We don’t want to get used to it. Nor make lite of it. We don’t want to shrug and say, “He’s just being who he is!” as though that was both excuse and pardon for behavior and speech that is . . . troubling . . . and unfortunate.
If among pairs of opposites which we use every day, the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no less importance should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth and falsehood, of reality and illusion.
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Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation - which is to contemplate Being.
(--from, Czeslaw Milosz - Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980)Saying truth is elusive mirrors Heidegger’s saying that truth conceals as much as it reveals.
In letting beings as a whole be, which discloses and at the same time conceals, it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all concealed. Insofar as it ek-sists, Da-sein conserves the first and broadest undisclosedness, untruth proper. The proper non-essence of truth is the mystery. Here non-essence does not yet have the sense of inferiority to essence in the sense of what is general (koinon genos), its possibilitas and the ground of its possibility. Non-essence is here what in such a sense would be a pre-essential essence. But "non-essence" means at first and for the most part the deformation of that already inferior essence. Indeed, in each of these significations the non-essence remains always in its own way essential to the essence and never becomes inessential in the sense of irrelevant. But to speak of non-essence and untruth in this manner goes very much against the grain of ordinary opinion and looks like a dragging up of forcibly contrived paradoxes. Because it is difficult to eliminate this impression, such a way of
speaking, paradoxical only for ordinary doxa (opinion), is to be renounced. But surely for those who know about such matters the “non-” of the primordial non-essence of truth, as untruth, points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being (not merely of beings).
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Man errs. Man does not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy, because as ek- sistent he in-sists and so already is caught in errancy. The errancy through which man strays is not something which, as it were, extends alongside man like a ditch into which he occasionally stumbles; rather errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical man is admitted. Errancy is the free space for that turning in which insistent ek-sistence adroitly forgets and mistakes itself constantly anew. The concealing of the concealed being as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy.
Errancy is the essential counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. Error is not just an isolated mistake but rather the realm (the domain) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven.
(--from, On the Essence of Truth, by Martin Heidegger. Date of original version: 1943)Perhaps the real estate salesman turned president is become, for us, a meditation on errancy and concealment.
In the latter part of his career, Lorenz applied his ideas to the behaviour of humans as members of a social species, an application with controversial philosophical and sociological implications. In a popular book, Das sogenannte Böse (1963; On Aggression), he argued that fighting and warlike behaviour in man have an inborn basis but can be environmentally modified by the proper understanding and provision for the basic instinctual needs of human beings. Fighting in lower animals has a positive survival function, he observed, such as the dispersion of competitors and the maintenance of territory. Warlike tendencies in humans may likewise be ritualized into socially useful behaviour patterns. In another work, Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (1973; Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge), Lorenz examined the nature of human thought and intelligence and attributed the problems of modern civilization largely to the limitations his study revealed.
(--Konrad Lorenz, AUSTRIAN ZOOLOGIST )The question could be posed: Are we, the citizens of the USA, imprinting the chief executive of the executive branch of government? Or, is he imprinting the citizens of this country -- himself a creature of the culture he so unawaredly foists himself and his opinions upon -- to the consternation and paralytic unbelief of the majority of the voting populace?
The final numbers:
Clinton received 65,844,610 votes, or 48.2% of the total vote.
Trump received 62,979,636 votes, or 46.1% of the total vote. (That's a difference of 2.86 million votes.)
(cf. Public Records Branch Public Disclosure and Media Relations Division Office of Communications Federal Election Commission)And here we are!
“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” ― Ludwig WittgensteinThe iffy and precarious fate of any individual is held aloft amid words and recollection, deduction and inference.
“Only describe, don't explain.” ― Ludwig WittgensteinFor the rest of us we hold our direct and hopeful experience of one another in the courtroom of personal appraisal and long for, pray for, what is right to now take place.
“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.” ― Ludwig WittgensteinPrayers for Jessica Briggs. Prayers for Tony Sanborn. Prayers that truth now reveals itself.
“Homo Deus” takes off where “Sapiens” left off; it is a “brief history of tomorrow.” What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? “At the dawn of the third millennium,” he writes, “humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’ ”
... To describe this ascendancy, Harari examines the factors that made the human species so special. “Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal,” he writes. So how did this animal come to claim dominion over all other beasts? The answer, he argues, lies not in the uniqueness of our emotions, sensations, morals or moods. Pigs and monkeys share many of these with us — including the capacity to feel anger, envy, pain — and even a desire for justice. Humans exceed these capacities by encoding complex algorithms — “a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions.” Pigs, dogs and monkeys — indeed, all living beings — also encode algorithms, Harari tells us; the human ones happen to be particularly complicated and powerful.
(--from NYTimes Book Review, The Future of Humans? One Forecaster Calls for Obsolescence, about HOMO DEUS, A Brief History of Tomorrow, By Yuval Noah Harari. Reviewed by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, MARCH 13, 2017 Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.In the United States a great deal of attention is taken up trying to decipher whether the president of the country is competent to lead, whether he is a threat to initiate a conflagration with North Korea or Iran, whether he will escalate hostilities with rhetoric presaging warfare replete with nuclear weapons and massive destruction, casualties, and disruption of global security.
In the new book, “Entering the Castle,” you talk about “mystics without monasteries.” What does it mean to be a contemporary mystic?A mystic is someone who has a sense of interior connection with a force of life, of meaning, much greater than themselves, a connection to God. There are people who are called to be a part of the world with the same passion that once drew people out of society and into monasteries or into ashrams. And now, the calling is to engage [with God] and remain within the mainstream of life. It is the need to live a life that is very clearly full of meaning and clear direction. When somebody says, “For what reason have I been born?” that is a question they are, in fact, releasing to God. That type of invocation ignites a deeper force from within.
And can that kind of question lead to a more mystical life? I do believe that. I think that leads to a longing for a much more passionate connection to the divine. There is a fundamental need in us to connect to something greater than ourselves. And that’s just the way we are designed. We do not want to think that, at the end of the day, we are simply flesh and bones. The second thing is we have a need to believe that, if we close our eyes and say, “God help us,” there really is someone on the end of that phone call. There is a part of us that absolutely longs to know that’s real.
The tortured mystic seems on a unrelenting search to find out where they should be, what they should be doing, what perfect prayer should they pray. (--Beliefnet)