Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  In other words, the members of the grou p m u s t Moral Topography • 1 13 h a ve h ad very much the same sense that we would in their p lace: here is one pe r s o n , an d there is another, a nd which one survives/flourishes depend s on w h i c h p e rs on/body is run over by that mammoth. B ut al ongsid e these strands of continuity, which would pro b ably mak e e v e n ou r r emote ancestors compre hensible t o us, there are baffling contrast s wh e n w e try t o u nd erstand human agency in its moral and spiritu al di me ns io n. This i s driven home to us in our puzzlement at the three souls of t he B u r i ats of northern Siberia. But our modern noti o n of t he self is just a s m u c h a his torically local self-interpretation which would also be opaque an d p e rp l ex i ng t o outsiders. It is probable that in every language there ar e r es o u rce s for self-refere nce and descriptions of re fl exive thought, action , a t tit u de ( the se resources would go beyond referring expressions and woul d in cl ude fo rms like the archaic Indo-European middle voice). But this is not at all th e sa me as making 'self' into a noun, preceded by a definite or indefinite arti cle, s peaking of "the" self, or "a" self. This r e flect s som e thing important which is peculiar to our modern sense of agency. The Greeks were notoriously capable of formulating the injunction 'gno thi seauton'-'know thyself'-but they d idn't normally speak of the human agent as 'h o aut o s', or use the term in a context which we would translate with the i ndefinite article. 4 A similar distinction could probably be made between the perennial and the specifically modern in regard to the distinction inside/outside. There is a sense of "inside" which designates the thought or desires or intentions which we hold back for ourselves, as agains t those which we express i n speech and action. When I refrain from saying what I think a b out you, the thought re mains inn er, and whe n I blurt it out, then it is in the public domain. This d i stin ction seems to be a common theme to many different cultures, one wh ich is w oven into a richer notion of what 'inner' and 'outer' mean, which e xp re sse s in each case the specific moral/spiritual vision of the civilization.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  2 7 And in this Pope shows the roots of this outlook, through Shaftesbury back to Ficino and Florentine P latonism, the roots also of the Romantic visio n of nature. But for Pope, love ties together an order whose principle of coherence is already evident enough to dispassionate reason. It is the circle of nature where eac h thing serves as grist to the mill of some other ("see dying vegetables life sustain"). 2 8 The Romantic order, in contrast, was not organized on principles which could b e grasped by disengaged reason. Its principle of order was not exoterically available. Rather it was itself an e nigma, an d one could o n l y understand it fully by participating in it. The love is such that one has to be initiated into it to see it. The old idea of a rational l y evident harmony of natures gives way to a new one o f a current of love or life, which is both cl ose to us and baffles understanding. "Nah ist / Und schwer zu £assen der Got t" ("N ear is / And difficult to grasp, the God,,). 2 9 But if the order of things is not exoterically there to be imitated by ar t, then it must be explored and made man ifest through the development of a ne w language, which can bring something at fi rst esot eric and n ot full y se e n to manifestation. E arl Wasserman has s hown how the decli n e of the old order with i ts established background of mea n ings made nec essary th e development of new The Expressivist Turn · 3 8 I po etic language by the Romantics. Pope, for instance, i n his Windsor Forest, co uld dra w on the age-old views of the order of nature as a commonly a vailable source of poetic images. For Shelley, this resource is no longer a v ailable; the poet must ar ticulate his own world of references, and m ake th em believable. Until the end of the eighteenth century there was sufficient intellectu al homogeneity for men to share certain assumptions ... In varying degrees , ... man accepted ... the Christian interpretation of history, the sacra menta lism of nature, the Great Chain of Being, the analogy of the variou s pl anes of creation, the conception of man as microcosm ... These wer e c osmic syntaxes in the public domain; and the poet could afford to think o f his art as imitative of "nature " since these patterns were what he meant by "nature".

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  And I am afraid even more bizarre stuff awaits because, on occasion, you may actually feel that another part of you is, well, watching YOU as you watch the show. Some readers will be worried, at this point, that I am falling into all sorts of traps, suggesting in this torrent of metaphors that there is an actual site in the brain that could double as a theater and be a forum for mental experience. Rest assured that such is not the case. Nor do I think there is a little you or me inside the respective brains, having the experience. No homunculus, no homunculus inside the homunculus, no infinite regress of philosophical legend. The undeniable fact, however, is that it all happens as if there were either a theater or a gigantic Cinerama screen, and as if there were a me or you in the audience. It is perfectly fine to call this an illusion provided we acknowledge that there are firm biological processes behind it and that we can use them to sketch an explanation of the phenomenon. We cannot merely dismiss it as if illusions did not matter. Our organisms, specifically our nervous systems and the bodies they interact with, do not require actual theaters or spectators. They use other tricks from the body-brain partnership to produce the same results, as we will see. 2 What else do you get to observe as the subject of your conscious mind? You might observe, for example, that your conscious mind is not a monolith. It is composed. It has parts. The parts are well integrated, so much so that some hinge on others, but they are parts nonetheless. Depending on how you make the observation, some parts may be more salient than others. The part of your conscious mind that is most salient and tends to dominate the proceedings has to do with images of many sensory stripes, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory. Most of those images correspond to objects and events of the world around you. They are more or less integrated in sets, their respective abundance related to the activities you are engaged in at the moment. If you are listening to music, sound images may well dominate. If you are having dinner, gustatory and olfactory images will be especially prominent. Some of the images form narratives, or parts of narratives. Interspersed with the images related to ongoing perception, there may be images being reconstructed from the past, recalled on the spot because they are pertinent to the current proceedings. They are part of memories of objects, actions, or events, embedded in old narratives or stored as isolated items.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Various wr it ers 7 hav e pointed out the weak sense of anachronism that our forebears h a d . I n the Middle Ages, the Holy Family would be portrayed in paint ing and g l a ss window s in contempor a r y dress. The Virgin Mary m i ght be dressed like a T u sc a n merchant 's da ughter. T h is see ms strangely incongruous to u s today 2.88 · TH E AFFIRMAT ION OF ORDINARY LIFE y et must have then been quite natural. It is hard for us fully to understand this mentali ty , but one of its com p onents must have been a sense of time a s the locus for the recurrent embodiment of a rchetypes, not themselves temporally placed. We feel the incongrui ty when Mary has the features of a thirteenth century Tuscan rather than of a first-century Jew, because to us she is this particular woman, whose placing in history is crucial to what she was. But in a mentality in which there were such, the Mother of God easily gravitates toward s an arch e ty pe; and as such she is equidistant from, and hence equally belongs to, all ages. With the term 'arche ty pe' I am gesturing at a mode of consciousness which is very complex and rich and which took many forms beyond those reflected in a Platonic theory of Ideas. We find another mode of it in the religious tradition, where one event c an be a ' ty pe' or prefiguration of another which happens long after it. 8 Thus the sacrifice of Isaac was seen as a 'ty p e' of the sacrifice of Christ. In this outlook, t he two events are linked through something outside history, where their s ymbolic affinity reflects some de ep er identi ty in regard to Divine Providence. 9 Something other than their causal relations in time co nnects them; in spite of the imme ns e tem po ral ga p , ther e is a sense in which they are s imultaneous. History embodies the extra tem p oral. But this sense of what it is to exist in time is under m ined by the decline of an ontic logos and by the new self- u nderstanding as disengaged reason. One c onsequence of objectifying the world has been the development of the idea of a "homogeneous, emp ty time ", 10 the time of p hysics, whose even ts are related diachronically purel y by efficient causal relations, and synchronica lly by mutual conditioning. This has come to pose an unavoidable, but also at times apparently unanswe r able, question of how we re late our own l ives to this time.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  'Relation' is a very slippery word. It has so many different concrete meanings that the use of it as an abstract universal may easily introduce bewilderment into our thought. We must therefore be careful to avoid ambiguity by making sure, wherever we have to employ it, what its precise meaning is in that particular sphere of application. At present we have to do with space-relations, and no others. Most 'relations' are feelings of an entirely different order from the terms they relate. The relation of similarity, e.g., may equally obtain between jasmine and tuberose, or between Mr. Browning's verses and Mr. Story's; it is itself neither odorous nor poetical, and those may well be pardoned who have denied to it all sensational content whatever. But just as, in the field of quantity, the relation between two numbers is another number, so in the field of space the relations are facts of the same order with the facts they relate. If these latter be catches in the circle of vision, the former are certain other patches between them. When we speak of the relation of direction of two points toward each other, we mean simply the sensation of the line that joins the two points together. The line is the relation; feel it and you feel the relation, see it and you see the relation; nor call you in any conceivable way think the latter except by imagining the former (however vaguely), or describe or indicate the one except by pointing to the other. And the moment you have imagined the line, the relation stands before you in all its completeness, with nothing further to be done. Just so the relation of direction between two lines is identical with the peculiar sensation of shape of the space enclosed between them. This is commonly called an angular relation.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  What they were like, what early life was like exactly, needs to be pieced together from different strands of evidence. Between the beginnings and now, there are sparsely documented gaps. How life arose, precisely, is open to informed conjecture. At first blush, in the wake of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the elucidation of the role of RNA, and the breaking of the genetic code, it must have appeared that life had to come from the genetic material, but that idea was up against a major difficulty: the likelihood of such complex molecules assembling themselves spontaneously as the first step in the construction of life was low to nil. 6 The puzzlement and equivocation were perfectly understandable. The 1953 discovery (by Francis Crick and James Watson and Rosalind Franklin) of the double-helix structure of DNA was and remains one of the peak moments of the history of science and deservedly influenced the formulations of life that followed. DNA was inevitably seen as the molecule of life and, by extension, the molecule of its beginning. But how could a molecule so complex put itself together spontaneously in the primordial soup? Seen from that perspective, the likelihood of life’s spontaneous emergence was so negligible that it justified Francis Crick’s skepticism that it would have originated on Earth. He and his colleague Leslie Orgel, at the Salk Institute, thought that life might have come from outer space, brought in by rocket ships, unmanned. This was a version of Enrico Fermi’s idea that aliens from other planets would have come to Earth and brought life with them. As intriguing as this claim is, it simply pushed the problem out to another planet. The aliens would have vanished, in the meantime, or perhaps be in our midst but unrecognized. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard ventured that of course they were still among us “but they call themselves Hungarians.” 7 This is especially amusing because another notable Hungarian, the biologist and chemical engineer Tibor Gánti, was a critic of the idea that life had been shipped from elsewhere, a notion that Crick eventually abandoned. 8 Still the puzzlement over the emergence of life produced widely divergent views, from some of the most distinguished biologists of the twentieth century. Jacques Monod, for example, was a “life skeptic” and believed that the universe was “not pregnant with life,” while Christian de Duve thought exactly the opposite. — Today we are still faced with two competing views: one we may call “replicator first” and the other “metabolism first.” The replicator-first view is attractive because the machinery of genetics is reasonably well understood and so compelling. When people pause to consider the origin of life, which surprisingly people rarely do, replicator first is the default account. Because genes help manage life and can transmit life, why would they not have started the life ball rolling?

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  These touch more centrally on what we are as rational life, and thus their absence would void a life of much of its value. But their paramountcy is to be understood in terms of high priority , not as offering a critical perspective from which other lesser ones can be denied altogether. We could say that what plays the role of a 'hypergood' in Aristotle's theory is the "supreme good" (t e lei o n agathon) itself; but this is the whole good life, i.e., all the goods toge ther in their proper proportions. This 'comprehending' strategy has powerful arguments on its side. But it is hard to follow it either, in totality. It involves respecting all t he good s w hich are internal to practices which humans develop in their differe nt societies. By 'internal' goods, I mean those whose point must be understood against the background of a certain mode of social interchange in the man ne r I discussed in the previous section. 27 But if we ever could have done this, we are plainly too far gone in our recognition of hy pergoods to go the w hol e comp r ehending route. We are too aware that there have been and a r e societies and modes of social interchange whic h ar e vicious or are incomp at ible with justice or human dignity. And we are not encourage d a long the Aristotelian path by the thought that the Philosopher himself justified slavery, not t o speak of a subordinate place for women. This is not to say that mo r a l indignation against Aristotle himself is in order on this score, but just that w e can see all too well how these institutions could look perfectly all right i n th a t society while we now see them as unconscionable a nd as fit objects for ref or m or abolition. But we can readily see from all this that the place of th ese h yper good s i n our lives cannot but provoke an epistemol ogical m alaise, which in turn fe ed s the naturalist temp er and t h e various r eductive th eori es t ha t I have be e n Ethics of Inarticulacy · 6 7 c o n te n d i n g against.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But this seemed far too explicit to another rishi.63 In the beginning, he maintained, there was nothing. There was neither existence nor nonexistence, neither death nor immortality, but only “indiscriminate chaos.” How could this confusion become ordered and viable? The poet decided that there could be no answer to this question: Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it wasborn and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it—or perhaps he knows not.64 The poem was a brahmodya. The rishi asked one unfathomable question after another, until both he and his audience were reduced to the silence of unknowing. Finally, in the famous Purusha Hymn, a rishi meditated on the ancient creation story of the Aryans, and laid the foundation for India’s Axial Age.65 He recalled that the sacrifice of the first man had brought the human race into being. Now he described this primordial Person (Purusha), walking of his own free will into the sacrificial ground, lying down on the freshly strewn grass, and allowing the gods to kill him. This act of self-surrender had set the cosmos in motion. The Purusha was himself the universe. Everything was generated from his corpse: birds, animals, horses, cattle, the classes of human society, heaven and earth, sun and moon. Even the great devas Agni and Indra had emerged from his body. But like Prajapati, he was also transcendent: 75 percent of his being was immortal and could not be affected by time and mortality. Unlike the agonistic rituals of the warriors, there was no fighting in this sacrifice. Purusha gave himself away without a struggle. Purusha and Prajapati were shadowy, remote figures, with no developed mythology. There was very little to say about them. Indeed, it was said that Prajapati’s real name was a question: “Who?” (Ka?) On the brink of its Axial Age, the visionaries of India were moving beyond concepts and words into a silent appreciation of the ineffable. But as the Purusha Hymn shows, they were still inspired by the ancient ritual. Even though the rites were so dangerous and violent, they would remain the inspiration of the great transformation in India. By the end of the tenth century, the rishis had established the complex of symbols that would create the first great Axial Age spirituality.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I say no, because now that our clothes are on and we are back to the business of practicalities, I’m anxious to be on my way. We walk quietly and quickly. “Wow, you walk fast! I’ve never walked with a woman who can match my pace and definitely not in heels in the rain,” he says. “I’m a city girl,” I tell him, remembering how little he knows about me aside from my body and the basic facts of my life. When we reach my car, I offer to drive him back up the hill to the hotel. Stepping into the driver’s seat, I do a quick swipe of the passenger seat, which is still filled with the remnants of my trip with Georgia: Ziplocs of goldfish crackers, granola bar wrappers, a bag of cherry pits. I feel totally and suddenly exposed for who I really am: a harried housewife and busy mom. How does this fit with the woman who a few hours ago stripped off her clothes and practically begged to be debauched? Back in the driveway under the stark, too-bright lights of the hotel, I turn to him and shyly say, “Well, thank you. It was really nice meeting you.” “Yeah, it was great to meet you too. Maybe I’ll run into you one of these weekends when I’m back up here,” he says, but he doesn’t ask for my phone number and I don’t ask for his. Within seconds I’m pulling out of the parking lot and driving back to my house. I’ve been gone only seven hours, but I am returning home a changed woman. * The next morning, I wake up bewildered. It seems impossible that last night happened the way I replay it in my imagination. I feel like I’ve been hit by lightning. I look down at my naked body, put my hand over my heart. Everything looks as it did just a day ago, my skin deeply tanned from the Nantucket beaches, my stomach slightly rounded, breasts spilling over toward the sides of my body. I’m not as taut or as buoyant as I was the last time I had sex with someone for the first time. My edges seem to be both harder, having lost the supple baby fat of my youth, and softer, having experienced gravity and childbirth and age. I survey myself, every freckle and vein and scar and hair, and think, it’s all mine, for better or for worse, and I can do whatever I want with it. This knowledge is liberating and riveting. For months I have felt numb when I’m having a good day and despondent when it’s a rough day, but I feel a flicker of myself coming back to life. It’s both a physical sensation and a sudden awareness of myself as a person. Not just a mother, not just a wife, not just a jilted lover. I am all these things but not just that.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But in each of these cases, some framework stands unquestioned which helps define the demands by which they judge their lives and measure, as it were, their fulness or emptiness: the space of fame i n the memory an d song of the tribe, or the call of God as made clear in revelation, or, to take another example, the hierarchical order of being in the universe. It is now a commonplace about the m odern world that it has made these frameworks problematic. On the level of explicit philosophical or theological doctrine, this is dramaticall y evident. Some traditio nal frame wo rks a re discredited or downgraded to the status of persona l pred il e cti on , l ike the Inescapable Frameworks • z7 spa ce of fame. Others have ceased to be cr edibl e altogether in anything like th eir origina l form, like the Platonic notion of the order of being. The forms o f revealed religion continue very much alive, but also highly contested. None fo rm s the horizon o f the whole so ciet y in the modern West. Th is term 'horizon' is the one that is frequently used to make this point. W h at Weber ca l led 'disenchantment', the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order , has allegedly dest royed the horizons in which people previously lived their spiritual lives. Nietzsche used the term in his c ele bra ted "God is dead " passage: "How could we drink up the sea? Who ga ve us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? " 10 Perhaps this way of p utting it appeals above all to the intellectuals, who put a lot of stock in the explicit doctrines that people subscribe to, and anyway tend to be unbelievers. But the loss of horizon described by Nietzsche's fool undoubtedly corresponds to something very widely felt in our culture. This is what I tri ed to describ e with the phrase above, that frameworks today are problem atic. This vague term points towards a relatively open disjunction of attitudes. What is common to them all is the sense that no fram ework is shared by everyone, can be taken for granted as the framework tout court, can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact. This basic understanding refracts differently in the stances people take. For some it may mean holding a definite traditionally defined view with the self-conscious sense of standing against a major p art of one's compatriots. Others may hold the view but with a pluralist sense that it is one among others, right for us but not necessarily binding o n them. Still others identify with a view but in the somewhat tentative, semi-provisional way I descri bed above in section 1.2..

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation. How do people sit in a meeting and not make fun of this? Who can read this bullshit on LinkedIn about a teddy bear and not burst out laughing? Who could respond to this kind of inanity with anything other than complete and total derision? Does the teddy bear have a mind of its own? Does she ever disagree with Dharmesh, and if so, what happens then? Does she ever contradict the other members of the management team? How, exactly, does Molly lobby on behalf of customers? If you really want actual customer feedback, you could create a customer advisory panel and ask for their input, which is something that other companies actually do. People on LinkedIn can post comments under the articles, and I figure that Dharmesh will get savaged. But I’m wrong. In fact people seem to think that Molly the teddy bear is a fantastic idea. People post glowing comments saying what a brilliant idea this is, and vowing that they, too, will start bringing teddy bears, or perhaps different stuffed animals, to their meetings. I feel like Mugatu, Will Ferrell’s character in the movie Zoolander , when he finally loses his patience and screams out: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” My colleagues see nothing ridiculous about the teddy bear. Even Zack will not joke about it. This surprises me, because Zack is still sort of new here, and he has worked at other companies, including Google. I lean around the side of my monitor to get his attention. “Hey,” I say, in a quiet voice, looking around to make sure no one is listening. “Did you read this essay that Dharmesh just published on LinkedIn?” “I did,” he says. “What’d you think?” “He’s a good writer.” “But the teddy bear,” I say. “What’d you think of that?” “I think it’s cool that he’s so serious about solving for the customer. A lot of companies lose sight of that.” “Okay,” I say. “All right. But the teddy bear. You really think that’s a good idea? That’s a big breakthrough in management? When you were at Google, if you found out that Larry Page was carrying a teddy bear to meetings, would people think that was okay? Because I think people would be afraid that Larry had lost his mind.” Zack just shrugs. “Start-ups are eccentric,” he says. So that’s that. Zack isn’t going to dish on the boss. No one is. This in itself is amazing to me. In any place I’ve ever worked, if the boss started bringing a teddy bear to meetings, he would be a laughingstock, forever. There would be stuffed animals everywhere. Mean questions would be asked at all-hands meetings. The teddy bear would be kidnapped and hung from a noose, photographed in flagrante delicto with other stuffed animals, dressed in bondage gear and sodomized by a Smurf.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  I took as my guiding thread th e succ es sive u nder standings of the moral ideal of self-mastery. This was th e basis of the c ont rast between Plato and Descartes. But the line of deve lopment through A ugu stine has also g enerated models of self-exploration which have crucially s hap ed m odern culture. Augustine's inward turn was tremendously influential in the West; at first in i na ugurating a fa mil y of forms o f Chri s tian spiri tuality, whi ch con ti n ued th rou gh out the Midd le Ages, and flou ri shed again in the Ren ai ssanc e. But t he n la ter th i s tu r n tak es on s ecula ri z ed forms . We go inwa rd, but not n ec es s ar ily t o find God ; we go to dis cov e r or impa rt some order, or some me aning or so m e ju stific atio n, to our liv es. In retr ospe ct, we can see I77 178 · INWARDNESS Augustine's Confessi o ns as the first gr eat w o rk i n a gen re which includes Rousseau's work of the same ti t le, Goethe's Dichtu n g und Wahrheit, Wordsworth's Prelude-except that the Bishop of Hippo antedates his followers b y more than a millennium. To the extent that this form of self-exploration become s c entral to our culture, another stance of radical reflexivity becomes of crucial importance to us alongside that of dis e ngagement. It is different and in some wa y s a ntithetical to disengagement. Rather than objectifying our own nature and hence classing it as irrelevant to our identity, it consists in ex p loring what we are in o r der to establish this identity, because the assumption behind modern self-exploration is that we don't alread y know who we are. There is a turning point here whose represen tative figure is perhaps Montaig ne. There is some evidence that when he embarked o n his reflections, he shared the traditional view that these shoul d serve to recover c o ntact with the permanent, stable, unchanging core of being in each of us. This is the virtuall y unanimous direction of ancient thought: beneath t he changing an d shifting desires in the unwise soul, and over against the fluctuating fortu ne s of the external world, our true nature, reason, provides a foundation, unwavering and constant. For someone who holds this , the modern problem of identity remains u nintelligible. Our onl y search can be to discover within us the one universal h uman nature. But things didn't work out this way for Montaign e.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Th e li n e s are drawn in rather different ways by the various disp utants, and t h e r e a re cr ucial disa greements between the different definitions of what must � o t b e � ac � ifice d-between, say, religious advocates of the acceptance of f um a n h m 1 t s, and sensuali st flower children -b ut the disputes have a s i milar o r m a n d are all linked in some wa y or other t o the great intramural deb a te 0 � th e l as t t w o centu ries, pit t ing the philosophy of the Enlightenment against t e v ar io us forms of Romantic o pposi t i on. :co2. • IDENTITY AND THE GOOD Now I believe that both the mainstream form of moral philosophy , whic h shuns any articulation of goods, an d the various strands of neo-Nietzschea n thought impede clear thinking on these issues. The mainstream form can' t deal with the clash between hypergoods and "or d inary" goods. Concentrat ing on the principles of action , and having a penchant for a unitary conception of the 'moral', based on a si n gle criterion, it can't even properl y conce ive of the kind of diversity of good s which underlies the conflic t . Where there is some sense of the special status of the hypergoo d, this is disguised in some doctrine about the special logical propertie s of moral language or th e presuppositions of discourse. As for the neo-Nietzschean outlooks, they dissolve the conflict by discrediting hypergoods. But they do this by means of a meta-doctrine which sees moral views simply as imposed orders. This doctrine is not only unsustain ab le but also hides from vie w the ways in which the protest against the sacrifice and mutilation demanded b y one hypergood may be animated by another quite different h ypergood. In t his respect, Nie t zsche h imself has a much richer a nd more believable philos oph y, offering as he did the counter idea l of the superman and the hypergo od of unreserved yea-saying. The articulation of goods, which both these popular philosophies ha mp e r owing to their ultimately confused meta-construals of our moral thinking, is an essential condition of seeing clearly in this whole range of disp u tes. A nd not onl y h ere. These philoso p hies h ave not only occluded the goods which they are inspired b y ; the y also c ontri b ute to a profound skew in the whole modern debate, in the direction of what we could call s ubiectivis m . The goods they (unadmittedly ) express and exalt are all human-centred: freedom, active benevolence, universa l r ights.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Humanistic psychologists, fed up with the traditional focus on pathology, emphasize human potential and our capacity for growth. This approach allows people much more freedom to be human, and thus diverse. But the humanists have shockingly little to say about sex, and even less about eroticism. They prefer to talk about love and intimacy, worthy topics to be sure, but made strangely one-sided by ignoring our lustier impulses. I’m humanistically oriented myself and have always been perplexed about how eroticism became the neglected stepchild of humanistic psychology. Could it be that it’s just too messy? Masters and Johnson launched the field of modern sex therapy in 1970.3 They started with the traditional medical model with an emphasis on physiological function and dysfunction. Then from humanism they incorporated an acceptance of sexual variations and an optimistic belief that people gravitate toward health. Using principles of behaviorism they developed practical, step-by-step methods for facilitating change. This mixture proved to be far more effective than traditional approaches in helping people resolve problems with their sexual functioning. Like all new fields, modern sex therapy has limitations, one of which is the fact that it is firmly rooted in the neat-and-clean perspective. Masters and Johnson considered sex to be fundamentally simple—a “natural” function. According to this view, all that is required for a happy sex life is the removal of disruptive impediments, most notably anxiety and guilt. If it ever occurred to them that the same impediments they sought to eliminate might also be turn-ons, they neglected to mention it. Many of today’s sex therapists are still so preoccupied with getting rid of inhibitions that they rarely stop to wonder how sexual passion is actually created and intensified. They assume, for example, that uncomplicated, comfortable sex is the best kind—which, of course, isn’t necessarily so. Neat-and-clean practitioners also believe that the ability to become aroused and to have orgasms should be sufficient for satisfaction. They don’t dwell on the fact that eroticism is intertwined with the untidy struggles of being human and is therefore inherently complex and unpredictable. EMBRACING PARADOXThis book is based on a completely different point of view. Whereas the pathology perspective fails to appreciate the inevitable variability of eroticism, and the neat-and-clean perspective tries to downplay its irrational power, the paradoxical perspective recognizes the joys of eros without denying its intricacies and risks. This new paradigm acknowledges and embraces the contradictory, dual-edged nature of erotic life. It recognizes that anything that inhibits arousal—including anxiety or guilt—can, under different circumstances, amplify it. Consequently, we must view with considerable skepticism any absolute statements about what makes sex either exciting or problematic.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Another problem with traditional morality is that it usually requires allegiance to some strong authority such as a dominant religion or widely accepted cultural norms. In pluralistic societies where there is no single authority, “thou shalt nots” lose some of their potency as once sacrosanct beliefs about proper conduct are scrutinized and challenged. Doctrines that reduce profound and complex ethical issues to simplistic moralisms tend to be particularly brittle in the face of such scrutiny, partly due to their inflexibility, and partly because they are so often founded on little more than ignorance, custom, or prejudice. Consequently, when externally imposed moral codes weaken, those who once believed in them often feel bewildered and disillusioned. More than a few embark on a frantic and fruitless search for new absolutes. As you have looked at the contradictions within the erotic mind, you’ve become familiar with another feature of don’t-do-it morality: prohibitions have of a way of increasing one’s fascination with the very acts they seek to suppress. You know that children who grow up surrounded by sexual restrictions stand a much better chance than most of becoming adults who are ambivalently and guiltily drawn to forbidden behavior. These and other flaws inherent in conventional morality cause some people to swing to the other extreme and reject all ethical considerations as antierotic. Some even convince themselves that sex and morality have little or nothing to do with each other. For a time disconnecting the two can be liberating, as it was for so many during the sexual revolution of the 1970s when a popular slogan was “If it feels good, do it!” Before long, however, that credo proved to be as vacuous as the pious moralisms it sought to supplant. Unless it is grounded in a conscious understanding of how one wishes to live and what truly matters, sexual liberation ultimately becomes an empty goal. Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach that avoids the pitfalls of either extreme: The erotically healthy person develops a clear set of ethical values that possess intrinsic personal meaning and applies them in the sexual arena. Personal values frequently overlap with traditional morality, but they operate quite differently. When we obey or pay lip service to standards of conduct passed down from on high, we tend to do so out of obligation, fear, guilt, or habit. Conversely, we honor our own values because we genuinely believe they have a direct impact on the quality of our lives. Value-based decisions are more likely to shape how we actually behave when they are forged from firsthand experiences and careful observations.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Rousseau is naturall y its point of departure, and its first important articulation comes perhaps in the work of Herder; thereafter it is taken up not only by Romantic writers but by Goethe and, in another way, by Hegel and becomes one of the constituent streams of modern c ul ture. The p hilosophy of nature as source was central to the great upheaval in thought and sensibility that we refer to as 'Romanticism', so much so that it is tempting to identify them. But as the mention of Goethe and Hegel shows, this would be too simple. My claim is rather that the picture of nature as a source was a crucial part of the conceptual armoury in which Romanticism arose and conquered European culture and sensibility. The word has a b ewildering number of definitions; and some have even doubted that there is such a unified phenomenon, as against simply a conceptual muddle hidde n in a single term. 1 There is, indeed, one popular picture of what Romanticism is, w hich seems rather disconnected from any doctrine about nature. This sees the movement as a rebellion against the construction of neo-Classical norms in art and especially literature. Against the classical stress on rationalism, tradition , and formal harmony, the Romantics affirmed the rights of the individual , of the imagination, and of feeling. There is a lot of truth in this desc ription, particularly applied to the wave of French Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In France the hold of neo-Classicism was alwa ys strong, and it took a revolutionary movement to displace it. If we define Romanticism in this way, then its relation to the philosophies of nature as source can be clearly stated. This notion of an inner voice or impulse, the idea t h at we find the truth with in us, and in particular in ou r 368 The Expressivist Turn · 3 69 feelings-these were the crucial justify ing conc ep ts of the Romantic rebellion in its variou s forms. The y were indispensable to it. That is wh y Rousseau is so often their starting point. Sometimes the voice or impulse is seen a s pa rticular to the person himself; it is the voice of one's self; this was perhap s m ore common among the French writers like Lamartine or Musset, who sought in their poetr y to give authentic expression to their feeJings. Sometimes i t is also seen as the impulse in u s of nature, as the larger order in which we ar e set. This wa s the case with some English writer s, like Blake and in a di fferent wa y also Wordsworth. 2 But this idea was much further elaborated in G erman y . Herder offered a p icture of nature as a great current of s y mpath y , running through all things. "Siehe die ganze Natur, betrachte die gr osse Analogie der Schopfung.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  At HubSpot people use Gmail calendar invites for everything, even for making lunch plans. One Monday morning, Zack, who sits facing me, asks me if I’ve been to the burrito place on First Street. I tell him I haven’t. He says maybe we can go there tomorrow, on Tuesday. Sure, I say. “Great, I’ll send you a calendar invite,” he says. “No need,” I say. “We can just go. I’ll be free.” “But this will remind you.” “I won’t forget. It’s tomorrow. I can just put in my calendar myself. See? I just did it. It’s now on my calendar.” “I’ll send you one anyway.” He does, and a few seconds later the email arrives, and I click yes , and now the appointment is on my calendar twice. This is fine. I don’t make a fuss about stuff like this. The one thing I don’t want to be is the curmudgeon who goes around saying, “Back in my day, we did things this way.” I’ve been warned that at a place like HubSpot the worst thing you can say is that anything that was done at your last company is something we should think about doing here. Even if your last company was Google or Apple, nobody at HubSpot wants to be told, especially by some newcomer—some outsider —that there might be a better way. HubSpot is HubSpot. It’s unique. It’s different. HubSpot has its own way of doing things. We’re rethinking everything. We’re challenging all the assumptions. We’re not just making software, we’re reinventing the way companies do business. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but who knows? Maybe the people at HubSpot have figured something out. Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five years old when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.” Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old-timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it. They pined for the good old days. I couldn’t stand them. I was on the side of change. Those people had lots of experience, but their experience kept them from being able to adapt. I’m not here at HubSpot to fight these guys; I’m here to learn from them. If they think it’s better to book lunch by using Gmail calendar invitations, then that’s what we’ll do. But then, about two months into the job, there comes an experience where the cultural gap between me and the people I’m working with opens up like a yawning chasm, and I begin to doubt whether I will be able to make my way across. This happens during our personality assessments.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In placing the Way at the center of his vision, Laozi emphasized the fluidity of the spiritual life; the goal was hidden and inaccessible, and the path always had a fresh twist or turn, constantly urged us further, at the same time as it receded into the distance: There is a thing confusedly formed, Born before heaven and earth, Silent and void It stands alone and does not change, Goes round and does not weary. It is capable of being the mother of the world. I know not its name So I style it “the way.” I give it the makeshift name of “the great.” Being great, it is further described as receding. 33 There was insouciance in Laozi’s attempt to name this elusive, recessive “thing” to which he would give only a “makeshift” name. We could not talk about this “thing,” but if we modeled ourselves upon it, it became—somehow—known to us. Laozi’s elliptical poems made no logical sense. He deliberately confused his readers by pelting them with paradox. He told them that the sublime was nameless, and yet a few lines later he said that the “named” and the “nameless” came from the same source. The sage ruler was supposed to hold these contradictions in his heart and become aware of the inadequacy of his ordinary thought processes. Laozi’s chapters were not speculations, but points for meditation. He wrote down only the conclusions, and did not trace the steps that led to these insights, because the sage ruler had to journey down the Way by himself, going from the manifest to the unseen, and finally to the darkest of the dark. He could not achieve these insights at second hand, relying on other people’s reports of the Way. The Chinese had their own form of yoga (zuo-wang), which taught them to shut out the outside world and close down their ordinary modes of perception. Zhuangzi had called this “forgetting,” the discarding of knowledge. Laozi occasionally referred to these yogic disciplines, 34 but did not describe them in any detail; they were, however, essential to the mystical process he outlined. The only way the reader could evaluate his conclusions was to make the journey. Laozi often called the unseen reality “the Void,” because it could not be defined, a name that suggested an emptiness that the busy yu wei mind feared. Our nature abhors a vacuum, and we fill our minds with ideas, words, and thoughts that seem to be full of life but take us nowhere. In the Daodejing, however, the Void is also called the Womb of all being, because it brings forth new life. 35 Laozi’s images of the Void, the Valley, and the Hollow all speak of something that is not there. Besides pointing to the indescribable mystery of being, they also point to the kenosis of the wu wei mind, once the ego has been lost. There must be a void in the being of the sage ruler.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  is the instrument of the Godhead; the Holy Ghost conceived not the Logos, but formed for him, out of the virgin, a temple which he might inhabit (John ii. 21). The incarnate God did not die, but quickened him in whom he was made flesh .... This garment, which he used, I honor on account of the God which was covered therein and inseparable therefrom; ... I separate the natures, but I unite the worship. Consider what this must mean. He who was formed in the womb of Mary, was not himself God, but God assumed him [assumsit, i.e., clothed himself with humanity], and on account of Him who assumed, he who was assumed is also called God."1562 From this word the Nestorian controversy took its rise; but this word represented, at the same time, a theological idea and a mighty religious sentiment; it was intimately connected with the growing veneration of Mary; it therefore struck into the field of devotion, which lies much nearer the people than that of speculative theology; and thus it touched the most vehement passions. The word theotokos was the watchword of the orthodox party in the Nestorian controversy, as the term homoousios had been in the Arian; and opposition to this word meant denial of the mystery of the incarnation, or of the true union of the divine and human natures in Christ. And unquestionably the Antiochian Christology, which was represented by Nestorius, did not make the Logos truly become man. It asserted indeed, rightly, the duality of the natures, and the continued distinction between them; it denied, with equal correctness, that God, as such, could either be born, or suffer and die; but it pressed the distinction of the two natures to double personality. It substituted for the idea of the incarnation the idea of an assumption of human nature, or rather of an entire man, into fellowship with the Logos,1563 and an indwelling of Godhead in Christ.1564 Instead of God-Man,1565 we have here the idea of a mere God-bearing man;1566 and the person of Jesus of Nazareth is only the instrument or the temple,1567 in which the divine Logos dwells. The two natures form not a personal unity,1568 but only a moral unity, an intimate friendship or conjunction.1569 They hold an outward, mechanical relation to each other,1570 in which each retains its peculiar attributes,1571 forbidding any sort of communicatio idiomatum. This union is, in the first place, a gracious condescension on the part of God,1572 whereby the Logos makes the man an object of the divine pleasure; and in the second place, an elevation of the man to higher dignity and to sonship with God.1573 By virtue of the condescension there arises, in the third place, a practical fellowship of operation,1574 in which the humanity becomes the instrument and temple of the deity and the e{nwsi" scetikhv cuIminates.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  If we were liberated from this captivity we would be dazzled and bewildered by the brilliant sunlight and vibrant existence of the world outside the cave. It would probably be too much for us, and we would want to go back to our familiar twilight existence. So, Socrates explained, the ascent to the light must take place gradually. The sunlight symbolized the Good. Just as physical light enabled us to see clearly, so the Good was the source of true knowledge. When, like the liberated prisoners, we saw the Good, we perceived what was really there. The sun enabled things to grow and flourish; like the Good, it was the cause of being and thus lay beyond anything that we experienced in ordinary life. At the end of its long initiation, the illuminated soul would be able to see the Good as clearly as ordinary people see the sun. But even this was not the end of the journey. The liberated men probably wanted to stay outside and bask in the sunlight—just as the Buddha wanted to luxuriate in the peace of nibbana—but they had a duty to go back to the darkness of the cave to help their comrades. “Therefore each of you in turn must go down to live in the common dwelling place of the others,” Socrates insisted. “You’ll see vastly better than the people there. And because you’ve seen the truth about fine, just, and good things, you’ll know each image for what it is.” 90 They would probably get a hostile reception. They would now be bewildered by the darkness; their former companions might laugh at them and tell them that they were deluded. How could an enlightened man “compete again with the perpetual prisoners in recognizing the shadows”? 91 The captives might even turn on their liberators and kill them, just as, Plato implied, the Athenians had executed the historical Socrates. The parable of the cave was an integral part of Plato’s political description of the ideal republic. He always came back to the practical application of his ideals, and the shadows on the wall, besides depicting the impoverished vision of the unenlightened, also expressed the ephemeral illusions of contemporary politics, which relied on coercion and self-serving fantasies. In The Republic, Plato wanted to show that justice was rational, and that people could live in the way that they should only if they were brought up in a decent society, where the rulers were governed by reason. There is much in this text that is distasteful and elitist. There would, for example, be genetic engineering in Plato’s utopian city: less able citizens would be discouraged from procreation; defective infants would be discreetly disposed of, and the more promising taken from their parents and brought up in state nurseries in a segregated sector of the polis.