Confusion

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 Going Clear (2013)

  Prince now sees those episodes of body paralysis as severe anxiety attacks, but they prepared him to accept the truthfulness of the paranormal powers that Scientology claimed to provide. Brainwashing theory, on the other hand, proposes that strenuous influence techniques can overwhelm and actually convert an individual to a wholly different perspective, regardless of his background or pre- existing character traits, almost like an addiction to a powerful drug can create an overpowering dependency that can transform an otherwise stable personality. Stripping away a person’s prior convictions leaves him hungry for new ones. Through endless rounds of confession and the constant, disarmingly unpredictable fluctuations between leniency and assault, love and castigation, the individual is broken loose from his previous identity and made into a valued and trusted member of the group. To keep alienated members in the fold, “exit costs”—such as financial penalties, physical threats, and the loss of community—make the prospect of leaving more painful than staying. Whether Prince was brainwashed, as he believes, or spiritually enlightened, as the church would have it, his thinking did change over the year and a half he spent in the RPF. In order to move out of the RPF, a member has to have a “cognition” that he is a Suppressive Person; only then can he begin to deal with the “crimes” that he committed that caused him to be confined in the RPF in the first place. During his many hours of auditing, Prince later related, “You just kinda get sprinkles of little things that seem interesting, sprinkles of something that’s insightful. And then you’re constantly audited and in a highly suggestible state ... like being pulled along very slightly to the point where now I might as well just be here and see what this is about now. Maybe it’s not so bad, you know?” ONE OF JESSE PRINCE’S COMPANIONS in RPF was Spanky Taylor, an old friend of Paul Haggis’s from his early days in Scientology. She had become close to Paul and Diane soon after they arrived in Los Angeles. She called him Paulie, and had helped him market some of his early scripts when he was still trying to break out of cartoons. From the beginning, she had seen his talent; her own talent was helping others realize theirs. Spanky was a schoolyard nickname for Sylvia, but it had such a teasing twist that she could never escape it. She was the child of Mexican American laborers in San Jose. When she was fourteen, she became a fan of a local cover band called People!, which included several Scientologists. She began helping the group with concert promotion, and soon she was working with some of the other great bands coming out of the Bay Area, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Scientology was just another expression of the political and cultural upheaval of the times. Even members of the Grateful Dead were drawn into Scientology, which promised mystical experiences without hallucinogens.

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

  But the metaphysical or "scientific" argument only est ab lished the weaker, de facto one a nd, indeed, trumpets the inability of reason to establish anything stronger. Here r es ides the confus i on and t ens io n . Thus it has often been remarked that th e p sychology of utilitarianism is som ewh at at odds wi th its ethic. According to the first, we are all "under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure". 35 Th i s means presumably that we ar e determined to act for our ow n pleasure, and to avoid pain to ourselves. But in the moral th eo ry, p ai n and pleasure are the criteria of right action, not as they affect u s, but as they touch everyone. We a re to seek the greatest happiness o f the greatest number. Of course, we can be conditioned to find our happiness in the general well-being. Bentham wanted t o foster in society a "culture of benevo)ence" 3 6 in w hich this wou)d generally be the case. Or it can work out that there is an underlying "harmony of in terests". (Although they might protest to the cont ra ry, utilitarian thin k ers assumed a great deal of convergence of interests; most n otably in accepting so methin g like the Smithian view, that egocentric activity when productively oriented redounds to the general good.) And undoubtedly i n thes e case s th ings would work out better for society as a w hole. But this doesn ' t ans w er the question, Why ought I to seek it? Theories of Enlightenment materialist utilitarianism are hard to bring i n t o f oc us. They have two sides-a reductive ontology and a moral impetus w hic h are hard to combine. This helps explain the paradoxical fact which I i n v oke d above: the rooting of these theories in the ethic of ordinary life and be nev o)ence is from one point of view terrib)y obvious; while from another i t h as to be articulated and defended against the grain of these theories t he ms elves. It is the reductive ontol o gy which makes th e difficulty.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  How would you guide me to think about and what kind of questions would you say you would want me to ask? -I would say, not a question to ask, but think about who's giving you what information and why they're giving it to you. Someone who's telling you something about how the body works or how all women do this thing might have an agenda. And you want to think about what that agenda is. -Well-meaning people may leave out pieces of information hoping to steer you to what they think is the most ethical answer. And they may mean very well, but there aren't many places where you really get to go and ask questions about sex and get information that's filtered for accuracy, not filtered for, I would like to lead you to a conclusion, -How do you come to the truth when it comes to sex? -We try to come to the truth in two big ways. Big way number one is through research. In many places around sexuality there is unfortunately not as much good research as we would like. And way number two is an introspective process of learning to recognize what judgments we have and recognize where our biases are and then be able to hold those. [Alex] Lisa Medoff also warned us about the agendas we've internalized. -If your immediate reaction to anything having to do with sexuality, the way somebody looks, hearing about somebody else's relationships, hearing about certain behavior. If your immediate reaction is, ew or, that's not okay, it's to always just take a beat and say, where does that come from? Does that come from family? Does that come from religion? Does that come from media or invisibility in media? Does that come from things that I learned in school, formal, informal education? Does that come from what we diagnose as a medical problem or something that needs therapy? You know, a simple little checklist to run through your mind. [laughter] But to always ask, where does that reaction come from? And it's not to try to change that reaction. It's not to ever to try to get them to say like, ew, I thought that was gross but now I'm cool with anything, it's to just think about, do I want to continue with it? Is that an idea that still works for me or was that just an automatic reaction from some of my conditioning? -When it comes to sex, there are two competing agendas that play tug of war in my brain, those of American conservatives and liberals. And because I am pro-life- -I will defend women's rights to make their own healthcare decisions. -When we have programs that say, we're gonna teach abstinence in schools, the liberals go crazy. -Provide comprehensive sex education in our schools. -Sure would be nice if mother and father were involved in this rather than the schools having to tell kids about contraception.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  We note immediately that the argumentation is so tortuous that there is no scholarly consensus on either the problem submitted to Paul by the Corinthians or the solution returned by Paul to the Corinthians. That makes this 1 Corinthians 11 very different from the preceding 1 Corinthians 7 on both those counts. On the one hand, if you focus only on the women, it is plausible to argue that Paul is subordinating them to men (based on scriptural text, social dress, and church custom). On the other, if you focus only on the men and realize that Roman males normally covered their heads for worship, as with the statue of Augustus as a priest at sacrifice ; and recall Aeneas, Augustus, and Agrippa on the Ara Pacis Augustae above, it is plausible to argue that Paul is opposing pagan religious practice. If, however, you notice how the text oscillates constantly between women and men, men and women, you would have to take both sexes into any correct explanation. Paul takes for granted that both women and men pray and prophesy in liturgical assembly. That is not the problem of this text. Its problem concerns the proper head covering for each of them in that situation. But why was that so important an issue? At Corinth, presumably as a defiant challenge to inequality and a dramatic statement of equality, men and women had reversed modes of head covering in prayer, so that men worshiped with covered heads and women with uncovered heads. In other words, Paul was confronted with a negation not just of gender hierarchy, but of gender difference, and he stutters almost incoherently in trying to argue against it. Of course, women and men were equal “in the Lord” and “from God,” but there should be no denial of ordinary dress codes or standard head coverings. The difference between women and men, however that was customarily and socially signified, must be maintained, even while hierarchy or subordination was negated. The passage in 1 Corinthians 11:3–16 is the best Paul can do on that subject. But the text is emphatically not about hierarchical inequality, but about differential equality. Paul presumes equality between women and men in the assembly, but absolutely demands that they follow the socially accepted dress codes of their time and place. Difference, yes. Hierarchy, no. That interpretation of a very difficult passage is strongly confirmed by the next section for, if women are silenced in the assembly, how can they be prominent in the apostolate? Equal (and More) in the Apostolate

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

  The same perplexity occurs in looking through prismatic glasses, which alter the eyes' convergence. He cannot decide whether the object has come nearer, or grown larger, or both, or neither; and our judgment vacillates in the most surprising way. We may even make our eyes diverge, and the object will none the less appear at a definite distance. When we look through the stereoscope, the picture seems at no determinate distance. These and other facts have led Helmholtz to deny that the feeling of convergence has any very exact value as a distance-measurer. [233] With the feelings of accommodation it is very much the same. Donders has shown [234] that the apparent magnifying power of spectacles of moderate convexity hardly depends at all upon their enlargement of the retinal image, but rather on the relaxation they permit of the muscle of accommodation. This suggests an object farther off, and consequently a much larger one, since its retinal size rather increases than diminishes. But in this case the same vacillation of judgment as in the previously mentioned case of convergence takes place. The recession made the object seem larger, but the apparent growth in size of the object now makes it look as if it came nearer instead of receding. The effect thus contradicts its own cause. Everyone is conscious, on first putting on a pair of spectacles, of a doubt whether the field of view draws near or retreats. [235] There is still another deception, occurring in persons who have had one eye-muscle suddenly paralyzed has led Wundt to affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only of the direction of our eye-movements, but not of their whole extent. [236] For this reason, and because not only Wundt, but many other authors, think the phenomena in these partial paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of innervation, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to every different sensation whatever, it seems proper to note the facts with a certain degree of detail. Suppose a man wakes up some morning with the external rectus muscle of his right eye half paralyzed, what will be the result? He will be enabled only with great effort to rotate the eye so as to look at objects lying far off to the right. Something in the effort he makes will make him feel as if the object lay much farther to the right than it really is. If the left and sound eye be closed, and he be asked to touch rapidly with his finger an object situated towards his right, he will point the finger to the right of it. The current explanation of the 'something' in the effort which causes this deception is that it is the sensation of the outgoing discharge from the nervous centres, the 'feeling of innervation,' to use Wundt's expression, requisite for bringing the open eye with its weakened muscle to bear upon the object to be touched.

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

  It is hard for us simply to list souls or minds al o ngside whatever else there is. This is the source of a continuing philos ophical discom f ort in modern times for which there is naturally no a nalogue among the ancients. Various solutions have been tried redu ctionism, 'transcendental' theories, returns to duali sm-but the problem c o ntinues to nag us as unsolved. I will not tackle this problem here. My point is rather that this ungr o unded ' extra-worldly' stat us o f the objectifying subject accentuates the existing motivatio n to describe it as a se l f. All other app ellations seem to place it somewhere in the roster of things, as one among ot he rs . The punctual ag ent seems to be nothing else but a 'self', an 'I'. He re we see the origin of one of the great paradoxes of modern p h ilo s ophy. The p hiloso phy of diseng ageme nt and objectification has helped t o cre ate a picture of the h u man being, at its most ext reme in certain forms o f ma terialis m , from which the l ast vestiges of sub j ectiv ity seem to h ave been 176 • INWARDNESS e xpelled. It is a picture of the human being from a completely thir d -per so n per spective. The paradox is that this severe outlook is connected with, indeed , based on, according a central place to the first-person stance. Radi ca l obje ctivity is onl y intelligible and accessible through radical subjectivi ty. Thi s p aradox has, of course, been much commented on by Heidegger, for instance , in his critique o f subjectivism, and by Merleau-Ponty. Modern n a turalism ca n never be the same once one sees this connection, as both these philoso phe rs argu e. But for those who haven't seen it, the problem of the 'I ' returns, lik e a repressed thought, a s a seemingly insoluble p uzzle. 2 2 For us the subject is a self in a way he or she couldn't be f o r the ancien ts . A ncient moralists frequently formulated the injunction 'Take care of your se lf', as Foucault has r ecently reminded us. 2 3 A nd Epictetus persuades us tha t al l that really matters to us is the state of our own hegemonikon, or ruli ng part, s ometimes translated 'mind' , o r 'will'. They can sometimes sound like our contemporaries. But in reality, there is a gulf between us and them .

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Many find it discomforting to tolerate the ambiguity of the erotic experience, to accept its mixed motivations, or to observe how the erotic mind has a habit of transforming one idea or emotion into another. And yet if we fail to come to terms with the fundamentally paradoxical nature of eroticism, we set the stage for its negative aspects to appear more frighteningly destructive. At the same time, the positive aspects of erotic life become increasingly elusive and difficult to celebrate, almost as if they are canceled out by a recognition of the danger or uncertainty inherent in them. The paradoxical perspective is the best alternative to the exaggerated shifts in sexual attitudes we’ve seen during the last few decades. According to the ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, sexual experimentation and freedom were valued. For millions it was a time to throw off old restraints, to push boundaries, and sometimes to overindulge recklessly. Within a single decade the pendulum lurched back in the opposite direction. In response to fear of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the atmosphere of conservative politics, social attitudes about sex flipped from celebration to dread. Reflecting and abetting this radical shift, the popular media turned its attention to the most disturbing manifestations of the erotic impulse, including sexual abuse and harassment, teen pregnancies, disease, and even satanic cults. In record time the popular perception of sex went from “good” to “bad.” No wonder so many of us are confused and a bit dazed: We live in an era of both promise and great danger. The danger is that negativity will drive eroticism into the shadows where it is most likely to assume the very shapes we fear. But those who find the courage to survey the entire panoply of the erotic experience—joyful as well as dangerous, life-giving as well as trouble-some—stand on the brink of a new consciousness of eros. As our perspective enlarges we can see that, in the final analysis, eroticism can never be either pathological or neat-and-clean—for it is as vast and multifaceted as human nature itself. The paradoxical perspective is the only point of view large enough to encompass this truth. WHAT THIS BOOK CAN DO FOR YOUThe Erotic Mind is an invitation to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the role of eroticism in your life. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Realms of Passion,” focuses primarily on peak erotic experiences as rich sources of information about the inner workings of the erotic mind. Particularly memorable real-life encounters as well as compelling fantasies offer us glimpses of eroticism thriving—as opposed to malfunctioning or causing trouble. In addition, during moments of peak arousal, the dynamics of eroticism are accentuated and thus easier to observe.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  A religious idea could all too easily become a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, while the purpose of the dhamma was to help people to let go. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He liked to tell the story of a traveler who came to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. But there was no bridge or ferry, so he cobbled together a raft and paddled over. But then, the Buddha would ask his audience, what should the traveler do with the raft? Should he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he must load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey? The answer was obvious. “In just the same way, monks, my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,” the Buddha concluded. 100 His task was not to issue infallible statements or satisfy intellectual curiosity, but to enable people to cross the river of pain and arrive at the “further shore.” Anything that did not serve that end was irrelevant. The Buddha had, therefore, no theories about the creation of the world or the existence of God. These topics were, of course, extremely fascinating, but he refused to discuss them. Why? “Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of nibbana.” 101 He told one monk who kept pestering him about cosmology to the detriment of his yoga and ethical practice that he was like a wounded man who refused medical treatment until he learned the name of the person who had shot the arrow, and what village he came from. He would die before he got this useless information. What difference did it make to learn that a God had created the world? Grief, suffering, and pain would still exist. “I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now,” the Buddha explained to his metaphysically inclined monk, “so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason I have refused to explain it.” 102 The Buddha liked to keep explanations to a minimum. Like Socrates, he wanted the disciple to discover the truth within himself. This also applied to the laity. On one occasion, the Kalamans, a tribal people who lived on the northern bank of the Ganges, sent a delegation to the Buddha. One renouncer after another had descended upon them, they explained, but each one belittled the others’ doctrines. How could they tell who was right? The Buddha replied that he could see why the Kalamans were so confused.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In China, the Axial Age had started late but was now in full flower. In the other regions, it was either running down or in the process of becoming something different. We see this clearly in the Mahabharata, the great epic of India.62 The story is set in the Kuru-Panchala region during the period of the Brahmanas, before the rise of the state systems, but the oral transmission of the epic started in about 500; it was not committed to writing until the first centuries of the common era, when it achieved its final form. The Mahabharata is, therefore, a complex, multilayered text, an anthology of many strands of tradition. The general outline of the story, however, had probably been established by the end of the fourth century. Unlike the defining texts of the Axial Age, which were composed in priestly and renouncer circles, the epic reflects the ethos of the kshatriya warrior class. The religious revolution of the Axial Age left them with a perplexing dilemma. How could a king or warrior who admired the ideal of ahimsa become reconciled with his vocation, which demanded that he fight and kill in order to defend his community? The duties of each class were sacred. Each had its own inviolable dharma, a divinely ordained way of life. A Brahmin’s duty was to become expert in Vedic lore; the kshatriya was responsible for law, order, and defense; and the vaishya had to devote his energies to the production of wealth. The renouncers depended on the support of the warriors and merchants, who gave them the alms, food, and security that enabled them to dedicate themselves full-time to the religious quest. Yet in order to carry out their duties successfully, kings, warriors, and merchants were compelled to behave in ways that were—in Buddhist parlance—“unskillful” or even downright sinful. To perform successfully in the marketplace, vaishyas had to be ambitious, to want worldly goods, and to compete aggressively with their rivals, and this “desire” bound them inexorably to the cycle of death and rebirth. But the kshatriya’s vocation was especially problematic. During a military campaign, he was sometimes forced to be economical with the truth or even to tell lies. He might have to betray former friends and allies, and to kill innocent people. None of these activities was compatible with the yogic ethos, which demanded nonviolence and a strict adherence to truth at all times. The kshatriya could only hope to become a monk in his next life, but given the nature of his daily karma, it seemed unlikely that he could achieve even this limited goal. Was there no hope? The Mahabharata agonized over these questions, but could find no satisfactory solution.

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

  Rath er there seem s t o us to be a fragmentation: some t hings happen in th e 'thumos', others in t h e 'pb,enes', others again in the 'kradie', 'etor', or 'ker', still others in the 'noos·. Some of these sites can be loosely identified with bodily locations; fo r instance, 'kradie', 'etor', and 'ker' seem to be identified with the hear t, a n d 'phrenes' with the lungs. Ri c hard Onians 4 also makes a strong case fo r 'tbumos' b eing originally sited in the lungs. In pa r allel to the multiplicity of 'mind' locations, bodily references are also usuall y to what we would think o f as pans. The term 'soma', S n ell argues, refers to the corpse. References to th e living body are to, e.g ., t h e 'limbs', 'skin', etc., varying as a ppropriate with the context. Snell also noted that the Homeri c hero was frequently carri ed to t he greatest heights of action by a surge of power infused into him by a god. An d indee d, t he same could be said for some of his great mistakes. Agamemnon excuse s his unfair and unwise treatment of Achilles by referring to the 'madness' (menos) visited on him by the g od. But contrary to our mo dern i ntuitions, this doesn't seem to lessen the merit or demeri t attaching t o the agent. A great hero remains great, though his impressive deeds are powere d by the god's infusion of energy. Indeed , there is no concession here; it is not that the hero remains grea t despite the divin e help. It is an inseparable par t o f his gr eatn e ss that he is such a locus of div in e action. As Adkins puts it, Homeric man is revealed "as a being whose part s are mor e in e vid e nce than the whole, and one very conscious o f sudden unexpected accesses of energy". 5 To the modern, this fragmentat i on, and th e seeming confusion about merit and responsibility, are very puzzling. S o me 6 hav e been tempted to make light of Snell's thesis, and to deny that Ho m er i c man was all that different from us in his w a y of understanding decisio n a n d responsibility.

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

  Cartesian dualis m was taken up b y m any of the Jansenists, for instance by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, as a framework for their moral and theological views. But what couldn't be assimilated was the Cartesia n confidence in man's own powers to achieve the good, the sense that the muddle and confusion of embodied thinking, which Arnauld and Nicol e s ee as a consequence of the Fall, 2 could be overcome just by our own intellec tu al efforts. With this goes a shift in self-interpretation. The muddle and confusion ar e no longer seen as simply the result of negligence and bad habits, something which a little resolution and proper understanding can clear up. Indeed, th e Cartesia n idea that we are in principle transparent to ourselves, and only f a i l to know ourselves through confusion, is ab andoned. The Jansenist writers , i n fully A ugustinian fashion, insist that we don't know the depths of o ur o w n hearts. We are constantly giving ourselv es spiritual marks which we may n o t de s e rve. No one knows if his inclination to pray really comes from grace , o r perha ps from some self-serving end. We have "une inclination naturell e d e l'amour propre ... ", says Nicole, "a croire que nous avons dans le coe u r Nature as Source · 3 5 7 to ut ce qui nage sur la surface de no stre esprit. ' ' But "ii y a toujours en nous u n certain fond, et une certain r acin e qui nous demeure inconnu et im p e n etr able toute nostre vie" ("a natural inclination of pride ... to believe that w e have in our hearts all that is floati ng on the surface of our minds ... but . . . there are always certain depths within, certain roots that remain u nknown and impenetrable to us all of our lives"). 3 For Pascal, I am a "monstre incomprehensible". We are full of contra d ictions. Far from b eing self-transparent, our self is a mystery to us. "Ou est d one ce moi?" he asks. 4 W hat alone can bring some order in this, can give s ome (relative) self-understanding, is grace, which transforms the terms of our inner conflicts. This denial of self-transparency will be taken up again and will be crucial t o the express ivist followers of Rousseau. But what is more relevant to my immediate purpose is the way that Rousseau transposes this way of thinking to integrate it int o Deism. In the orthodox theory, the source of the higher love is grace; it is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For Rousseau (without entirely ceasing to be God, at least of the philosophers), it has become the voice of nature.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The gospel of John says that the earliest disciples came from the circle of the Baptist, and this at a time when Jesus’s early, simple teaching was strongly reflective of the Baptist’s, at least according to Mark’s account of it. Our authorities give a very confusing picture of Jesus’s following, both during his ministry and afterwards, when the personnel seem to have changed radically. The synoptics agree that twelve men were constituted, in Mark’s words, ‘to be with him, and to send them to preach and to have authority to cast out demons’. Both John and Paul refer to the figure twelve. But were the twelve the same as the apostles? The synoptics and Acts provide lists, but only agree on the first eight. John gives only half. Most of them are just names, if we leave aside later traditions. ‘The Twelve’ seem to relate to the ‘true people’ of the twelve tribes; but apostle in Greek implies an expedition across the sea and must refer primarily to the gentile or diaspora mission. Luke, in the Acts, does not tell us what rights or duties or privileges were enjoyed by ‘the twelve’ or by ‘the apostles’. Indeed, when he gets to Paul’s work he forgets all about them, and thenceforth refers to him as ‘the apostle’. Only with Peter can we trace any activity; with John it is barely possible, though we can assume it since he was martyred. And it is quite impossible with the rest. James, Jesus’s brother, is an identifiable personality, indeed an important one. But he is not an ‘apostle’, nor one of ‘the twelve’. It is thus misleading to speak of an ‘apostolic age’, and equally misleading to speak of a primitive pentecostal Church and faith. The last point is important, because it implies Jesus left a norm, in terms of doctrine, message, and organization, from which the Church subsequently departed. There was never a norm. Jesus held his following together because he was, in effect, its only spokesman. After Pentecost, there were many; a Babel of voices. If the famous Petrine text in Matthew is genuine and means what it is alleged to mean, Peter was a very unsteady rock on which to found a Church. He did not exercise powers of leadership and seems to have allowed himself to be dispossessed by James and other members of Jesus’s family, who had played no part in the original mission. Finally, Peter went on foreign mission and left the Jerusalem circle altogether. The impression we get is that the Jerusalem Church was unstable, and had a tendency to drift back into Judaism completely. Indeed, it was not really a separate Church at all, but part of the Jewish cult. It had no sacrifices of its own, no holy places and times, no priests. It met for meals, like the Essene groups, and had readings, preaching, prayers and hymns; its ecclesiastical personality was expressed solely in verbal terms.

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

  But for a quite d i f f er e n t reason. I don't think there is such a thing as our real epistemic predica m en t in relation to God, just san:; phrase. Our sense of the certainty o r pro ble m aticity of G od is relative to our sense of moral sources. Our forebears we r e gen erally unruffled in their belief, because the sources t h e y could envi sa g e Fractured Horizons · 3 I 3 m a de unbelief incredible. The big thing that has ha pp ened since is the o p eni n g of oth er p ossible sources. In a p redicament where these are p lural, a lot of thin g s lo ok p roblematic that didn ' t before-and not just the existence of G od, but als o such "unquestionabl e" eth i ca l p rinci p les as that reason ought to govern the p assions. Who kn o ws whether further transformations in the available moral sources may no t a lter all these issues again out of all re c ognition? I w ant to argue that our p resent p redicament re p resents an e p i stemic gain, because I think that the alternative moral sources which have o p e ned for us in the pas t-two centuries re p resent real and im p ortant huma n p ote n tialities. It is p ossible to argue, as many have done, that they are largely based on illusion. But ev e n if I am right and we are in a better e p istemic p redicament as a consequence, this still doesn't authorize us to tal k of "the real" e p istemic p redicament. What this means for the ex p lanation of seculari z ation is that the issue shifts fro m the removal of blinkers to the question how these new sources became available . This is the cultural shift which we have to understand. Secularizat i on d oesn't just arise because p eo p le get a lo t more ed uc ated, and science p rogres ses. This has some effect , but it isn't decisive. What matters is that mass es of p e o p le can s ense moral sources of a quite different kind, ones that don't nece ssarily su pp ose a God. The limited effect of "Enlig h tenment" on its own becomes clear when we try to see what it is for new sources to become 'ava ilable'.

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

  Now for the next step in our construction of real space: How are the various sense-spaces added together into a consolidated and unitary continuum? For they are, in man at all events, incoherent at the start. Here again the first fact that appears is that primitively our space-experiences form a chaos, out of which we have no immediate faculty for extricating them. Objects of different sense-organs, experienced together, do not in the first instance appear either inside or alongside or far outside of each other, neither spatially continuous nor discontinuous, in any definite sense of these words. The same thing is almost as true of objects felt by different parts of the same organ before discrimination has done its finished work. The most we can say is that all our space-experiences together form an objective total and that this objective total is vast. Even now the space inside our mouth, which is so intimately known and accurately measured by its inhabitant the tongue, can hardly be said to have its internal directions and dimensions known in any exact relation to those of the larger world outside. It forms almost a little world by itself. Again, when the dentist excavates a small cavity in one of our teeth, we feel the hard point of his instrument scraping, in distinctly differing directions, a surface which seems to our sensibility vaguely larger than the subsequent use of the mirror tells us it 'really' is. And though the directions of the scraping differ so completely inter se, not one of them can be identified with the particular direction in the outer world to which it corresponds. The space of the tooth-sensibility is thus really a little world by itself, which can only become congruent with the outer space world by farther experiences which shall alter its bulk, identify its directions, fuse its margins, and finally embed it as a definite part within a definite whole. And even though every joint's rotations should be felt to vary inter se as so many differences of direction in a common room; even though the same were true of diverse tracings on the skin, and of diverse tracings on the retina respectively, it would still not follow that feelings of direction, on these different surfaces, are intuitively comparable among each other, or with the other directions yielded by the feelings of the semi-circular canals. It would not follow that we should immediately judge the relations of them all to each other in one space-world.

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

  But the more philosophic student, whose business it is to discover difficulties quite as much as to get rid of them, will reflect that it is conceivable that the partial factors might fuse into a larger space, and yet not each be located within it any more than a voice is located in a chorus. He will wonder how, after combining into the line, the points can become severally alive again: the separate puffs of a, 'sirene' no longer strike the ear after they have fused into a certain pitch of sound. He will recall the fact that when, after looking at things with one eye closed, we double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal points affected, the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear alongside of the old ones and additional to them, but merely make the old ones seem larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points on the same retina have so different a result? In fact, we will see no sort of logical connection between (l) the original separate local signs, (2) the line as a unit, (3) the line with the points discriminated in it, and (4) the various nerve-processes which subserve all these different things. We will suspect our local sign of being a very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature. Positionless at first, it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of companions than it is found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and assigning place to each of its associates. How is this possible? Must we accept what we rejected a, while ago as absurd, and admit the points each to have position in se? Or must we suspect that our whole construction has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of association, qualities which the associates never contained? There is no doubt a real difficulty here; and the shortest way of dealing with it would be to confess it insoluble and ultimate. Even if position be not an intrinsic character of any one of those sensations we have called local signs, we must still admit that there is something about every one of them that stands for the potentiality of position, and is the ground why the local sign, when it gets placed at all, gets placed here rather than there.

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

  But since these no ti o ns a re the vehicles of all our tho ughts, w e find it hard to accept that they a re c a ll ed into question. V agu e and ins ignificant forms o f s peech, and abuse of lan gu age, hav e so l o n g pa s se d for my steries of scienc e ; a nd hard and misapplied words, with li t tl e or n o meaning, ha v e, b y pres c r iption, such a right to be mistaken for d e ep l earning and h e ig ht of s p e culation, t hat i t will not be easy to p er s u ade eithe r tho se who s peak o r th ose who hear them, that they are but t h e c ov er s o f ignor anc e , an d h i ndran ce of true knowledg e . (Essay, Epistle , p . 1 4 ) The c ru cial first task i s ther efore one of dem olition, and Locke speaks of his a rn b it ion as " to b e emp l o yed as an und er •l a b oure r in clearing the ground a 166 • INWARDNESS little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledg e '' (ibid.). Locke proposes to de molish and rebuild. This in itself is not new; it is ju s t what Descartes propou nded. M ore generally, the att ack on the err o r s inculcate d b y cus t om and ordinary education is at least a s old as Plato. Ev e n t h e p r o posal to reconstruct o n the basis of sense expe rience is not entir e l y new: the Aristotelian .; Thomistic tradition also makes sensation primary i n our knowledge of t he world. What is radical is the extent of the disen gag e ment he proposes. We do not reje ct custom like Plato in order to follow the inherent b ent i n us towar ds reason. N or do we make sense experience primary in ord er t o discern through this experience the forms of the things we encounter. N or do we accep t an y innate principles.

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

  It is easy to see why the phantom foot might continue to follow the position of the artificial one. But I confess that I cannot explain its half way-positions. [50] It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see things right-side up. Our consciousness is naively supposed to inhabit the picture and to feel the picture's position as related to other objects of space. But the truth is that the picture is non-existent either as a habitat or as anything else, for immediate consciousness. Our notion of it is an enormously late conception. The outer object is given immediately with all those qualities which later are named and determined in relation to other sensations. The 'bottom' of this object is where we see what by touch we afterwards know as our feet, the 'top' is the place in which we see what we know as other people's heads, etc., etc. Berkeley long ago made this matter perfectly clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, 93-98, 113-118). [51] For full justification the reader must see the next chapter. He may object, against the summary account given now, that in a babe's immediate field of vision the various things which appear are located relatively to each other from the outset. I admit that if discriminated, they would appear so located. But they are parts of the content of one sensation, not sensations separately experienced, such as the text is concerned with. The fully developed 'world,' in which all our sensations ultimately find location, is nothing but an imaginary object framed after the pattern of the field of vision, by the addition and continuation of one sensation upon another in an orderly and systematic way. In corroboration of my text I must refer to pp. 57-60 of Riehl's book quoted above on page 32, and to Uphues: Wahrnehmung und Empfindung (1888), especially the Einleitung and pp. 51-61. [52] Prof. Jastrow has ascertained by statistical inquiry among the blind that if their blindness have occurred before a period embraced between the fifth and seventh years the visual centres seem to decay, and visual dreams and images are gradually outgrown. If sight is lost after the seventh year, visual imagination seems to survive through life. See Prof. J.'s interesting article on the Dreams of the Blind, in the New Princeton Review for January 1888. [53] Impression means sensation for Hume. [54] Treatise on Human Nature, part i. §vii. [55] Huxley's Hume, pp. 92-94. [56] On Intelligence (N. Y.), vol. ii. p. 139. [57] Principles, Introd. §13. Compare also the passage quoted above, p. 469 [58] The differences noted by Fechner between after-images and images of imagination proper are as follows: [59] [I am myself a good draughtsman, and have a very lively interest in pictures, statues, architecture and decoration, and a keen sensibility to artistic effects.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  What does self-affirmation have to do with erotic transitions? Just about everything! With few exceptions, blockages and distortions of your deepest inclinations lie at the root of self-defeating turn-ons. The alternative is to listen carefully for the guidance that comes only from within. STEP 3:NAVIGATE THE GRAY ZONEOnce a significant transition is under way, it’s only a matter of time until you enter a period of awkward uncertainty when you’re no longer where you’ve been, but you haven’t arrived at where you’re going. Welcome to the gray zone, which, of course, is not a location but a state of mind distinguished by a distressing absence of clear pathways and landmarks. For a time you feel as though you’re wandering aimlessly, disoriented, lost without a clue about how to regain your bearings. The more important and challenging the changes you seek, the more prolonged will be your stay in the gray zone. For some, being in the gray zone feels like standing at the edge of an abyss. But if you can tolerate its ambiguities, the gray zone holds unparalleled opportunities for self-discovery. Gradually, you will notice that the gray zone is not at all the featureless desert it first appears to be. It’s more like a blank canvas on which you can experiment with new shapes and colors. STUMBLING INTO THE GRAY ZONESometimes the first hint that you are entering the gray zone is a realization that partners, situations, or fantasies that have reliably turned you on in the past are losing their allure. If you aren’t prepared for the surprises that await you in the gray zone you might misinterpret your waning interest as a sign of trouble rather than a harbinger of positive change. Men find it especially difficult to handle this temporary reduction in desire because it is usually reflected in less reliable, softer, or nonexistent erections. When old turn-ons begin to lose their effectiveness, some people embark on a search for more intense forms of stimulation to prove to themselves that everything still works. Unfortunately, their first impulse is often to repeat—with even more single-minded determination—the very patterns that are losing their grip. One man could no longer ignore the fact that he wasn’t responding to his porn collection featuring leather-clad dominatrixes. So he went on a frantic search for new porn with even more exaggerated images of dominance and submission. Only later did he realize that these purchases were completely useless because his eroticism was evolving away from the imagery of power and toward—well, he didn’t know yet. But once he accepted the fact that his old arousal patterns were crumbling to make room for something new, yet undefined, he was better able to accept the flux and uncertainty of the gray zone. Maggie Revisited: Turning away from longing

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future, and were, therefore, unknown to us; it was impossible to separate the knowledge of future good or evil from our experience of good and evil in the present and the past. We say that courage was only one of the virtues, but anyone who was truly valiant must also have acquired the qualities of temperance, justice, wisdom, and goodness that were essential to valor. If you wanted to cultivate one virtue, you also needed to master the others. So at base, a single virtue, such as courage, must be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, the three hoplites had to admit that, even though they had all endured the trauma of the battlefield and should be experts on the subject, they were quite unable to define courage. They had not discovered what it was, could not decide what distinguished it from the other virtues, and felt deeply perplexed. They were ignorant and, like children, needed to go back to school. 37 Socrates had invented dialectic, a rigorous dialogue designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. By asking questions and analyzing the implications of the answers, Socrates and his colleagues discovered the inherent flaws and inconsistencies of every single point of view. One definition after another would be rejected, and often the dialogue ended with the participants feeling as dizzy and stunned as Laches and Niceas. Socrates’ aim was not to come up with a clever or intellectually satisfying solution. The struggle usually led to the admission that there was no answer, and the discovery of this confusion was far more important than a neat conclusion, because once you had realized that you knew nothing, your philosophical quest could begin. Socrates’ dialectic was a Greek, rational version of the Indian brahmodya, the competition that attempted to formulate absolute truth but always ended in silence. For the Indian sages, the moment of insight came when they realized the inadequacy of their words, and thus intuited the ineffable. In that final moment of silence, they had sensed the brahman, even though they could not define it coherently. Socrates was also trying to elicit a moment of truth, when his interlocutors appreciated the creative profundity of human ignorance. The knowledge thus acquired was inseparable from virtue. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates did not believe that courage, justice, piety, and friendship were empty fictions, even though he could not define them. He was convinced that they pointed to something genuine and real that lay mysteriously just out of reach. As his dialogues demonstrated, you could never pin the truth down, but if you worked hard enough, you could make it a reality in your life.

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

  He told me he had met with Halligan and Shah when they first put the company together and were trying to raise money. “I went back and told my partners, ‘I wouldn’t put a penny into that place. They’re selling snake oil.’ Since then I’ve had to eat my words, because they’ve done pretty well.” Gordon had an engineering background. Before he became a venture capitalist he had built and sold a tech company. He asked me if I believed that HubSpot’s software did what the company claimed. “Do you really think some small-business owner, like a plumber, is going to come home at the end of the day and then write a blog? Do you think that happens?” “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Even if people use the software, do you think it actually works?” I had wondered the same thing. One of the consultants told me it was a mixed bag. Some customers buy the software but don’t use it, because they’re too busy to write a blog. They’re like people who sign up for a gym membership then never go to the gym. Among those who do use the software, results vary. There are some places where the stuff just doesn’t work very well, the consultant told me. “And then there are about 10 percent of customers where it’s absolutely magic,” he said. “It’s like you’ve given them a dowsing rod, they’ve found a well, the town is saved. It’s magic.” Gordon says Halligan and Shah are good at telling stories and generating hype, but he doesn’t think much of HubSpot’s engineering team, and he is particularly dismissive of Shah. “He’s not really an engineer anymore,” Gordon says. “He’s a blogger. He writes a blog. He makes PowerPoint decks.” Gordon was equally contemptuous of Cranium: “Everyone tells me he’s some kind of marketing genius, but I don’t see it. I’ve asked him several times to explain the product to me. He couldn’t do it. I still don’t understand what the product does. I’ve met a bunch of people at HubSpot and nobody there impresses me. None of them seems that smart.” After breakfast, we stood outside. It was a chilly Cambridge morning, with a cold wind blowing off the Charles River. Gordon told me I should stick around through the IPO, then find something better to do. “The place is a house of cards,” he told me. “I’m just hoping they can get to an IPO so the guys who invested can cash out before the whole thing collapses.” Those were pretty strong words, especially to use around a former business journalist. I don’t think Gordon meant that HubSpot was a flimflam operation. Obviously HubSpot had a real business, and was selling a real product, to real customers, and generating real revenue. I think what Gordon meant was that he didn’t think the business was sustainable, that sooner or later a strong wind would come along and blow the place down.