pt.5: ON PHILOSOPHY (TRAINING FOR DEATH)

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR ARGUMENTS

And so, Descartes said: Except our own thoughts,

there is nothing absolutely in our power.

Thus, I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine

the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

With that, each problem that I solved became a rule,

which served afterwards to solve other problems.

I therefore conclude that it is not enough to have a good mind;

the main thing is to use it well. For when it is not in our power

to follow what is true, which frequently is the case,

we ought to follow what is most probable.

Therefore, an optimist may see a light where there is none,

but still I ask, why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world,

for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it

that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters

are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest virtue

and the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices.

In this vain, the mind will always believe everything you tell it.

Feed it faith, feed it truth, feed it love – gain hope

for hope is the desire of the soul to be convinced

that the dream will come true.

God alone is the author of all the motions in the world

and so, we do not describe the world we see, but rather

see the world we can describe. Just as Plato said, I say now:

When I consider this carefully,

I find not a single property which with certainty

separates the waking state from the dream.

How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?

To this question, I conclude only one answer:

I think, therefore I am.

And so, Kant said: Two things

Fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe,

the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them:

the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

for thoughts without content are empty,

intuitions without concepts are blind.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind,

forgetting the Greek who said:

War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.

and so only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.

All our knowledge begins with the senses,

proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason.

There is nothing higher than reason. Nothing is divine

 but what is agreeable to reason and religion – the recognition

of all our duties as divine commands.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore

those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason;

by the latter one necessarily shunned,

Happiness is thus not an ideal of reason, but of imagination. While morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless,

so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting

to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure

in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve

into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

And so, by God, without man and his potential for moral progress,

the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness,

a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.