Articles by Dinesh

“No wild beast is more savage than man when his passion is supplemented with power” ~ Plutarch

“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” goes a Chinese proverb

The Act of Prohibition makes the withheld items more alluring that it could ever otherwise have been. Excerpt: “Pandora’s Jar” - Natalie Haynes

“A Nation's essence and character lie in its language, its thought and sensibility, its whole style and civilization ~ Kurt Wachsmuth, German philologist

“A Chair is not an artifact of service but an artifact of culture” ~ Ralph Caplan

. . . . .When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.” - page 8

. . . Respect is the homage one pays to the order itself, rather than to the individuals. The first condition for a smooth-running social order in respect for it ~ Page 202

. . . . all medieval towns had a few common characteristics. Walls enclosed the town. (The terms ‘burgher’ and bourgeois” derive from the Old English and Old German words ‘burg,’ ‘ borg,’ and ‘borough’ for “a walled or fortified place.”

“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”

Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens : Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain ~ Friedrich Schiller

. . . The natural processes which makes human life possible cannot be described as ‘evil’, even if their effects are left in human suffering. This is an idea with an ancient pedigree: when Seneca writes on the propriety of natural processes, he is at pains to conclude that if you don’t like the suffering that accompanies life in this world, that’s your problem. Such Experiences, he says bluntly, are the price we pay for the privilege of being alive. ` Page 126

Dawkins believes that “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976) and Csikszentmihalyi urges us to “achieve control” over our minds, desires and actions. “If you let them be controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yourself” But evolutionary process are not controllable by the creatures they gave rise to; and in any case, who is this self who is going to rebel? ~ Page 233

“la verite surgit de la meprise” ~ Only from this error does the truth come forth” {the truth emerges from the contempt}

Libet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet distinguishes between the action as a physical act and the urge to act as a mental phenomenon. We can control our actions but not our urges, he concludes. ~ Excerpt “The User Illusion”

Human intellect is discursive and abstract -- as a Consequence (and this is my own personal comment on Roland-Gosselin), aesthetic pleasure too is perfected in the act of judgment that takes into account the individual elements recovered in the ‘reflexio ad phantasmata’ (reflection to the phastasmata){ phantasma ; 1. A supernatural being, such as a ghost: apparition ; 2. An illusory mental image: daydream ; 3. An erroneous perception of reality: delusion ...} Excerpt: From the Tree to the Labyr…

Its conceivable that Darwin’s values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical and all logically incompatible with one another: “My hereditary material is the most important material of earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death” And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of…