|
fd1d050
|
Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than ? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than ? Was he more patient, more charitable, than ? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than ? In what respect was he the superior of ? Was he gentler than , more universal than ? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of ? Did he express grander truths than ? Was his mind subtler than 's? Was his brain equal to 's or 's? Was he grander in death - a sublimer martyr than ? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of , the greatest of the human race?
|
|
shakespeare
kindness
wisdom
bruno
epicurus
gautama-buddha
giordano-bruno
laozi
zeno
zeno-of-citium
zoroaster
cicero
baruch-spinoza
epictetus
spinoza
buddha
buddhism
socrates
stoicism
patience
isaac-newton
johannes-kepler
kepler
newton
william-shakespeare
|
Robert G. Ingersoll |
|
c05ceab
|
So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
|
|
shakespeare
india
religion
annie-navasky
arthur-miller
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
desecration
eritrea
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
morocco
prague
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
steve-wasserman
synagogues
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
jewish-question
david-rieff
rabbis
temples
spinoza
normality
einstein
istanbul
security
salvation
poland
jewishness
eastern-europe
kurdish-people
middle-east
damascus
iraq
debate
atheism
islam
antisemitism
jews
germany
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
e297f06
|
If I'm among men who don't agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself. A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively. Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it's absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
|
|
irvin-yalom
spinoza
true-self
|
Irvin D. Yalom |
|
0cbaa7a
|
With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by , by , by , and especially by , in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by , by the , and by the German Rationalists, among whom stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.
|
|
criticism
science
baruch-spinoza
d-holbach
denis-diderot
diderot
gotthold-ephraim-lessing
gotthold-lessing
jean-jacque-rousseau
jean-meslier
lessing
meslier
paul-henri-d-holbach
thomas-hobbes
hobbes
rousseau
protestant
spinoza
science-vs-religion
civilization
geologists
europe
science-and-religion
persecution
descartes
galileo
galileo-galilei
rene-descartes
|
Thomas Henry Huxley |
|
a4b082f
|
Spinoza follows Maimonides in rejecting the ordinary meanings which attach to words, and in asking his readers to attend, not to language, but to the 'ideas' which he is attempting to convey by means of it. Common usage is governed by the imagination, which associates words, not with clear and distinct ideas, but with the confused conceptions of experience. In the language of imagination nothing can be truly described, and nothing is more misleadingly rendered by the imagination than the ultimate subject matter of philosophical speculation - God himself
|
|
spinoza
word
|
Roger Scruton |
|
34592e3
|
The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.
|
|
monism
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
0eaf098
|
Contact with secular and Christian ways of thinking increased Spinoza's dissatisfaction with the biblical interpretations he received from the rabbis, who in turn frowned on his interest in natural science, and on his study of the pernicious Latin language, in which so much heresy and blasphemy had been so engagingly expressed.
|
|
natural-science
spinoza
latin
|
Roger Scruton |
|
0212b76
|
Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God's nature, and among these achievements Spinoza's is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
542427e
|
Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute - 'be cautious' - inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
e4c520f
|
We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism.
|
|
spinoza
muslim
|
Roger Scruton |
|
e172171
|
Religious quarrels,' he added, 'do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them habitually to distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
8d1ff03
|
Throughout the proofs of the , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
0a5e0fe
|
The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers - whose conclusions are wholly opposed - should have treated each other with a certain caution.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
c9bfc6c
|
In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
c3180d9
|
While Spinoza did not condemn marriage, he rejected it for himself, perhaps fearing the 'ill temper of a woman', and in any case recognizing in matrimony a threat to his scholarly interests.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
e635d06
|
The philosopher and the scientist emphasize different features of the world, follow different interests and inspire different passions in the soul. But the aim of their study is in each case the same: the supreme good which consists in the adequate knowledge of God
|
|
scientist
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |
|
8892551
|
To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century.
|
|
spinoza
|
Roger Scruton |