Gaston Bachelard, By Chance
I was reshelving a book in my office and noticed a volume on the shelf that I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years– a collection of selections from the work of Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (edited by Collette Gaudin). I remembered being disappointed when I first got the book that it [...]
Attacking the Rationalists
In the winter of 1906-1907, William James delivered a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston on the subject of pragmatism. They were, in many ways, the culmination of a lifetime of work (James would die only two years later) and they also have the virtue of what can only be called voice [...]
Anniversary
On this anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I simply note the destructive violent power of absolute belief. Certainty is so difficult to maintain that whole religions and political systems have to be created to prop it up. Those systems — theirs, ours — are inherently violent.
Mindfulness & the Chaos of Voices
Even a little experience trying to cultivate what the Buddhists (and others) call “mindfulness” demonstrates one thing for certain: the mind is a chaos of voices. At least mine is. If the goal is to observe and ultimately come into some kind of harmony with the chaos of voices, that is a robustly active attitude [...]
Static
I’m tired of the static in my head. I’ve mostly quit reading political sites, though I still scan the news. Maybe this has something to do with getting older and trying to see some meaning in the arc of my life from birth to death; the endless daily chatter seems increasingly toxic, though perhaps I’ve [...]
Another Kind of Life
Lt. William Calley stood before a Kiwanis Club meeting the other day and apologized for the My Lai massacre [also: 1, 2]. Reading the article, I take it as a sincere apology and a real expression of regret, though I understand how the prosecutor who tried Calley felt, too:
William George Eckhardt, the chief prosecutor in [...]
A Notable Life
I had never heard of Adrien DeWind until I read his obituary in the NY Times this morning. (The older I get, the more I am drawn to the obits, with fear of personal extinction prompting me to recall the motto Samuel Johnson is said to have written on his watch dial: Work for the [...]
Camping?
Had a dream last night that I was in a store buying things to go camping. I don’t like camping, actually, so I will take this as a metaphor for starting out on some kind of intellectual or spiritual adventure. Earlier, I had another dream in which a little girl gave me a device she [...]
Creativity?
What struck me about this Scientific American article on creativity is what an impoverished notion of creativity the scientists have. Solving that little problem about how to get out of a tower with a rope is “creative”? If you’re a ten-year-old, maybe. Or a psychologist. Creativity as problem solving. Is that what scientists really think? [...]
Pragmatists and Existentialists
The pragmatists’ emphasis on human agency, even in realms of epistemology, melds pretty easily with the existentialists’ emphasis — thinking mostly of Camus here — on individual moral choice. Both philosophies might at first appear to put all the emphasis on the individual, but that’s not in fact true when one looks more closely. For [...]
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