The Danish Doctor of Dread

• The Danish Doctor of Dread

  tags: philosophy psychology anxiety

  • the chronic, disquieting feeling that something not so good was about to happen.
  • Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy,” a simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion.
  • Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
  • is in our anxiety that we come to understand feelingly that we are free, that the possibilities are endless, we can do what we want
  • Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world,  forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.
  • Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
  • The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.

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NYRblog : Roving thoughts and provocations from our writers

• NYRblog : Roving thoughts and provocations from our writers

  • Arguably the most important word in the invented-referents category is “self.” We would like the self to exist perhaps, but does it really? What is it? The need to surround it with a lexical cluster of reinforcing terms—identity, character, personality, soul—all with equally dubious referents suggests our anxiety. The more words we invent, the more we feel reassured that there really is something there to refer to.
  • Like God, the self requires a story; it is the account of how each of us accrues and sheds attributes over seventy or eighty years—youth, vigor, job, spouse, success, failure—while remaining, at some deep level, myself, my soul. One of the accomplishments of the novel, which as we know blossomed with the consolidation of Western individualism, has been to reinforce this ingenious invention, to have us believe more and more strongly in this sovereign self whose essential identity remains unchanged by all vicissitudes.
  • novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. They reinforce a process we are engaged in every moment of the day, self creation. They sustain the idea of a self projected through time, a self eager to be a real something (even at the cost of great suffering) and not an illusion.
  • even pessimistic novels—say, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace—can be encouraging: however hard circumstances may be, you do have a self, a personal story to shape and live. You are a unique something that can fight back against all the confusion around. You have pathos.
  • If we asked the question of, for example, a Buddhist priest, he or she would probably tell us that it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist in the way we imagine, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives.

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Sokal and Lynch on First Principles - NYTimes.com

• Sokal and Lynch on First Principles - NYTimes.com

  • Epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe and what sources and methods for forming beliefs are worthy of our trust.
  • But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues.
  • The problem of justifying first epistemic principles is very old. It led the ancient Greek skeptics to say that knowledge is an illusion. But over the centuries, it has been more common to draw a different conclusion, one concerning the relative value of reason itself.  According to many people, what the problem of justifying first principles really shows is that because reasons always run out or end up just going in circles, our starting point must always be something more like faith.
  • The trouble is that they supplement the ordinary epistemic principles that we all adopt in everyday life — the ones that we would use, for instance, when serving on jury duty —  with additional principles like “This particular book always tells the infallible truth.”
  • By contrast, the results of modern science can be justified, I think, by using the general epistemic principles that we all share.
  • As the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, you can doubt induction or observation all day long, but you’ll still end up trusting them later that night.  As he put it, it is just part of our “natural instincts” to trust our senses most of the time. That is how we are built.
  • First, the fact that most folks believe some principle doesn’t make it true,
  • The second reason we can’t rest content with the fact that some principles are widely shared is that some debates are over the priority of principles.
  • Certain reasoning patterns tend to promote survival; others don’t.
  • our fundamental epistemic principles, such as observation and induction, are well-nigh universal among human beings.
  • defending scientific principles of rationality by appeal to their survival value is to cite practical, not epistemic, reasons in their defense.
  • The basic thought is: “The methods [of science say, or whatever] can’t be shown to be reliable in a noncircular fashion [insert skeptical argument]. Therefore the methods of science are no more rational than any other.”
  • From this, the traditional ancient skeptic concluded: believe nothing, because no belief is produced by a reliable method. The evangelical concludes: only nondiscursive faith or revelation can get us the truth. The postmodernist concludes: no method can get us to the truth — because there is no (objective) truth.

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