53 ideas
| 18290 | But what is the reasoning of the body, that it requires the wisdom you seek? [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. For who knows for what purpose your body requires precisely your best wisdom? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.05) | |
| A reaction: Lovely question. For years I've paid lip-service to wisdom as the rough aim of all philosophy. Not quite knowing what wisdom is doesn't bother me, but knowing why I want wisdom certainly does, especially after this idea. |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The great discovery of the Scientific Revolution was that humans do not know the answers to their most important question. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus') | |
| A reaction: I think of that revolution as raising the bar in epistemology, but this idea gives a motivation for doing so. Why the discovery then, and not before? |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |
| Full Idea: For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another, …and the only machine capable of performing energy conversion was the body. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Hence the huge and revolutionary importance of the steam engine and the electricity generator. |
| 18303 | Reject wisdom that lacks laughter [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.12.23) |
| 18305 | To love truth, you must know how to lie [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Inability to lie is far from being love of truth. ....He who cannot lie does not know what truth is. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.13.9) |
| 21982 | I only wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody! It's as much as I can do to see real people. [Carroll,L] |
| Full Idea: "I see nobody on the road," said Alice. - "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked. ..."To be able to see Nobody! ...Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people." | |
| From: Lewis Carroll (C.Dodgson) (Through the Looking Glass [1886], p.189), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: [Moore quotes this, inevitably, in a chapter on Hegel] This may be a better candidate for the birth of philosophy of language than Frege's Groundwork. |
| 20757 | The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man - he is called a self. He lives in your body; he is your body. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], I.4), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Creature' | |
| A reaction: I find Nietzsche's view of the self very congenial, though I tend to see the self as certain central functions of the brain. The brain is enmeshed in the body (as in the location of pains). |
| 18289 | Forget the word 'I'; 'I' is performed by the intelligence of your body [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this - although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.05) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure if I understand this, but I offer it as a candidate for the most profound idea ever articulated about personal identity. |
| 18299 | The will is constantly frustrated by the past [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time's desire - that is the will's most lonely affliction. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.20) |
| 18297 | We created meanings, to maintain ourselves [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself - he first created the meaning of things, a human meaning! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.16) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly hard to see anything resembling values or meaning in the cosmos, if you remove the human beings. We should expect an evolutionary grounding in their explanation. |
| 18293 | The noble man wants new virtues; the good man preserves what is old [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The noble man wants to create new things and a new virtue. The good man wants the old things and that the old things shall be preserved. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.09) | |
| A reaction: There is a limit to how many plausible virtues the noble men can come up with. We may already have run out. Are we going to have to re-run the Iliad? |
| 18301 | We only really love children and work [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One loves from the very heart only one's child and one's work. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: Very Nietzchean (and masculine?) to cite one's work. Rachmaninov said he was 85% musician and 15% human being, so I guess he loved music from the very heart. |
| 18307 | I want my work, not happiness! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Do I aspire after happiness? I aspire after my work! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.20) | |
| A reaction: I empathise with aspiring to do something, rather than be something. But what do we wish for our children? Happiness first, then achievement? |
| 18291 | Virtues can destroy one another, through jealousy [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Every virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing. Even virtues can be destroyed through jealousy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.07) | |
| A reaction: How much more subtle and plausible than the picture of accumulating virtues, like medals! Zarathustra says it is best to have just one virtue. |
| 18287 | People now find both wealth and poverty too much of a burden [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: True. Most people I know are just puzzled by people who actually seem to want to be extremely wealthy. |
| 20692 | Money does produce happiness, but only up to a point [Harari] |
| Full Idea: An interesting conclusion (from questionnaires) is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 19 'Counting') | |
| A reaction: The question is whether that flattening-off point is relative to those around us, or absolute, according to the needs of living. Though these two may not be separate. |
| 18295 | If you want friends, you must be a fighter [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If you want a friend, you must be willing to wage war for him: and to wage war, you must be capable of being an enemy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.15) |
| 18286 | The greatest experience possible is contempt for your own happiness, reason and virtue [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: This would be a transient state for Nietzsche, in which you realise the hollowness of those traditional ideas, and begin to seek something else. |
| 18296 | An enduring people needs its own individual values [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.16) | |
| A reaction: Political philosophers say plenty about a 'people', but little about what unifies them, or about what keeps one people distinct from another. Most people's are proud of their local values. |
| 20663 | If a group is bound by gossip, the natural size is 150 people [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bound by gossip is about 150 individuals. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 02 'Legend') | |
| A reaction: On the other hand, most of us can learn the names of a group of about 450. Maybe the 'known' group and the 'gossip' group are equally significant. Not much use for a modern state, but of interest to communitarians. |
| 20677 | Since 1500 human population has increased fourteenfold, and consumption far more [Harari] |
| Full Idea: In the year 1500 there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the world. Today there are 7 billion. …Human population has increased fourteenfold, our production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Discovery') | |
| A reaction: We really need to grasp how extraordinary this is. |
| 20688 | People 300m tons; domesticated animals 700m tons; larger wild animals 100m tons [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The combined mass of homo sapiens is about 300 million tons; the mass of all domesticated farmyard animals is about 700 million tons; the mass of the surviving larger wild animals (from porcupines up) is less than 100 million tons. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Permanent') | |
| A reaction: These really are figures that deserve much wider currency. Every school entrance hall needs a board with a few of the basic dramatic statistics about human life on Earth. |
| 20674 | The Nazi aim was to encourage progressive evolution, and avoid degeneration [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. …Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were hardly outside the pale. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Worship') | |
| A reaction: It still sounds a fairly worthy ambition, close to the heart of educationalists everywhere. The problems start with the definition of 'degeneration' and 'progress'. |
| 18294 | The state coldly claims that it is the people, but that is a lie [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people'. It is a lie! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.12) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as just as true even after everyone gets the vote. Rulers can't help gradually forgetting about the people. |
| 20679 | We stabilise societies with dogmas, either of dubious science, or of non-scientific values [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order either declare a scientific theory (such as racial theories for Nazis, or economic ones for Communists) to be an absolute truths, or declare non-scientific dogmas (such as liberal values) | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 20690 | The state fostered individualism, to break the power of family and community [Harari] |
| Full Idea: States and markets use their growing power to weaken the bonds of family and community. They made an offer that couldn't be refused - 'become individuals' (over marriage, jobs and residence). The 'romantic individual' is not a rebel against the state. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Collapse') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] See the film 'Breaking the Waves'. An interesting slant on the Romantic movement. See Wordsworth's 'Michael'. Capitalism needs shoppers with their own money, and a mobile workforce. |
| 20689 | In 1750 losing your family and community meant death [Harari] |
| Full Idea: A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Collapse') | |
| A reaction: This is a very good advert for liberal individualism, and marks the downside of 'too much community'. |
| 20681 | The sacred command of capitalism is that profits must be used to increase production [Harari] |
| Full Idea: In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: In this sense, capitalism is less greedy than its predecessors. 17th century aristocratic monopolists simply spent the profits of their activities. See the gorgeous clothes then (and pyramids and palaces), and the quiet suits of capitalists. |
| 20682 | The main rule of capitalism is that all other goods depend on economic growth [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The principle tenet of capitalism is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for it, because justice, freedom, and even happiness all depend on economic growth. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: In this respect, the main opponent of captitalism is green politics, rather than marxism. |
| 20683 | The progress of capitalism depends entirely on the new discoveries and gadgets of science [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. …The human economy has managed to keep on going only thanks to the fact that scientists come up with a new discovery or gadget every few years. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: For example, the desperate but unconvincing attempts to persuade us of the novelty of new models of car. Built-in obsolescence is needed once a design becomes static. |
| 20687 | In capitalism the rich invest, and the rest of us go shopping [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The supreme commandment of the rich is 'invest!', and the supreme commandment of the rest of us is 'buy!' | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Age') | |
| A reaction: Hence not only do the rich get much richer, while most of us remain roughly where we were, but there is a huge gulf between the investors and the non-investors. Encouraging small investors is a step forward. |
| 20685 | No market is free of political bias, and markets need protection of their freedoms [Harari] |
| Full Idea: There is no such thing as a market free of all political bias, …and markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Cult') | |
| A reaction: Is this in theory, or in practice? In Sicily the free market has been a tool of the mafia. |
| 20693 | Freedom may work against us, as individuals can choose to leave, and make fewer commitments [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The freedom we value so highly may work against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbours, but they can choose to leave us. With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path, we find it ever harder to make commitments. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 19 'Counting') | |
| A reaction: This is the worry of the communitarian. I take freedom to be a great social virtue - but an overrated one. |
| 18304 | Saints want to live as they desire, or not to live at all [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: 'To live as I desire to live or not to live at all': that is what I want, that is what the most saintly man wants. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.09) | |
| A reaction: [spoken by Zarathustra] |
| 18300 | Whenever we have seen suffering, we have wanted the revenge of punishment [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The spirit of revenge: my friends, that, up to now, has been mankind's chief concern; and where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.20) |
| 20691 | Real peace is the implausibility of war (and not just its absence) [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Pax') | |
| A reaction: I have a nasty feeling that war only becomes implausible because it hasn't happened for a long time. War looked implausible for Britain in 1890. War certainly now looks implausible in western Europe. |
| 20684 | Financing is increasingly through credit rather than taxes; people prefer investing to taxation [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes. …Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Columbus') | |
| A reaction: This is presumably the mechanism that drives the unstoppable increase of the gulf between the rich and the poor in modern times. With investment, the rich get richer. |
| 20675 | The more you know about history, the harder it becomes to explain [Harari] |
| Full Idea: A distinguishing mark of history is that the better you know a historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 13 'Hindsight') | |
| A reaction: Presumaby that means it resembles statistics. Each individual reading is perplexing, but some patterns emerge on the large scale. |
| 20676 | History teaches us that the present was not inevitable, and shows us the possibilities [Harari] |
| Full Idea: We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and the we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 13 'Hindsight') | |
| A reaction: On the whole winners forget history, and losers are branded through and through with it. If you don't know history, you can never understand the latter group. |
| 18302 | Man and woman are deeply strange to one another! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.10.2) |
| 18292 | I can only believe in a God who can dance [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.08) |
| 20671 | In order to explain both order and evil, a single evil creator is best, but no one favours that [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Monotheism explains order but not evil, and dualist religion explains evil but not order. One logical solution is a single omnipotent God who created the universe, and is evil - but nobody in history has had much stomach for that belief. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Eh? Is there not also good, which also needs explaining? And there is some chaos to be explained too. Hume offers the best explanations. An inexperienced god, a team of squabbling gods, a god with shifting moods…. Study the facts first. |
| 18298 | Not being a god is insupportable, so there are no gods! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods. ...For what would there to be create if gods - existed! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.02) | |
| A reaction: [Zarathustra says this, not Nietzsche!] |
| 20664 | Animism is belief that every part of nature is aware and feeling, and can communicate [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Animism is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicated direct with humans. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 03 'Talking') | |
| A reaction: So does this count as a 'supernatural' belief system? It seems not, if the awareness is integral to the natural feature, and dies with it. Panpsychism is not supernatural either. A problem for anyone trying to define Naturalism. |
| 20666 | Most polytheist recognise one supreme power or law, behind the various gods [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe. Most poytheist and even animist religions recognised such a supreme power that stands behind all the different gods, demons and holy rocks. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Benefits') | |
| A reaction: Presumably this one supreme power was always taken to be too remote for communication or worship. Are the other gods seen as slaves, or friends, or ambassadors of the Supreme One? |
| 20667 | Polytheism is open-minded, and rarely persecutes opponents [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Benefits') | |
| A reaction: The Old Testament tells of the Jews turning on local pagans, and India was presumably tolerant Hindus encountering less tolerant Muslims. Then there's Christians in Africa. Dreadful bunch, the monotheists. Romans killed very few Christians. |
| 20665 | Mythologies are usual contracts with the gods, exchanging devotion for control of nature [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Much of ancient mythology is a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Silencing') | |
| A reaction: [He cites the first book of Genesis] So how readily do you swith allegiance, if someone else's gods are more successful? Why be loyal a loser. It should be like shopping - but I bet it wasn't. |
| 20669 | Dualist religions see everything as a battleground of good and evil forces [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism gave birth to monotheism, and to dualistic religions. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between good and evil forces, and everything that happens is part of that struggle. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Presumably we are supposed to support the good guys, so the gods are not equals. God v Satan seems the right model, but Satan has to be beyond God's control, or else the problem of evil has to be solved. Empedocles held something like this. |
| 20670 | Dualist religions say the cosmos is a battleground, so can’t explain its order [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Dualist religions solve the problem of evil, but are unnerved by the Problem of Order. …If Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war? | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: You might explain it if one side was persistently winning, which is roughly God v Satan. |
| 20673 | Manichaeans and Gnostics: good made spirit, evil made flesh [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Manichaeans and Gnostics argued that the good god created the spirit and the soul, whereas matter and bodes are the creation of the evil god. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Hm. What motivated the evil god to do that? The evil god's achievement looks a lot more impressive. |
| 20668 | Monotheism appeared in Egypt in 1350 BCE, when the god Aten was declared supreme [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt c.1350 BCE, when Pharaoh Akenaten declared that one of minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was in fact the supreme power ruling the universe. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'God') | |
| A reaction: Zeus seems to have started like a tribal chief, and eventually turned into something like God. |
| 18288 | Heaven was invented by the sick and the dying [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.04) |
| 18306 | We don't want heaven; now that we are men, we want the kingdom of earth [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We certainly do not want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men, so we want the kingdom of earth. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.18.2) |