reason & truth29 quotes

“Names, names, the naming of the names. What’s this? What’s that? they ask me, pointing to this bush, that bush. I give my standard reply: What it is, ma’am, no one knows; but men call it—creosote bush.”

“If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist want to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history, or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the principle of science and philosophy.”

“Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause.”

“We meet here a paradox that was already pointed out on another level: natural science represents a fantastic triumph of reason, but at the same time it claims to show that reason is merely a product—and an unintentional product, an epiphenomenon—of evolution, that is, of a movement that was led by blind and irrational forces.”

“In fact, it is the easiest thing in the world to utter a verbal contradiction, though much harder to entertain a mental one. This is indeed an arresting fact of speech—that what logicians claim you cannot say, you can so easily utter.”

“Reality used to impose itself on you, while fantasy was your own doing. Now illusions flush your brain and reality is something you laboriously construct, rip from the earth and beat out of people.”

“We can recognize an objectively bad or objectively good event in extreme situations. But the positive universal that defines the Good inevitably remains insufficient. We cannot grasp anything in its totality. We can grasp only flashes, echoes, remnants of a total Good, which always remains an object of promise and faith. Our certitude, even if we clearly perceive the path it takes, remains incomplete, mixed with the finiteness that constitutes our being. We are the ones who determine its contours, we who have a history, mores, and desires steeped in the uniqueness of time and place. This is why to impose our certitude on others is unscrupulous.”

“Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom.”

“Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί.”

“The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement appear the only result of our must accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”

“The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?”

“...there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”

“In the absence of conviction, I’ve come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn’t strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.”

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

“...if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself...I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

“Nothing is more damaging to an argument than the words without hesitation, without doubt, undoubtedly, certainly, and the like. They are used only when proof is wanting.”

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

“There is no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith...In their respective worlds, God and the human being are set within a unique relationship. In God there lies the origin of all things, in him is found the fullness of the mystery, and in this His glory consists; to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.”

“Understanding that the truth is a gift to be shared, not a possession to be monopolized, frees the Church from the temptation of seeking forms of presence based on power...What matters most is not occupying positions of power or defending cultural strongholds, but initiating good processes and enabling them to mature. In this way, the truth of the Gospel is not imposed from above, but grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures. This is not a truth that fears diversity, but instead welcomes and guides it. It does not eliminate conflicts, but transforms them, reuniting that which history tends to scatter. This concept can also be illustrated by the image of a multifaceted polyhedron, in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.”

“Individuals can search for truth. Groups search for consensus.”

“I cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind, it cannot be long endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”

“I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinions is caused, in the first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the second, by pride. We have no means of measuring this vast machine, we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable mysteries. These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, yet we fall back our imagination. Through this imagined world each forces a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path will lead him to the goal. Yet we long to know and understand it all. The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regards to it.”

“When we talk about the Big Bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah—scrutinizing and deducing from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In our awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science.”

“For the recognition of universal principles forces man to judge the established order, or what is actual here and now, in the light of the natural or rational order; and what is actual here and now is more likely than not to fall short of the universal and unchangeable norm. The recognition of universal principles thus tends to prevent men from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting, the social order that fate has allotted to them. It tends to alienate them from their place on the earth. It tends to make them strangers, and even strangers on the earth.”

Βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσ όπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπονπρὸς πρόσωπον: ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼσκαὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, then face-to-face; Now I know partly; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

“Videmus nunc per speculum et in aenigmate...

And now we see through a glass as in a riddle...”

“For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.”

“The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming now more now than another of that ancient urge—much older than the desire for truth—to command attention, dominate one’s fellows.”