83 ideas
| 19608 | Wisdom is just the last gasp of a dying civilization [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Wisdom is the last word of an expiring civilization, the nimbus of historic twilights, fatigue transfigured into a vision of the world, the last tolerance before the advent of newer gods, and of barbarism. A vain attempt at melody among the death rattles. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Twilight') | |
| A reaction: I didn't quite get what he said there, but I picked up the tone all right. But I thought wisdom was something sought in the early stages of western civilization, and now relegated to the wings as an idle dream? |
| 19624 | Intelligence only fully flourishes at the end of a historical period [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither. ...Every period's ending is the mind's paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Felicity') | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't have thought that the facts of history supported this very well. The golden ages of philosophy are the Age of Pericles, the Aristotelian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the early twentieth century. |
| 19599 | Ideas are neutral, but people fill them with passion and weakness [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Genealogy') | |
| A reaction: If it isn't neutral (if, say, it expresses love or hatred) then presumably it doesn't qualify as an 'idea'. Are ideas as neutral as mathematical theorems. It's a nice remark, and a good epigraph for a book on the history of ideas. |
| 19629 | A nation gives expression to its sum of values, and is then exhausted [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: A nation cannot create indefinitely. It is called upon to give expression and meaning to a sum of values which are exhausted with the soul which has begotten them. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: This phenomenon is obvious. Is it the people who run out of steam, or the ideas and values to which their nation is giving expression? Is this a reason to break up nations every few centuries, and re-form them differently? Break up the UK! |
| 19631 | The history of ideas (and deeds) occurs in a meaningless environment [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The history of ideas, like that of deeds, unfolds in a meaningless climate. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'Tory' view of the history of ideas (as opposed to the 'Whig' view of directedness - a distinction made by historians). I would say there are periods where a certain inevitable sequence is worked out, but then there are dislocations. |
| 19645 | Some thinkers would have been just as dynamic, no matter when they had lived [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: A Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, had they appeared in the most anodyne age, would have had no less tremulous, no less incendiary an inspiration. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Truths') | |
| A reaction: He is saying that some (only some) thinkers are independent of the age and culture in which they live. Personally I think of those two as distinctive products of a romantic age. Diogenes of Sinope seems a bit of a misfit! |
| 19621 | Originality in philosophy is just the invention of terms [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's originality comes down to inventing terms. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell') | |
| A reaction: Analytic philosophers are just as obsessed with inventing terms as their continental rivals. Kit Fine, for example. It can't be wrong to invent terms. Scientists do it too. |
| 19618 | I abandoned philosophy because it didn't acknowledge melancholy and human weakness [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: I turned away from philosophy when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy; in Kant and in all the philosophers. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell') | |
| A reaction: An interesting challenge, but if I set out to develop a philosophy based on human weakness I'm not sure where I would start, once I had settled the 'akrasia' [weakness of will] problem. |
| 19607 | The mind is superficial, only concerned with the arrangement of events, not their significance [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The mind in itself can be only superficial, its nature being uniquely concerned with the arrangement of conceptual events, and not with their implications in the spheres the signify. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 'The Abstract') | |
| A reaction: This may be excessively pessimistic, and any decent philosopher must partially concede the point. Thoughts about the significance of historical events just recede into the mist. |
| 19638 | Metaphysics is a universalisation of physical anguish [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Underside') | |
| A reaction: Not sure if I understand this, but anyone who registers the physical aspect of abstract thought gets a nod of approval from me. |
| 19620 | Great systems of philosophy are just brilliant tautologies [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The great philosophical systems are no more than brilliant tautologies. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell') | |
| A reaction: This makes them sound pointless, but the terms used in the system all have some kind of reference, so the systems are in some way about the world, and not mere private games. At the very least, they are a wonderful branch of poetry. |
| 19630 | No great idea ever emerged from a dialogue [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Nothing monumental has ever emerged from dialogue, nothing explosive, nothing 'great'. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: This may be an argument in favour of dialogue! It smacks of the creepier side of Nietzsche's thinking. I suspect individuals have had many great ideas during dialogues, though not as part of them. Greek schools were all dialogue. |
| 19636 | Truth is just an error insufficiently experienced [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: What we call truth is an error insufficiently experienced. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 5) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure how to go about refuting that claim! Turn the tables, I suppose. 'Tell me, Cioran, are you claiming that this idea is true?' |
| 19642 | Eventually every 'truth' is guaranteed by the police [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Once a belief is established the police will guarantee its 'truth' sooner or later. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views') |
| 9449 | The plausible Barcan formula implies modality in the actual world [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Modality in the actual world is the import of the Barcan formula, and there are good reasons for accepting the Barcan formula. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: If you thought logic was irrelevant to metaphysics, this should make you think twice. |
| 19632 | An axiom has no more authority than a frenzy [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: This earth is a place where can confirm anything with an equal likelihood: here axioms and frenzies are interchangeable. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: A perceptive and poetic expression of the modern anti-Euclidean and anti-Fregean view of axioms, as purely formal features of a model or system. |
| 9501 | If all existents are causally active, that excludes abstracta and causally isolated objects [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one says that 'everything that exists is causally active', that rules out abstracta (notably sets and numbers), and it rules out objects that are causally isolated. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I like the principle. I take abstracta to be brain events, so they are causally active, within highly refined and focused brains, and if your physics is built on the notion of fields then I would think a 'causally isolated' object incoherent. |
| 9500 | If naturalism refers to supervenience, that leaves necessary entities untouched [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one's naturalistic principles are formulated in terms of supervenience, then necessary entities are left untouched. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be part of the reason why some people like supervenience - that it leaves a pure 'space of reasons' which is unreachable from the flesh and blood inside a cranium. Personall I like the space of reasons, but I drop the 'pure'. |
| 9502 | There might be just one fundamental natural property [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The thought that there might be just one fundamental natural property is not that strange. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice variation on the Parmenides idea that only the One exists. Bird's point would refer to a possible unification of modern physics. We see, for example, the forces of electricity and of magnetism turning out to be the same force. |
| 9477 | Categorical properties are not modally fixed, but change across possible worlds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Categorical properties do not have their dispositional characters modally fixed, but may change their dispositional characters (and their causal and nomic behaviour more generally) across different worlds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the key ground for Bird's praiseworth opposition to categorical propertie. I take it to be a nonsense to call the category in which we place something a 'property' of that thing. A confusion of thought with reality. |
| 9490 | The categoricalist idea is that a property is only individuated by being itself [Bird] |
| Full Idea: In the categoricalist view, the essential properties of a natural property are limited to its essentially being itself and not some distinct property. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: He associates this view with Lewis (modern regularity view) and Armstrong (nomic necessitation), and launches a splendid attack against it. I have always laughed at the idea that 'being Socrates' was one of the properties of Socrates. |
| 9495 | If we abstractly define a property, that doesn't mean some object could possess it [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of abstract definition does not show that we have defined a property that we can know, independently of any theory, that it is physically possible for some object to possess. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a naturalist resisting the idea that there is no more to a property than set-membership. I strongly agree. We need a firm notion of properties as features of the actual world; anything else should be called something like 'categorisations'. |
| 9492 | Categoricalists take properties to be quiddities, with no essential difference between them [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The categoricalist conception of properties takes them to be quiddities, which are primitive identities between fundamental qualities, having no difference with regard to their essence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Compare 'haecceitism' about indentity of objects, though 'quidditism' sounds even less plausible. Bird attributes this view to Lewis and Armstrong, and makes it sound well daft. |
| 9503 | To name an abundant property is either a Fregean concept, or a simple predicate [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It isn't clear what it is to name an abundant property. One might reify them, as akin to Fregean concepts, or it might be equivalent to a simple predication. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.1.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Fregean concepts' would make them functions that purely link things (hence relational?). One suspects that people who actually treat abundant properties as part of their ontology (Lewis) are confusing natural properties with predicates. |
| 14540 | Only real powers are fundamental [Bird, by Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: Bird says only real powers are fundamental. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum - Getting Causes from Powers 1.5 | |
| A reaction: They disagree, and want higher-level properties in their ontology. I'm with Bird, except that something must exist to have the powers. Powers are fundamental to all the activity of nature, and are intrinsic to the stuff which constitutes nature. |
| 9450 | If all properties are potencies, and stimuli and manifestation characterise them, there is a regress [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Potencies are characterized in terms of their stimulus and manifestation properties, then if potencies are the only properties then these properties are also potencies, and must be characterized by yet further properties, leading to a vicious regress. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is cited as the most popular objection to the dispositional account of properties. |
| 9498 | The essence of a potency involves relations, e.g. mass, to impressed force and acceleration [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The essence of a potency involves a relation to something else; if inertial mass is a potency then its essence involves a relation to a stimulus property (impressed force) and a manifestation property (acceleration). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.3.3) | |
| A reaction: It doesn't seem quite right to say that the relations are part of the essence, if they might not occur, but some other relations might happen in their place. An essence is what makes a relation possible (like being good-looking). |
| 9474 | A disposition is finkish if a time delay might mean the manifestation fizzles out [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Finkish dispositions arise because the time delay between stimulus and manifestation provides an opportunity for the disposition to go out of existence and so halt the process that would bring about the manifestation. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for the conditional analysis of dispositions; there may be a disposition, but it never reaches manifestation. Bird rightly points us towards actual powers rather than dispositions that need manifestation. |
| 9475 | A robust pot attached to a sensitive bomb is not fragile, but if struck it will easily break [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If a robust iron pot is attached to a bomb with a sensitive detonator. If the pot is struck, the bomb will go off, so they counterfactual 'if the pot were struck it would break' is true, but it is not a fragile pot. This is a 'mimic' of the disposition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.5.1) | |
| A reaction: A very nice example, showing that a true disposition would have to be an internal feature (a power) of the pot itself, not a mere disposition to behave. The problem is these pesky empiricists, who want to reduce it all to what is observable. |
| 9499 | Megarian actualists deny unmanifested dispositions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The Megarian actualist denies that a disposition can exist without being manifested. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree with Bird that this extreme realism seems wrong. As he puts it (p.109), "unrealized possibilities must be part of the actual world". This commitment is beginning to change my understanding of the world I am looking at. |
| 9486 | Why should a universal's existence depend on instantiation in an existing particular? [Bird] |
| Full Idea: An instantiation condition seems to be a failure of nerve as regards realism about universals. If universals really are entities in their own right, why should their existence depend upon a relationship with existing particulars? | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this challenge, which seems to leave fans of universals no option but full-blown Platonism, which most of them recognise as being deeply implausible. |
| 9472 | Resemblance itself needs explanation, presumably in terms of something held in common [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The realist view of resemblance nominalism is that it is resemblance that needs explaining. When there is resemblance it is natural to want to explain it, in terms of something held in common. Explanations end somewhere, but not with resemblance. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I smell a regress. If a knife and a razor resemble because they share sharpness, you have to see that the sharp phenomenon falls within the category of 'sharpness' before you can make the connection, which is spotting its similarity. |
| 9482 | If the laws necessarily imply p, that doesn't give a new 'nomological' necessity [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It does not add to the kinds of necessity to say that p is 'nomologically necessary' iff (the laws of nature → p) is metaphysically necessary. That trick of construction could be pulled for 'feline necessity' (true in all worlds that contain cats). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I love it! Bird seems to think that the only necessity is 'metaphysical' necessity, true in all possible worlds, and he is right. The question arises in modal logic, though, of the accessibility between worlds (which might give degrees of necessity?). |
| 9481 | Logical necessitation is not a kind of necessity; George Orwell not being Eric Blair is not a real possibility [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I do not regard logical necessitation as a kind of necessity. It is logically possible that George Orwell is not Eric Blair, but in what sense is this any kind of possibility? It arises from having two names, but that confers no genuine possibility. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: How refreshing. All kinds of concepts like this are just accepted by philosophers as obvious, until someone challenges them. The whole undergrowth of modal thinking needs a good flamethrower taken to it. |
| 9505 | Empiricist saw imaginability and possibility as close, but now they seem remote [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Whereas the link between imaginability and possibility was once held, under the influence of empiricism, to be close, it is now widely held to be very remote. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8) | |
| A reaction: Tim Williamson nicely argues the opposite - that assessment of possibility is an adjunct of our ability to think counterfactually, which is precisely an operation of the imagination. Big error is possible, but how else could we do it? |
| 9491 | Haecceitism says identity is independent of qualities and without essence [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The core of haecceitism is the view that the transworld identity of particulars does not supervene on their qualitative features. ...The simplest expression of it is that particulars lack essential properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be something the 'bare substratum' account of substance (associated with Locke). You are left with the difficulty of how to individuate an instance of the haecceity, as opposed to the bundle of properties attached to it. |
| 2614 | Modern phenomenalism holds that objects are logical constructions out of sense-data [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Nowadays phenomenalism is held to be a theory of perception which says that physical objects are logical constructions out of sense-data. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (Phenomenalism [1947], §1) |
| 2615 | The concept of sense-data allows us to discuss appearances without worrying about reality [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: The introduction of the term 'sense-datum' is a means of referring to appearances without prejudging the question of what it is, if anything, that they are appearances of. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (Phenomenalism [1947], §1) |
| 9487 | We can't reject all explanations because of a regress; inexplicable A can still explain B [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Some regard the potential regress of explanations as a reason to think that the very idea of explanation is illusory. This is a fallacy; it is not a necessary condition on A's explaining B that we have an explanation for A also. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.4) | |
| A reaction: True, though to say 'B is explained by A, but A is totally baffling' is not the account we are dreaming of. And the explanation would certainly fail if we could say nothing at all about A, apart from naming it. |
| 19626 | Our instincts had to be blunted and diminished, to make way for consciousness! [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: How much our instincts must have had to be blunted and their functioning slackened before consciousness extended its control over the sum of our actions and our thoughts! | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Coming') | |
| A reaction: Modern wisdom, founded in neuroscience, seems to tell us that the role of consciousness even now is far less than Cioran believed. Once you digest that wisdom, I believe introspection supports it. Still, instinct in animals is much stronger than ours. |
| 19633 | We use concepts to master our fears; saying 'death' releases us from confronting it [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: It is the use of concepts which makes us master of our fears. We say: Death - and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptising events and things, we elude the inexplicable. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: I like this idea. I'm struck by how weird our lives would become if people no longer had names. They are so deeply embedded in our experience that we don't notice them. Imagine if it were taboo to ever name death. |
| 19615 | I want to suppress in myself the normal reasons people have for action [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: I want to suppress in myself the reasons men invoke in order to exist, in order to act. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Gamut') | |
| A reaction: So much of our inner and moral life concerns not what we think or feel, but what we want to think or feel. The theory of action (if there can be such a thing) must account for these metareasons, which hover over us while we act. |
| 19628 | At a civilisation's peak values are all that matters, and people unconsciously live by them [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Epochs of apogee cultivate values for their own sake: life is only a means of realising them; the individual is not aware of living - he lives. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a very Nietzschean thought. Mind you, a crazed and dangerous crowd exhibits the same absorption in simple values. |
| 19646 | Values don't accumulate; they are ruthlessly replaced [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'We') | |
| A reaction: That may seem true for a Frenchman or a Romanian, but it doesn't feel true of British culture, which seems to me to have accumulated values over the last five hundred years. Before 1500 it seems to me to be a foreign country. We may be near the end! |
| 19614 | Lovers are hateful, apart from their hovering awareness of death [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: As for lovers, they would be hateful if among their grimaces the presentiment of death did not hover. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Gamut') | |
| A reaction: A nice existential corrective, if you were planning to build an ethical system around a rather sentimental idea of love! If you are not gripped by a latent fear that your beloved may die, I doubt whether you are in love. |
| 19634 | Man is never himself; he always aims at less than life, or more than life [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Able to live only beyond and short of life, man is a prey to two temptation: imbecility and sanctity: sub-man and superman, never himself. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 4 'Threat') | |
| A reaction: To me, Taoism embodies imbecility, and spiritual religions embody the superman idea. [This is not Nietzsche's übermensch]. |
| 19619 | To live authentically, we must see that philosophy is totally useless [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Farewell') | |
| A reaction: The existentialist dream of trying to find an 'authentic' way of life. That idea means nothing to me. You would need to be utterly immersed in the life of a community with which you identified to live authentically, and that life has almost vanished. |
| 19617 | Evidence suggests that humans do not have a purpose [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: By all evidence, we are in the world to do nothing. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Militant') | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear what evidence there could be. Other animals are all enmeshed in a particular environment. As soon as homo sapiens left Africa, it became a baffling phenonomen. I'm not sure what an alligator is in the world for, either. |
| 19612 | The universe is dirty and fragile, as if a scandal in nothingness had produced its matter [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Everything which is done and undone in the universe bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Reactionary') | |
| A reaction: A gloriously imagined idea, worthy of Shakespeare. By 'scandal' I suppose he implies that the universe is the bastard child of a horrible relationship. A prize exhibit for my 'Nihilism' collection. True nihilists, of course, don't write books. |
| 19622 | The pointlessness of our motives and irrelevance of our gestures reveals our vacuity [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: When we realise that no human motive is compatible with infinity, and that no gesture is worth the trouble of making it, our heart, by its very beating, can no longer conceal its vacuity. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Disintoxication') | |
| A reaction: An interesting choice of reasons. Nihilism in comparison with infinity, and in comparison with the vastness of society? If you were immortal, and there were only fifty other humans, would that help? |
| 19606 | We can only live because our imagination and memory are poor [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Key') | |
| A reaction: Does this mean that we should actually aspire to limit our imaginations and memories? Or are we mercifully intrinsically limited, so that massive intellectual ambition will do no harm? We should be told these things, Cioran! |
| 19604 | Unlike other creatures, mankind seems lost in nature [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Indirect5') | |
| A reaction: Nice challenge to the Aristotelian idea that we can identify the nature and function of man, and derive an ethics from it. This idea seems to state the essence of existentialism, perhaps better than anything in Sartre. We should have stayed in Africa? |
| 19601 | Life is now more dreaded than death [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death; it is life which is the Great Unknown. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Variations') | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of remark we pay continental philosophers to make. |
| 19641 | If you lack beliefs, boredom is your martyrdom [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Ennui is the martyrdom of those who live and die for no belief. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Obsequies') |
| 19644 | History is the bloody rejection of boredom [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: History is the bloody product of the rejection of boredom. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views') | |
| A reaction: How many absurd and horrible things have been done by people who could not stand being bored? But also, almost everything wonderful has the same source. How did Bach and Shakespeare and Rembrandt feel about boredom? |
| 19640 | No one is brave enough to say they don't want to do anything; we despise such a view [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: No one has the audacity to exclaim: 'I don't want to do anything!' - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'The Architect') | |
| A reaction: Perhaps this should be the anti-epigraph for this website. I've slogged away at this project for nineteen years, probably for no other reason than that inactivity appears to be wicked. If I abandoned it, I would invent another project. Sad. |
| 19602 | You are stuck in the past if you don't know boredom [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The man who knows nothing of ennui is still in the world's childhood. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Dislocation') | |
| A reaction: Boredom well may be the central experience of existentialism, rather than angst, or nihilism, or the temptations of suicide. |
| 19613 | It is pointless to refuse or accept the social order; we must endure it like the weather [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: It is equally futile to refuse or to accept the social order: we must endure its changes for the better or the worse with a despairing conformism, as we endure birth, love, the weather, and death. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Reactionary') |
| 19627 | Opportunists can save a nation, and heroes can ruin it [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Opportunists have saved nations; heroes have ruined them. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Defense') | |
| A reaction: Siegfried smashes the staff of Wotan. Napoleon looks like a hero, but he increasingly looks like the single most disastrous figure ever to have emerged in Europe. It took the Germans till 1940 to avenge what he did. |
| 19625 | The ideal is to impose a religion by force, and then live in doubt about its beliefs [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: To belong to a church uncertain of its god - after once imposing that god by fire and sword - should be the ideal of every detached mind. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Felicity') | |
| A reaction: I'm trying hard to think of an adequate response to this. I'll get back to you.... |
| 19605 | Despite endless suggestions, no one has found a goal for history [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: No one has found a valid goal for history; but everyone has proposed one. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Indirect') | |
| A reaction: This seems to be an attack on the Hegelian idea of destiny that suffused both marxism and fascism in the 1930s. |
| 19637 | History is wonderfully devoid of meaning [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 5) | |
| A reaction: I have just read a history of the Wars of the Roses, and I wholeheartedly endorse Cioran's view. |
| 19611 | No one has ever found a good argument against suicide [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: No church, no civil institution has as yet invented a single argument valid against suicide. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Resources') | |
| A reaction: Suicide in young people usually looks like an error of judgement (in quiet moments of history). You need more inductive evidence that life is going to be irremediably awful. But if life is fine but they choose suicide anyway, what can you say? |
| 19610 | Religions see suicide as insubordination [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: If the religions have forbidden us to die by our own hand, it is because they saw that such practices set an example of insubordination which humiliated temples and gods alike. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Resources') | |
| A reaction: Has anyone ever committed suicide in a cathedral (even during a service)? How many bishops, cardinals, rabbis etc have committed suicide? It is not uncommon among priests in the lower echelons. |
| 19609 | If you have not contemplated suicide, you are a miserable worm [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison, or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1'Resources') | |
| A reaction: I guess by this date everyone in Paris had read Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus', so suicide was the main topic in the cafés. I sort of agree with it. The possibility of suicide is part of the examined life. |
| 19639 | We all need sexual secrets! [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Woe to those who have no sexual secrets! | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Wonders') |
| 9493 | We should explain causation by powers, not powers by causation [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The notion of 'causal power' is not to be analysed in terms of causation; if anything, the relationship is the reverse. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: It is a popular view these days to take causation as basic (as opposed to the counterfactual account), but I prefer this view. If anything is basic in nature, it is the dynamic force in the engine room, which is the active powers of substances. |
| 9494 | Singularism about causes is wrong, as the universals involved imply laws [Bird] |
| Full Idea: While singularists about causation might think that a particular has its causal powers independently of law, it is difficult to see how a universal could have or confer causal powers without generating what we would naturally think of as a law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: This is a middle road between the purely singularist account (Anscombe) and the fully nomological account. We might say that a caused event will be 'involved in law-like behaviour', without attributing the cause to a law. |
| 9507 | Laws are explanatory relationships of things, which supervene on their essences [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The laws of a domain are the fundamental, general explanatory relationships between kinds, quantities, and qualities of that domain, that supervene upon the essential natures of those things. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the scientific essentialist view of laws [see entries there, in 'Laws of Nature']. There seems uncertainty between 'kinds' and 'qualities' (with 'quantities' looking like a category mistake). I vote, with Ellis, for natural kinds as the basis. |
| 9488 | Laws are either disposition regularities, or relations between properties [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Instead of viewing laws as regular relationships between dispositional properties and stimulus-manifestation, they can be conceived of as a relation between properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Bird offers these as the two main views, with the first coming from scientific essentialism, and the second from Armstrong's account of universals. Personally I favour the first, but Bird suggests that powers give the best support for both views. |
| 9496 | That other diamonds are hard does not explain why this one is [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The fact that some other diamonds are hard does not explain why this diamond is hard. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.3.2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice aphorism! It pinpoints the whole error of trying to explain the behaviour of the world by citing laws. Why should this item obey that law? Bird prefers 'powers', and so do I. |
| 9479 | Dispositional essentialism says laws (and laws about laws) are guaranteed regularities [Bird] |
| Full Idea: For the regularity version of dispositional essentialism about laws, laws are those regularities whose truth is guaranteed by the essential dispositional nature of one or more of the constituents. Regularities that supervene on such laws are also laws. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Even if you accept necessary behaviour resulting from essential dispositions, you still need to distinguish the important regularities from the accidental ones, so the word 'guarantee' is helpful, even if it raises lots of difficulties. |
| 9473 | Laws cannot offer unified explanations if they don't involve universals [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Laws, or what flow from them, are supposed to provide a unified explanation of the behaviours of particulars. Without universals the explanation of the behaviours of things lacks the required unity. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Sounds a bit question-begging? Gravity seems fairly unified, whereas the frequency of London buses doesn't. Maybe I could unify bus-behaviour by positing a few new universals? The unity should first be in the phenomena, not in the explanation. |
| 9484 | If the universals for laws must be instantiated, a vanishing particular could destroy a law [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If universals exist only where and when they are instantiated, this make serious trouble for the universals view of laws. It would be most odd if a particular, merely by changing its properties, could cause a law to go out of existence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds conclusive. He notes that this is probably why Armstrong does not adopt this view (though Lowe seems to favour it). Could there be a possible property (and concomitant law) which was never ever instantiated? |
| 9506 | Salt necessarily dissolves in water, because of the law which makes the existence of salt possible [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We cannot have a world where it is true both that salt exists (which requires Coulomb's Law to be true), and that it fails to dissolve in water (which requires Coulomb's Law to be false). So the dissolving is necessary even if the Law is contingent. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: Excellent. It is just like the bonfire on the Moon (imaginable through ignorance, but impossible). People who assert that the solubility of salt is contingent tend not to know much about chemistry. |
| 23713 | Most laws supervene on fundamental laws, which are explained by basic powers [Bird, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| Full Idea: According to Bird, non-fundamental laws supervene on fundamental laws, and so are ultimately explained by fundamental powers. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by Friend/Kimpton-Nye - Dispositions and Powers 3.6.1 | |
| A reaction: This looks like the picture I subscribe to. Roughly, fundamental laws are explained by powers, and non-fundamental laws are explained by properties, which are complexes of powers. 'Fundamental' may not be a precise term! |
| 9489 | Essentialism can't use conditionals to explain regularities, because of possible interventions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The straightforward dispositional essentialist account of laws by subjunctive conditionals is false because dispositions typically suffer from finks and antidotes. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: [Finks and antidotes intervene before a disposition can take effect] This seems very persuasive to me, and shows why you can't just explain laws as counterfactual or conditional claims. Explanation demands what underlies them. |
| 9504 | The relational view of space-time doesn't cover times and places where things could be [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The obvious problem with the simple relational view of space and time is that it fails to account for the full range of spatio-temporal possibility. There seem to be times and places where objects and events could be, but are not. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.3.2) | |
| A reaction: This view seems strongly supported by intuition. I certainly don't accept the views of physicists and cosmologists on the subject, because they seem to approach the whole thing too instrumentally. |
| 19603 | Why is God so boring, and why does God resemble humanity so little? [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Why is God so dull, so feeble, so inadequately picturesque? Why does He lack interest, vigor, actuality and resemble us so little? Is there any image less anthropomorphic and more gratuitously remote? | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'The Devil') | |
| A reaction: This seems to be directed at those like Feuerbach who said that we had merely created God as a glorified image of humanity. |
| 19616 | As the perfect wisdom of detachment, philosophy offers no rivals to Taoism [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: China alone long since arrived at a refined wisdom superior to philosophy: Taoism surpasses all the mind has conceived by way of detachment. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Militant') | |
| A reaction: Personally I dislike Taoism, which seems to advocate a sort of suicide within life. But given Cioran's evident state of mind, I can see its attractions. If this country deteriorates any further [I write on 4th July 2016], I may turn to Taoism. |
| 19600 | When man abandons religion, he then follows new fake gods and mythologies [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Genealogy') | |
| A reaction: Cioran had just lived through the high water mark of communism and fascism. I don't think modern atheists fit this description very well. |
| 19643 | A religion needs to motivate killings, and cannot tolerate rivals [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Views') | |
| A reaction: I fear that in our time we have people who are killing in the name of their religion as a last resort to try to convince themselves that their religion is not dying. It is startlingly how religion can now be publicly mocked. Unthinkable 50 years ago. |
| 19623 | Circles of hell are ridiculous; all that matters is to be there [Cioran] |
| Full Idea: What a preposterous notion, to draw circles in hell, to make the intensity of the flames vary in its compartments, to hierarchise its torments! The important thing is to be there. | |
| From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], '1 'La Perduta') |