 60 and heading towards 70!
1. Kidnappers are not very interested in you..
2. In a hostage situation you are likely to be released first.
3. No one expects you to run--anywhere.
4. People call at 9 pm and ask, did I wake you?
5. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.
6. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.
7. Things you buy now won't wear out.
8. You can eat supper at 4 pm.
9. You can live without sex but not your glasses.
10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.
11. You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.
12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the room.
13. You sing along with elevator music.
14.. Your eyes won't get much worse.
15 . Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off..
16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather service.
17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember them either.
18. Your supply of brain cells is finally down to manageable size.
19. You can't remember who sent you this list.
And you notice these are all in Big Print for your convenience.
Forward this to every one you can remember right now! And Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Ancient Psychology
Ancient Psychology, rooted in a very different ground from modern therapeutic thinking, held that the fate and character of each of us is born in mystery, that our individuality is so profound and so hidden that it takes more than a lifetime for identity to merge. Renaissance doctors said that the essence of each person originates as a star in the heavens. How different this is from the modern view that a person is what he makes himself to be.
It is the unfathomable mystery that is the very seed and heart of each individual. Care of the soul appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of the rational and normal. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
It is the unfathomable mystery that is the very seed and heart of each individual. Care of the soul appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of the rational and normal. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
James Hillman and archetypal psychology
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.
Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life."
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced.”
The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.
Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life."
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced.”
The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.
Minimalism
Less is more, less is better.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.
The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Postminimalism).
The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.
The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Postminimalism).
The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.
Marsilio Ficino
Two books by Marsilio Ficino:
The Platonic Theology
The Book of Life
The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his "Platonic Theology," translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. This is the fourth of a projected six volumes.
The Platonic Theology
The Book of Life
The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his "Platonic Theology," translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. This is the fourth of a projected six volumes.
Care of the soul
"Care of the Soul" by Thomas Moore
Moore's studies in Renaissance psychology, philosophy, and medicine contributed to the work.
Renaissance authors: Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus
Jung said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of religion. He also said that the work begins and ends with Mercury. Mercury is the god of fictions and fabrications, of trickery, thievery, and sleight-of-hand.
A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological health.
Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.
Marsilio Ficino: The mind tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.
James Hillman (the founder of archetypal psychology)
Robert Sardello
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza
Patricia Berry
Alfred Ziegler
Cure of the soul: cura animarum.
the craft of life: techne tou biou (Plato)
We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we ave to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.
The emotional complaints:
Emptiness
Meaninglessness
Vague depression
Disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationship
A loss of values
Yearning for personal fulfillment
A hunger for spirituality
All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know that the soul craves.We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas. Lacking that soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.
"therapy" refers to service to the gods.(Socrates)
Apuleius (Roman writer): Everyone should know that you can't live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.
Epicurus: cultivating the simple pleasure.
Soul is nothing like ego(self). Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego. Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.
Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
---John Keats
Care of the soul is not a method of problem solving. Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness. The word care implies a way of responding to expressions of the soul that is not heroic and muscular. Cura means several things: attention, devotion, husbandry, adorning the body, healing, managing, being anxious for, and worshiping the gods.
"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.
Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can't care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observation is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observation of a holiday. The -serv- in observation originally referred to tending sheep.
This definition of caring for the soul is minimalist. It has to do with modest care and not miraculous cure. Therapy sometimes emphasizes change so strongly that people often neglect their own natures and tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health that may always be out of reach. By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures, we move beyond the reach of soul.
James Hillman: The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
It is the soul that makes us human.
To feel and imagine may not sound like much. But in care of the soul there is trust that nature heals, that much can accomplished by not-doing.
Paracelsus (16th century physician): The physician is only the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore, it behooves medicine to follow the will of nature.
In caring for the soul, a symptom has its own will and that "curing" in some way means following that will.
Observance has considerable power.
Modern interventional therapy sometimes tries to solve specific problems and can therefore be carried out on a short-term basis. But care of the soul never ends.
Every ending is a beginning. The life of the soul is a continual going over and over of the material of life.
Storytelling is an excellent way of caring for the soul. It helps us see the themes that circle in our lives, the deep themes that tell the myths we live.
Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation. A little distance allows us to see our own complexity. Love of the soul asks for some appreciation for its complexity.
Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.
Moore's studies in Renaissance psychology, philosophy, and medicine contributed to the work.
Renaissance authors: Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus
Jung said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of religion. He also said that the work begins and ends with Mercury. Mercury is the god of fictions and fabrications, of trickery, thievery, and sleight-of-hand.
A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological health.
Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.
Marsilio Ficino: The mind tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.
James Hillman (the founder of archetypal psychology)
Robert Sardello
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza
Patricia Berry
Alfred Ziegler
Cure of the soul: cura animarum.
the craft of life: techne tou biou (Plato)
We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we ave to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.
The emotional complaints:
Emptiness
Meaninglessness
Vague depression
Disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationship
A loss of values
Yearning for personal fulfillment
A hunger for spirituality
All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know that the soul craves.We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas. Lacking that soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.
"therapy" refers to service to the gods.(Socrates)
Apuleius (Roman writer): Everyone should know that you can't live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.
Epicurus: cultivating the simple pleasure.
Soul is nothing like ego(self). Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego. Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.
Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
---John Keats
Care of the soul is not a method of problem solving. Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness. The word care implies a way of responding to expressions of the soul that is not heroic and muscular. Cura means several things: attention, devotion, husbandry, adorning the body, healing, managing, being anxious for, and worshiping the gods.
"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.
Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can't care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observation is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observation of a holiday. The -serv- in observation originally referred to tending sheep.
This definition of caring for the soul is minimalist. It has to do with modest care and not miraculous cure. Therapy sometimes emphasizes change so strongly that people often neglect their own natures and tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health that may always be out of reach. By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures, we move beyond the reach of soul.
James Hillman: The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
It is the soul that makes us human.
To feel and imagine may not sound like much. But in care of the soul there is trust that nature heals, that much can accomplished by not-doing.
Paracelsus (16th century physician): The physician is only the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore, it behooves medicine to follow the will of nature.
In caring for the soul, a symptom has its own will and that "curing" in some way means following that will.
Observance has considerable power.
Modern interventional therapy sometimes tries to solve specific problems and can therefore be carried out on a short-term basis. But care of the soul never ends.
Every ending is a beginning. The life of the soul is a continual going over and over of the material of life.
Storytelling is an excellent way of caring for the soul. It helps us see the themes that circle in our lives, the deep themes that tell the myths we live.
Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation. A little distance allows us to see our own complexity. Love of the soul asks for some appreciation for its complexity.
Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
雄心与野心
http://thoughts.forbes.com/thoughts/quotes/ambition
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
-- William Shakespeare
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
-- William Shakespeare
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.
-- William Cobbett
-- William Cobbett
To be unhappy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Samuel Johnson
富裕与贫穷
富裕与贫穷是人与人之间相对的一个比较，在一般情况下，都不是一个绝对的概念。除非一个人不是在减肥，饿极了却没有饭吃；不是在锻炼身体，冬天冷极了，却没有衣服穿、地方住； 还有一个，那就是身体坏极了，却没有足够的经济实力治病，经历过这些人，应该算是绝对的穷人，其他的都不是绝对的，而是相对的，不是相对亲戚、朋友、同事、周围的邻居和其他陌生人，就是报上登的和新闻广播里讲的
成熟人生的话题
成熟人生的话题里没有包括怎样看篮球、足球、还有美国的橄榄球、棒球、高尔夫球，没有讲如何讲炒股、办私人企业，因为这些事不需要成熟也可以做，有些人很早就已经开始看球了，有些人80岁才开始炒股。
什么是成熟的话题，应该是一个你觉得没法跟一个小孩子解释清楚的话，或是比较抽象的概念，或是必须等到身体成熟、亲身经历到了一定程度时才能理解的话，就象跟一个没有生育过的女人讲生孩子的痛苦一样（死是一个唯一没法解释的经历），或者身体健康的人讲卧床不起的滋味一样。
成熟人生的话题应该是人三十或者四十以后开始说的话，一些让人困惑的话题，一些哲学的话题，一些永远也没有固定答案的话题，一些只有自己才能明白的话题，
一个写什么是成熟人生的人也许是一个并不成熟的人，生的苹果下一步是熟，熟的苹果下一步就是熟透了，太熟了也不好吃了。
什么是成熟的话题，应该是一个你觉得没法跟一个小孩子解释清楚的话，或是比较抽象的概念，或是必须等到身体成熟、亲身经历到了一定程度时才能理解的话，就象跟一个没有生育过的女人讲生孩子的痛苦一样（死是一个唯一没法解释的经历），或者身体健康的人讲卧床不起的滋味一样。
成熟人生的话题应该是人三十或者四十以后开始说的话，一些让人困惑的话题，一些哲学的话题，一些永远也没有固定答案的话题，一些只有自己才能明白的话题，
一个写什么是成熟人生的人也许是一个并不成熟的人，生的苹果下一步是熟，熟的苹果下一步就是熟透了，太熟了也不好吃了。
感情与理智
从来听人说“要用理智战胜感情”，却从未听说过“用感情战胜理智”之类的话，仔细玩味，逐渐明白了其中的一些道理： 原来感情处在了比理智地势高的地方，已就象打仗之前先占领山头一样，已在其上的东西，就不需要战胜了。感情是自身发动的，象地里的草一定要往上长，你拔了一遍，第二天它又长起来了，你连根拔掉，过两天，它又从旁边长出来了，理智是后天训练的，自身发动的东西来得快，理智还没登陆之前，感情早已到了岸边，
Friday, January 1, 2010
Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy?
What Is Ancient Philosophy?
Benjamin Balint
According to Pierre Hadot, a prominent historian of ancient thought and professor emeritus at the College de France, philosophy today—specialized, professional, and detached from life—is but a shadow of its glorious Athenian past. But that is not the original part of his thesis. A wide array of modern minds have thought the same: Hegel lamented that philosophy is no longer “practiced as a private art, as it was by the Greeks,” Heidegger called for a return to the Greek grammar of being, and Kant claimed that “the ancient Greek philosophers remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done.” What is new in What Is Ancient Philosophy? is that its author confidently identifies Christianity as the agent of philosophy’s decline.
In his latest book, first published in France in 1995, Hadot surveys with care the great schools of classical thought—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism—and argues that they share not only a drive to offer rational explanations of the world but also a conception of philosophy profoundly different from the way that discipline currently understands itself. As in his last book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot shows that unlike today, philosophers in the age of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum practiced their craft; they did not merely study it. Since they considered philosophy a means of inner transformation rather than a purely theoretical endeavor, the ancients aimed not at resolving abstract problems or thinking systematically but at preparing themselves for truth and making themselves susceptible to it by cultivating certain attitudes of mind: equanimity and absence of worry ataraxia), independence (autarkeia), good disposition euthumia), and so forth. These inner calibrations in turn demanded a highly developed philosophical exercise (askesis) of self–awareness, self–mastery, and examination of the conscience. Philosophy required rational living as much as rational thinking.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the philosophers of antiquity, from the Pre-socratics to the late Neo-platonists, flourished in tight communities of shared dialogue and practice. The Stoic sage Seneca counseled that “the living word and life in common will benefit you more than written discourse,” and his contemporaries indeed tended to think together and to think out loud. “For Aristotle,” as for others, Hadot says, “the discussion of problems was ultimately more formative than their solution.” Membership in a philosophical school entailed not doctrinal allegiance but, as Hadot puts it, “the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”
If this strikes you as closer to religion than philosophy, then you are thinking like an early Christian. For far from rejecting pagan philosophy, Hadot notes, Christianity borrowed from it extensively, ultimately deriving its very conception of itself from Greek thought. The fledgling religion presented itself not only as a philosophy, in the ancient sense of the term, but as the philosophy. If doing philosophy meant living in conformity with reason (the thinking went), if it really represented “a conversion of one’s entire being,” then Christians were philosophers and (at least some) philosophers Christians. Hence we find the apologist Justin, for example, declaring—scarcely a century after Jesus—that “those who, before Christ, led a life accompanied by reason are Christians, even if they were known as atheists. Such were Socrates, Heraclitus, and those like them.” (For a wider discussion of Justin’s view, see “The Christianity of Philosophy” in the May 2001 First Things, where Peter Simpson concludes that “the Christian faith for [Justin] was the true and complete philosophy.”)
Hadot further argues that the first Christians annexed from philosophy not only large swaths of the ancient ideological landscape, but also many of its spiritual practices. In the early Christian exercises aiming to instill virtues such as peace of mind and absence of the passions, and in the tradition of contemplative monasticism as developed by such fourth–century Church fathers as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, Hadot detects a strong whiff of Greek philosophical practice. Hadot admits that these exercises “formed part of a broader ensemble of practices which were specifically Christian.” Still, though “the Christian philosophers tried to Christianize their use of secular philosophical themes,” they could not help “describing their spiritual exercises by means of the vocabulary and concepts of secular philosophy."
But the heart of Hadot’s argument lies in his contention that in the process of digesting it, Christianity slowly but inexorably broke philosophy apart. The ancient schools that had not disappeared (Platonism and Aristotelianism in particular), removed from the ways of life that inspired them, “were reduced to the status of mere conceptual material which could be used in theological controversies.” Philosophy, made to serve theology, became merely theoretical. “Aristotelian logic and ontology,” for example, “furnished concepts that were indispensable for the formulation of the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation.” But Christianity, itself a pervasive way of life,had little use for the practical elements of ancient philosophy (other than those it chose to appropriate). So when philosophy emerged many centuries later into its own again to breathe the air of the Enlightenment, it “consider[ed] itself a theoretical science, because the existential dimension of philosophy no longer had any meaning from the perspective of Christianity.” And so it was, Hadot concludes, that philosophy, stripped to its conceptual content, became the impoverished thing it is today.
The problem with this story is not its moral. As morals go, Hadot’s is uplifting and deserves to be heard. The lesson, he says, is simply that “there is no discourse which deserves to be called philosophical if it is separated from the philosophical life, and there is no philosophical life unless it is directly linked to philosophical discourse.”
The trouble lies rather with the story itself. To begin with, as mentioned above, nostalgia for the original union of praxis and theoria propels some of the most powerful currents of modern philosophy; it may even be said to be a kind of shibboleth of fashionably self–critical moderns. Alexander Nehamas, in The Art of Living, showed that the Socratic attention to the ways philosophy shapes personality deeply informed the views of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault—and Hadot himself, citing Descartes, awkwardly admits that the old ideal of philosophia never really died (had it vanished entirely, we would not find Hadot’s own book so unstartling). He might have added that the insistence that thought not abstract itself from life would also form a crucial theme for both the existentialists and the pragmatists.
Further, Hadot’s account—which might more aptly have borne the title Where Did Modern Philosophy Come From?—in considering ancient philosophies as ways of life, too often obscures their substance. What about the content of ancient contemplation sets it apart from modern philosophical reflection? Is there nothing about the subject matter of classical speculation that distinguishes it from the study of philosophy today? On this Hadot utters not a word.
But his narrative wobbles most of all in the description of Christianity’s link to ancient philosophy, a relationship that is both closer and more remote than the author allows. More remote because in his account of the assimilation of philosophy into the early Church, Hadot fails fully to acknowledge the distinctively revealed character of Christianity or indeed the ways in which faith colors the Christian conception of truth. “Faith,” Kierkegaard reminds us, “is not a knowledge.” Surely there is a great leap from truth rationally discovered to truth divinely revealed and from the imperative to doubt to the command to believe, but this is a gap Hadot is not keen to describe.
On the other hand, these two great forces are closer than Hadot permits precisely because the ideal of transformative knowledge defines religion in a way no other quality does. For this very reason, some claim that ancient thought is precociously religious more than Christianity is belatedly philosophical. But we needn’t go that far to recognize that the inseparability of speculative discourse and concrete conduct is a fundamentally religious notion. Philosophy may have embroidered the idea, but religion had always announced that the truth that fails to transform its bearer is no truth at all. (This is true also in Judaism. In his commentary on the Torah, the rabbinic scholar Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “All ‘religion,’ all so–called ‘honoring God in spirit,’ is worthless if the thought, the idea of God, is not strong enough to exercise its power practically in the control of our words and doings.”)
Seen in this light, the Christian stewardship of philosophy, far from dissolving it, may actually have preserved the union of thought and deed. The real question would then be: Why did our modern philosophers, those “artists of reason,” when freed from their religious guardians to sculpt an intellectual world afresh, choose to reject the potent synthesis that marked Greece and Christendom alike? But that would be another, more judicious book.
Benjamin Balint
According to Pierre Hadot, a prominent historian of ancient thought and professor emeritus at the College de France, philosophy today—specialized, professional, and detached from life—is but a shadow of its glorious Athenian past. But that is not the original part of his thesis. A wide array of modern minds have thought the same: Hegel lamented that philosophy is no longer “practiced as a private art, as it was by the Greeks,” Heidegger called for a return to the Greek grammar of being, and Kant claimed that “the ancient Greek philosophers remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done.” What is new in What Is Ancient Philosophy? is that its author confidently identifies Christianity as the agent of philosophy’s decline.
In his latest book, first published in France in 1995, Hadot surveys with care the great schools of classical thought—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism—and argues that they share not only a drive to offer rational explanations of the world but also a conception of philosophy profoundly different from the way that discipline currently understands itself. As in his last book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot shows that unlike today, philosophers in the age of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum practiced their craft; they did not merely study it. Since they considered philosophy a means of inner transformation rather than a purely theoretical endeavor, the ancients aimed not at resolving abstract problems or thinking systematically but at preparing themselves for truth and making themselves susceptible to it by cultivating certain attitudes of mind: equanimity and absence of worry ataraxia), independence (autarkeia), good disposition euthumia), and so forth. These inner calibrations in turn demanded a highly developed philosophical exercise (askesis) of self–awareness, self–mastery, and examination of the conscience. Philosophy required rational living as much as rational thinking.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the philosophers of antiquity, from the Pre-socratics to the late Neo-platonists, flourished in tight communities of shared dialogue and practice. The Stoic sage Seneca counseled that “the living word and life in common will benefit you more than written discourse,” and his contemporaries indeed tended to think together and to think out loud. “For Aristotle,” as for others, Hadot says, “the discussion of problems was ultimately more formative than their solution.” Membership in a philosophical school entailed not doctrinal allegiance but, as Hadot puts it, “the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”
If this strikes you as closer to religion than philosophy, then you are thinking like an early Christian. For far from rejecting pagan philosophy, Hadot notes, Christianity borrowed from it extensively, ultimately deriving its very conception of itself from Greek thought. The fledgling religion presented itself not only as a philosophy, in the ancient sense of the term, but as the philosophy. If doing philosophy meant living in conformity with reason (the thinking went), if it really represented “a conversion of one’s entire being,” then Christians were philosophers and (at least some) philosophers Christians. Hence we find the apologist Justin, for example, declaring—scarcely a century after Jesus—that “those who, before Christ, led a life accompanied by reason are Christians, even if they were known as atheists. Such were Socrates, Heraclitus, and those like them.” (For a wider discussion of Justin’s view, see “The Christianity of Philosophy” in the May 2001 First Things, where Peter Simpson concludes that “the Christian faith for [Justin] was the true and complete philosophy.”)
Hadot further argues that the first Christians annexed from philosophy not only large swaths of the ancient ideological landscape, but also many of its spiritual practices. In the early Christian exercises aiming to instill virtues such as peace of mind and absence of the passions, and in the tradition of contemplative monasticism as developed by such fourth–century Church fathers as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, Hadot detects a strong whiff of Greek philosophical practice. Hadot admits that these exercises “formed part of a broader ensemble of practices which were specifically Christian.” Still, though “the Christian philosophers tried to Christianize their use of secular philosophical themes,” they could not help “describing their spiritual exercises by means of the vocabulary and concepts of secular philosophy."
But the heart of Hadot’s argument lies in his contention that in the process of digesting it, Christianity slowly but inexorably broke philosophy apart. The ancient schools that had not disappeared (Platonism and Aristotelianism in particular), removed from the ways of life that inspired them, “were reduced to the status of mere conceptual material which could be used in theological controversies.” Philosophy, made to serve theology, became merely theoretical. “Aristotelian logic and ontology,” for example, “furnished concepts that were indispensable for the formulation of the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation.” But Christianity, itself a pervasive way of life,had little use for the practical elements of ancient philosophy (other than those it chose to appropriate). So when philosophy emerged many centuries later into its own again to breathe the air of the Enlightenment, it “consider[ed] itself a theoretical science, because the existential dimension of philosophy no longer had any meaning from the perspective of Christianity.” And so it was, Hadot concludes, that philosophy, stripped to its conceptual content, became the impoverished thing it is today.
The problem with this story is not its moral. As morals go, Hadot’s is uplifting and deserves to be heard. The lesson, he says, is simply that “there is no discourse which deserves to be called philosophical if it is separated from the philosophical life, and there is no philosophical life unless it is directly linked to philosophical discourse.”
The trouble lies rather with the story itself. To begin with, as mentioned above, nostalgia for the original union of praxis and theoria propels some of the most powerful currents of modern philosophy; it may even be said to be a kind of shibboleth of fashionably self–critical moderns. Alexander Nehamas, in The Art of Living, showed that the Socratic attention to the ways philosophy shapes personality deeply informed the views of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault—and Hadot himself, citing Descartes, awkwardly admits that the old ideal of philosophia never really died (had it vanished entirely, we would not find Hadot’s own book so unstartling). He might have added that the insistence that thought not abstract itself from life would also form a crucial theme for both the existentialists and the pragmatists.
Further, Hadot’s account—which might more aptly have borne the title Where Did Modern Philosophy Come From?—in considering ancient philosophies as ways of life, too often obscures their substance. What about the content of ancient contemplation sets it apart from modern philosophical reflection? Is there nothing about the subject matter of classical speculation that distinguishes it from the study of philosophy today? On this Hadot utters not a word.
But his narrative wobbles most of all in the description of Christianity’s link to ancient philosophy, a relationship that is both closer and more remote than the author allows. More remote because in his account of the assimilation of philosophy into the early Church, Hadot fails fully to acknowledge the distinctively revealed character of Christianity or indeed the ways in which faith colors the Christian conception of truth. “Faith,” Kierkegaard reminds us, “is not a knowledge.” Surely there is a great leap from truth rationally discovered to truth divinely revealed and from the imperative to doubt to the command to believe, but this is a gap Hadot is not keen to describe.
On the other hand, these two great forces are closer than Hadot permits precisely because the ideal of transformative knowledge defines religion in a way no other quality does. For this very reason, some claim that ancient thought is precociously religious more than Christianity is belatedly philosophical. But we needn’t go that far to recognize that the inseparability of speculative discourse and concrete conduct is a fundamentally religious notion. Philosophy may have embroidered the idea, but religion had always announced that the truth that fails to transform its bearer is no truth at all. (This is true also in Judaism. In his commentary on the Torah, the rabbinic scholar Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “All ‘religion,’ all so–called ‘honoring God in spirit,’ is worthless if the thought, the idea of God, is not strong enough to exercise its power practically in the control of our words and doings.”)
Seen in this light, the Christian stewardship of philosophy, far from dissolving it, may actually have preserved the union of thought and deed. The real question would then be: Why did our modern philosophers, those “artists of reason,” when freed from their religious guardians to sculpt an intellectual world afresh, choose to reject the potent synthesis that marked Greece and Christendom alike? But that would be another, more judicious book.
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