Illich wrote in Tools for C.: that if you travel faster than by mule or a third world bus, you cannot possibly take your soul along with you. But you know this.
I'd forgotten that line! And oddly enough, I just got a notification from Instagram, drawing my attention to someone who posts as @4mph_futures, which seems equally apt:
Mar 5, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
I'm researching for the writing of my own first book. The book is on the topic of knowing (usually called 'knowledge' -- the noun rather than the verb). I'm interested in the verb -- in knowing as a process in which we're at any moment in its present moment. The moment passes, it moves on... or does it? Do we let it move on fully as needed? Anyway, I'm exploring knowing in relation to thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining -- and how to go about wedding these to one another so they work together in harmony. This, I think, would bring about another world! Or it could.
Anyway, while researching, Dear Dougald, I chanced upon this quote which resonates with your writing and thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining.
*****
“Our age,” says Kierkegaard, “will remind one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gave it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.” 2 Beckett’s works, at once tragic and comic in just this sense, are indeed works of and for our time.”
― David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
“In the clearing, world and earth are in interaction: earth is the ground on which the world is built, and world is that within which the earth is given its meaning as grounding. Earth and world are in incessant, endless strife, the earth ever reclaiming for itself, reducing to earth, what the world builds upon it, whereas the world struggles with the earth, and against the earth, to make it serve human purposes. But it is only in the world that the earth receives meaning; and it is only in relation to the earth that we can fully understand not only the fragility and power of our world but also the frightening vulnerability of our grounding and building on the earth—and can harvest some meaning in our fated mortality.”
― David Kleinberg-Levin, Heidegger's Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction
Thanks, James! The line from Kierkegaard in that first quote is striking. It's the kind of line that I can imagine being quoted as proof that "Every generation thinks this", but I'm inclined to see it rather as a reminder of how long and drawn out this process is. Does that make sense?
"Every generation thinks this", but I'm inclined to see it rather as a reminder of how long and drawn out this process is. Does that make sense?"
These outrageous mismatches between the daily lived habits of the people of a culture and the guiding myths, ethos, world view and world picture of that culture appear to me to be episodic rather than perpetual and ubiquitous. They seem to me to appear as ruptures -- a splitting up of the world, a fragmentation--, because they are cultural shifts too abrupt for daily lived life to catch up with the sudden radical disruption and displacement.
I'm not much familiar with the "dissolution of the Greek city-state" mentioned by Kierkegaard here. It's one of those bothersome ten thousand things I feel I ought to know about much better, but don't, and can't "catch up" with given there are ten thousand of these. But I do know a little about our modern disruption and fracture, and some of its roots in what we tend to call "the enlightenment" in European civilization (which is now spread around the world in myriad respects). I think the machine metaphor of early modern science is a key to such understanding. Suddenly pretty much everything was a machine! The stars were machines. The earth was a machine. Animals were machines.... And, eventually, as the process unfolded, even human beings were machines. This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. But the world which we dwelled within prior to the machine metaphor guiding culture in the west was swallowed up and digested by the machine culture. And now we're in the death throes of that very same machine culture -- as it is obsolete in nearly every imaginable respect. (Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a thing as obsolete when it is either "no longer in use" or "no longer useful.)
[I couldn't help remembering the image of the traveler you mentioned recently, the traveler whose soul cannot quite catch up to his body while traveling at ridiculous speed in a plane, train or automobile. If a culture journeys far rapidly, it too has a soul which has difficulty catching up to itself. A liminality among the ruins.]
Western civilization is in a liminal place between the guiding myth/s of the Enlightenment and whatever may come after. We are almost literally living in a time of ruins -- to riff on your book title. We're living within our own ruins, the catastrophe of the death of our guiding myths -- e.g., our story of progress, success, ... but also of "the good" and "the beautiful". It's not just our stories, narratives and world view / world picture which is now obsolete, but nearly every feature of our material culture and economy, our architecture... everything (ruins from a past age we must dwell within despite ourselves).
So sorry for misinterpreting. Please forgive. To pause, reflect then to act . We all know our present path is the path toward extention. Let's hope our collective individual actions redirect this path toward a livable future.
Thanks, Dennis! And yes, here's to that vital pause, the moment of reflection that interrupts the chain of stimulus and response, opening the possibility of other, unexpected actions and other paths worth taking.
Hi, just finished reading your book. Thanks. Seeing clearly is, I think (actually, I might have nicked this from Ruskin), one of the more difficult things to do, and to communicate what is seen is just as hard. I just hope there's more Palestinian chicken in me than Israeli.
Also, maybe "travelling without moving" (nicked from Dune) creates the soul-sickness.
Thank you Dougald, this call to humility is such the antithesis of the new modernity that constantly declares that, “you can have it all” while ignoring the blaring signs that we have reached the absolute limits of our planet’s carrying capacity. I am also applauding your decision to humbly, slow you body down right now so that you can recalibrate your personal carrying capacity. Good walks, rest, soup, and bread; all restorative medicine. Thank you for this reminder and for At Work Among the Ruins, both are helping me stay resilient and resolved.
So by the time I leave Vietnam maybe my soul will have got as far as your place. In a jetlagged half-awake state last night I was imagining reading a quote from the dust jacket of your next book: "Reading [title]" it said "is like being shouldered off a cliff by a wild boar and then finding you don't have to fall." Maybe I was half-remembering something Ed said in Norwich.
Now I have to half-remember the book I promised or threatened to write! Though I have sworn off embarking on anything of the kind until these 23 days are out.
I've commented before but wanted to reach out again. In the weeks since I read your book, I've been mulling over much of what you wrote. In search of a good podcast, I've also been listening to The Great Humbling, starting from the beginning. I wish I'd known about the podcast while I was living through the pandemic, but I've ended up in the same place, regardless. It's refreshing to hear your and Ed's measured perspectives on global events, and I can also hear echoes of the ideas in your book coming into being. Just finished the "Cultivation of Conspiracy" episode (loved it), as I have been vaguely aware of Ivan Illich for years, but only more recently have started hearing more about his thought.
Your endorsement in your book was the final tipping point for me to embark on reading The Master and His Emissary, (after hearing about it from various sources over the years). It's immensely erudite, ambitious, and incisive, and McGilchrist's cultural observations seem to be spot-on.
Oh, and I purchased another copy of your book and mailed it to my sister in Nevada. Hoping to have a cross-continental discussion about it with her soon! (I'm in Ohio).
How good to hear all this, Amy! It makes me smile to think of you retracing the steps that Ed and I took through the past three years – and yes, those conversations were one of the vessels in which the ideas for the book got brewed. Glad to hear that I've put you onto The Master and His Emissary. One of my tasks for next week is to edit the conversation I filmed with Iain during the tour.
Thanks for commenting, Dennis! I'm not sure I follow, though. How do you mean, "did people like their souls"?
Just to be clear, I'm not taking literally the idea that we leave our souls behind if we travel too fast, though as a metaphor it catches something that I think is true.
Illich wrote in Tools for C.: that if you travel faster than by mule or a third world bus, you cannot possibly take your soul along with you. But you know this.
I'd forgotten that line! And oddly enough, I just got a notification from Instagram, drawing my attention to someone who posts as @4mph_futures, which seems equally apt:
https://www.instagram.com/4mph_futures/
I'm researching for the writing of my own first book. The book is on the topic of knowing (usually called 'knowledge' -- the noun rather than the verb). I'm interested in the verb -- in knowing as a process in which we're at any moment in its present moment. The moment passes, it moves on... or does it? Do we let it move on fully as needed? Anyway, I'm exploring knowing in relation to thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining -- and how to go about wedding these to one another so they work together in harmony. This, I think, would bring about another world! Or it could.
Anyway, while researching, Dear Dougald, I chanced upon this quote which resonates with your writing and thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining.
*****
“Our age,” says Kierkegaard, “will remind one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gave it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.” 2 Beckett’s works, at once tragic and comic in just this sense, are indeed works of and for our time.”
― David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15732798.David_Michael_Kleinberg_Levin
Also similarly salient to your work, Dougald:
“In the clearing, world and earth are in interaction: earth is the ground on which the world is built, and world is that within which the earth is given its meaning as grounding. Earth and world are in incessant, endless strife, the earth ever reclaiming for itself, reducing to earth, what the world builds upon it, whereas the world struggles with the earth, and against the earth, to make it serve human purposes. But it is only in the world that the earth receives meaning; and it is only in relation to the earth that we can fully understand not only the fragility and power of our world but also the frightening vulnerability of our grounding and building on the earth—and can harvest some meaning in our fated mortality.”
― David Kleinberg-Levin, Heidegger's Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction
Thanks, James! The line from Kierkegaard in that first quote is striking. It's the kind of line that I can imagine being quoted as proof that "Every generation thinks this", but I'm inclined to see it rather as a reminder of how long and drawn out this process is. Does that make sense?
Good luck with your research for the book!
"Every generation thinks this", but I'm inclined to see it rather as a reminder of how long and drawn out this process is. Does that make sense?"
These outrageous mismatches between the daily lived habits of the people of a culture and the guiding myths, ethos, world view and world picture of that culture appear to me to be episodic rather than perpetual and ubiquitous. They seem to me to appear as ruptures -- a splitting up of the world, a fragmentation--, because they are cultural shifts too abrupt for daily lived life to catch up with the sudden radical disruption and displacement.
I'm not much familiar with the "dissolution of the Greek city-state" mentioned by Kierkegaard here. It's one of those bothersome ten thousand things I feel I ought to know about much better, but don't, and can't "catch up" with given there are ten thousand of these. But I do know a little about our modern disruption and fracture, and some of its roots in what we tend to call "the enlightenment" in European civilization (which is now spread around the world in myriad respects). I think the machine metaphor of early modern science is a key to such understanding. Suddenly pretty much everything was a machine! The stars were machines. The earth was a machine. Animals were machines.... And, eventually, as the process unfolded, even human beings were machines. This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. But the world which we dwelled within prior to the machine metaphor guiding culture in the west was swallowed up and digested by the machine culture. And now we're in the death throes of that very same machine culture -- as it is obsolete in nearly every imaginable respect. (Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a thing as obsolete when it is either "no longer in use" or "no longer useful.)
[I couldn't help remembering the image of the traveler you mentioned recently, the traveler whose soul cannot quite catch up to his body while traveling at ridiculous speed in a plane, train or automobile. If a culture journeys far rapidly, it too has a soul which has difficulty catching up to itself. A liminality among the ruins.]
Western civilization is in a liminal place between the guiding myth/s of the Enlightenment and whatever may come after. We are almost literally living in a time of ruins -- to riff on your book title. We're living within our own ruins, the catastrophe of the death of our guiding myths -- e.g., our story of progress, success, ... but also of "the good" and "the beautiful". It's not just our stories, narratives and world view / world picture which is now obsolete, but nearly every feature of our material culture and economy, our architecture... everything (ruins from a past age we must dwell within despite ourselves).
So sorry for misinterpreting. Please forgive. To pause, reflect then to act . We all know our present path is the path toward extention. Let's hope our collective individual actions redirect this path toward a livable future.
Thanks, Dennis! And yes, here's to that vital pause, the moment of reflection that interrupts the chain of stimulus and response, opening the possibility of other, unexpected actions and other paths worth taking.
Hi, just finished reading your book. Thanks. Seeing clearly is, I think (actually, I might have nicked this from Ruskin), one of the more difficult things to do, and to communicate what is seen is just as hard. I just hope there's more Palestinian chicken in me than Israeli.
Also, maybe "travelling without moving" (nicked from Dune) creates the soul-sickness.
Thank you Dougald, this call to humility is such the antithesis of the new modernity that constantly declares that, “you can have it all” while ignoring the blaring signs that we have reached the absolute limits of our planet’s carrying capacity. I am also applauding your decision to humbly, slow you body down right now so that you can recalibrate your personal carrying capacity. Good walks, rest, soup, and bread; all restorative medicine. Thank you for this reminder and for At Work Among the Ruins, both are helping me stay resilient and resolved.
So by the time I leave Vietnam maybe my soul will have got as far as your place. In a jetlagged half-awake state last night I was imagining reading a quote from the dust jacket of your next book: "Reading [title]" it said "is like being shouldered off a cliff by a wild boar and then finding you don't have to fall." Maybe I was half-remembering something Ed said in Norwich.
Now I have to half-remember the book I promised or threatened to write! Though I have sworn off embarking on anything of the kind until these 23 days are out.
I've commented before but wanted to reach out again. In the weeks since I read your book, I've been mulling over much of what you wrote. In search of a good podcast, I've also been listening to The Great Humbling, starting from the beginning. I wish I'd known about the podcast while I was living through the pandemic, but I've ended up in the same place, regardless. It's refreshing to hear your and Ed's measured perspectives on global events, and I can also hear echoes of the ideas in your book coming into being. Just finished the "Cultivation of Conspiracy" episode (loved it), as I have been vaguely aware of Ivan Illich for years, but only more recently have started hearing more about his thought.
Your endorsement in your book was the final tipping point for me to embark on reading The Master and His Emissary, (after hearing about it from various sources over the years). It's immensely erudite, ambitious, and incisive, and McGilchrist's cultural observations seem to be spot-on.
Oh, and I purchased another copy of your book and mailed it to my sister in Nevada. Hoping to have a cross-continental discussion about it with her soon! (I'm in Ohio).
How good to hear all this, Amy! It makes me smile to think of you retracing the steps that Ed and I took through the past three years – and yes, those conversations were one of the vessels in which the ideas for the book got brewed. Glad to hear that I've put you onto The Master and His Emissary. One of my tasks for next week is to edit the conversation I filmed with Iain during the tour.
Did people like their souls with the invention of the wheel or movable type or other discoveries that brought us where we are today.
Think not.
Cheers
DENNIS D.
Thanks for commenting, Dennis! I'm not sure I follow, though. How do you mean, "did people like their souls"?
Just to be clear, I'm not taking literally the idea that we leave our souls behind if we travel too fast, though as a metaphor it catches something that I think is true.