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Jose y Gasset, one of the most famous Spanish and existentialist philosophers, wrote realms of books about the importance of stepping from 'out' and turning 'within'. The greatest warriors, he noted, were those who took time to separate themselves from their armies, go into seclusion, and reflect on the history of their tactics and on ideas of how to proceed. It was exactly this 'turning away' form the noise of the world that allowed them to gain a moment of silence, see the world, and their actions in it is, form a clearer, more detached perspective, and enable them to proceed in a more rational manner.
Hurricane Sandy gave me something of this last week. Perhaps, because I took advantage of it. Many others, I later heard, were discomfited by the break in their electronic routine. They -- we -- were used to texting, chatting, browsing on the computer, talking on the cellular phone, using the i-pod, the i-pad, YouTube, watching DVDs, and so forth… And suddenly, it was as though we were back in the Neanderthal ages. For many of us,...
Imagine existence with no television! Irksome and weird.
The best of it all was that it gave me a moment to reflect. I had often endeavored to practice mindfulness. Yet, the onrushing and seduction of electronic data had entrapped me in a web of distraction where I was choked in it and unable to liberate myself.
There are plenty of stories of people who exchange their books for computer and TV, rationalizing that they can gain their information form these mediums. The stories always disturb me -- and they happened far more radically when computer first appeared than now -- since the exchange seems to me cheap. Somewhat like Esau bartering his birthright for the soup. Books have been our birthright. They are our birthright. We gain something from them that we cannot gain from that shifting, distracting, unreliable morass of electronic data. Yes, the data found in book form may exist, too, on Web in a more compact form. But it was not just the fact that the professor was exchanging a seemingly…
Source
Bikerts, S. Into the Electronic Millennium . Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/BR16.5/birkerts.html
Jose Ortega y Gasset, once a "Liberal" legislator in the doomed Spanish Republic, wrote Revolt of the Masses 70 years too soon. This elitist book, although seriously flawed, makes numerous excellent points, demands to be read in these opening years of the 21st Century, and should be quoted, frequently, publicly, and with great fervor. Gasset felt that man has come to demand things without taking responsibility. However, at the same
However, he reconciles these opposite views in what he designs as the new religion for man: While he knew that a collapse and ricorso of Vico's type into a "divine" and "barbaric" epoch was possible, he did not regard any such colossal disaster as necessary or likely. He put hope above fear, and positive over negative. He seems to have foreseen a historical transformation similar to the change from Hellenic
The myth of Santa Claus does to children what God does to adults. In Kant's eyes, Santa Claus is parallel to God. Children will never see or feel him, yet he is absolutely real. Even after individuals find out the truth, they still perpetuate the myth as a way of control over their ignorant children. Rather than behaving in life in order to get into the afterlife, children behave
Post World War I era: Freud and Ortega y Gasset The outbreak of World War I was a traumatic and disillusioning event for many people in Europe, perhaps most of all for those who had committed themselves to a notion of progress and advancement in human affairs. The sheer scale of the destruction and death unleashed by the war, which "exceeded that of all other wars known to history," at the
The evolution of mankind on all levels, and especially the new focus of the modern society on technology and material development, has brought about an estrangement from the spiritual life. The new world offers "alternatives," as it were, to love, through a complexity of personal, both material and social developments, that seem to been able to replace or fill the spiritual needs. Although men and women still interact what happens between
Human Beings Make Sense of Things In the early-1900s, Edmund Husserl sought to provide psychology with a truly scientific basis, not by copying the physical sciences but through the description of conscious experiences. This would be a truly humanistic psychology, grounded in human life and experience rather than materialistic and mechanistic theories like functionalism and behaviorism. Karl Jaspers called for a psychology that would describe phenomena such as "hallucinations, delusions,