Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Nature's Nonchalance

"Nature abandons without reserve her organisms constructed with such inexpressible skill, not only to predatory instinct of the stronger, but also to the blindest chance ... She expresses that the annihilation of these individuals is a matter of indifference to her, does her no harm ... With man she does not act otherwise than she does with animals ... Everything lingers only for a moment, and hurries on to death ... But despite all this, in fact as if this were not the case at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything was imperishable ... Death is for the species, what sleep is for the individual, or winking for the eye. "

Arthur Schopenhauer

Thursday, December 22, 2011

After-wants

"If in a Utopia, everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about already roasted; where everyone at once found his sweetheart and had no difficulty keeping her; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves."

Arthur Schopenhauer

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Why decisions sometimes come faster than thought

"He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

Aeschylus

"The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind."

2, 3, 23

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pride of Asia





Manny Pacquiao wins again!

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Food is Energy



When people tell me to 'search for strength within', I always wondered if they were referring to the Penang Laksa in my tummy.

22

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Sophrosyne

Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) is a Greek philosophical term etymologically meaning healthy-mindedness and from there self-control or moderation guided by knowledge and balance.

Greeks upheld the ideal of sophrosyne, which means prudence and moderation but ultimately its complex meaning, so important to the ancients, is very difficult to convey in English. It is perhaps best expressed by the two most famous sayings of the oracle at Delphi: "Nothing in excess" and "Know thyself."

The term suggests a life-long happiness obtained when one's philosophical needs are satisfied, resembling the idea of enlightenment through harmonious living. It is a nearly lost Classical ideal, but is enjoying some revival today with its emphasis on individuals to live within the proportions of reason and nature, this being achieved through practical wisdom and self knowledge. Parallels abound in eastern thought, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The Analects of Confucius, for example, has several passages on humility that resemble discussions of the Greek ideal.

It is conceptually the opposite of hubris.

The word is found in the writings of Ancient Greece, especially that of Plato in ethical discussions of the dialogue Charmides where it refers to the avoidance of excess in daily life. This term in Plato's use is connected with the Pythagorean idea of harmonia.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Cardinal Wolsey's Final Prayer

"God, we have not spoken this long or as often as we should. I've often been about other business. If I wanted forgiveness I should ask for it, but for all that I have done and for all that I am yet to do, there can be no forgiveness. And yet I think I'm not an evil man. Evil men pray louder, seek penance, and stick themselves closer to Heaven than I am. I shall not see its gates Lord. Nor hear your sweet words of salvation. I have seen eternity, I swear. But it was in dream and in the morning all was gone. I know myself for what I am. And I throw my poor soul upon your forgiveness, in the full knowledge that I deserve none at your loving hands."

The Tudors

Monday, September 05, 2011

The Leitmotif of Vulnerability

"Singapore’s ‘encirclement complex’ is informed in the first instance by its material reality. It is a small, geographically confined state, lacking in strategic depth, with a mainly ethnic-Chinese identity in a predominantly Malay-Muslim region, “wedged between the sea and airspace of two larger neighbours with which [it] has never been politically at ease.” Furthermore, Singapore lacks a significant domestic market, and is almost totally dependent on external sources for capital, technology and, most importantly, raw materials – including food and drinking water. Accordingly, the government of Singapore has never taken the city-state’s survival for granted."


Saturday, September 03, 2011

My Empire of Dirt



Immortalising a slice of human frailty, memory and space for those who have been.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

The New Humanism

"...This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When Sigmund Freud came up with his view of the unconscious, it had a huge effect on society and literature. Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world."

David Brooks

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

I shall pass this way but once

"I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."

Stephen Grellet

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Caspar David Friedrich



Wanderer Above the Mist




Monk by the Sea





Polar Sea

"The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."

Caspar David Friedrich

Sunday, May 08, 2011

Taken away

"...dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to slaughter."

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Raising the Retirement Age

"Economic growth is a function of the size of the workforce, the amount of capital employed and the rise in productivity. If the workforce shrinks, as demography shows it will, all the growth will have to come from capital investment and productivity improvements. In Japan, where the working population is already getting smaller, economic growth has been minuscule, despite a good productivity record. To counteract a shrinking labour force, the retirement age needs to be raised."

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Id and Age

"A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"

George Orwell

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Aristotle's Ethics

"Justice is used both in a general and in a special sense. In its general sense it is equivalent to the observance of law. As such it is the same thing as virtue, differing only insofar as virtue exercises the disposition simply in the abstract, and justice applies it in dealings with people. Particular justice displays itself in two forms. First, distributive justice hands out honors and rewards according to the merits of the recipients. Second, corrective justice takes no account of the position of the parties concerned, but simply secures equality between the two by taking away from the advantage of the one and adding it to the disadvantage of the other. Strictly speaking, distributive and corrective justice are more than mere retaliation and reciprocity. However, in concrete situations of civil life, retaliation and reciprocity is an adequate formula since such circumstances involve money, depending on a relation between producer and consumer. Since absolute justice is abstract in nature, in the real world it must be supplemented with equity, which corrects and modifies the laws of justice where it falls short. Thus, morality requires a standard which will not only regulate the inadequacies of absolute justice but be also an idea of moral progress.

This idea of morality is given by the faculty of moral insight. The truly good person is at the same time a person of perfect insight, and a person of perfect insight is also perfectly good. Our idea of the ultimate end of moral action is developed through habitual experience, and this gradually frames itself out of particular perceptions. It is the job of reason to apprehend and organize these particular perceptions. However, moral action is never the result of a mere act of the understanding, nor is it the result of a simple desire which views objects merely as things which produce pain or pleasure. We start with a rational conception of what is advantageous, but this conception is in itself powerless without the natural impulse which will give it strength. The will or purpose implied by morality is thus either reason stimulated to act by desire, or desire guided and controlled by understanding. These factors then motivate the willful action. Freedom of the will is a factor with both virtuous choices and vicious choices. Actions are involuntary only when another person forces our action, or if we are ignorant of important details in actions. Actions are voluntary when the originating cause of action (either virtuous or vicious) lies in ourselves.

Moral weakness of the will results in someone does what is wrong, knowing that it is right, and yet follows his desire against reason. For Aristotle, this condition is not a myth, as Socrates supposed it was. The problem is a matter of conflicting moral principles. Moral action may be represented as a syllogism in which a general principle of morality forms the first (i.e. major) premise, while the particular application is the second (i.e. minor) premise. The conclusion, though, which is arrived at through speculation, is not always carried out in practice. The moral syllogism is not simply a matter of logic, but involves psychological drives and desires. Desires can lead to a minor premise being applied to one rather than another of two major premises existing in the agent’s mind. Animals, on the other hand, cannot be called weak willed or incontinent since such a conflict of principles is not possible with them."

IEP