Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'Miscellaneous Observations' and 'A Subject with No Object'

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3 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / a. Nature of emotions
Freud said passions are pressures of some flowing hydraulic quantity [Freud, by Solomon]
     Full Idea: Freud argued that the passions in general …were the pressures of a yet unknown 'quantity' (which he simply designated 'Q'). He first thought this flowed through neurones, …and always couched the idea in the language of hydraulics.
     From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Robert C. Solomon - The Passions 3.4
     A reaction: This is the main target of Solomon's criticism, because its imagery has become so widespread. It leads to talk of suppressing emotions, or sublimating them. However, it is not too different from Nietzsche's 'drives' or 'will to power'.
18. Thought / E. Abstraction / 2. Abstracta by Selection
Everything is a chaotic unity, then we abstract, then we reunify the world into a free alliance [Novalis]
     Full Idea: Before abstraction everything is one - but one as chaos is - after abstraction everything is again unified - but in a free alliance of independent, self-determined beings. A crowd has become a society - a chaos is transformed into a manifold world.
     From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 094)
     A reaction: Personally I take (unfashionably) psychological abstraction to one of the key foundations of human thought, so I love this idea, which gives a huge picture of how the abstracting mind relates to reality.
The old debate classified representations as abstract, not entities [Burgess/Rosen]
     Full Idea: The original debate was over abstract ideas; thus it was mental (or linguistic) representations that were classified as abstract or otherwise, and not the entities represented.
     From: JP Burgess / G Rosen (A Subject with No Object [1997], I.A.1.b)
     A reaction: This seems to beg the question of whether there are any such entities. It is equally plausible to talk of the entities that are 'constructed', rather than 'represented'.