Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Per Spinoza

The human mind is not simply an instrument of conscious cognition that can be detached from its organic base. It is a locus of feeling, conscious and unconscious, flowing directly from a somatic foundation.... Where humans differ most from other animals may be in our capacity and need for illusion.

John Gray, The Mind’s Body Problem (NYRB, December 2, 2021)

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;  It thinks it discovers at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with the motion.

Montaigne

Friday, June 28, 2019

It is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.

Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

 

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people so confident, as those who entertain us with fables.

Michel de Montaigne

Sunday, November 05, 2017

Weber was wrong: the modern world is not disenchanted (even if secularists pretend otherwise) but a continuation of Christianity by other means. Whether liberal, communist, fascist, or authoritarian, every polity relies to one degree or another on the persistence of charismatic authority and the (usually disguised) theological legitimation of political power.


Benjamin Nathans on Yuri Slezkine'd  The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution in the New York Review of November 23, 2017

See also Freud and Plato - The Politics of the Soul (Pt 1)