A random memory. My mother went through a phase of believing that what I needed were lessons in transcendental meditation. She had seen some newspaper article about TM, when it was all the rage, and she thought it would be good for what ailed me. She had a lot of such phases. I generally resisted. There was reason for this, other than sultry passive-aggressive rebellion. There was that, too. But the chief reason I balked at TM was the sense that it would badly backfire on me. I would start, become attached to it, and then in another swing of her own phases my mother would decide to stop it, and I'd be getting lectures about how much time I was wasting with this silly pose and mantra. In time, she did forget about the wonderfulness of TM and she did pass on to something else, as I had expected. Mom died about ten years ago, and I offer this recollection of course with regret for the fact that we never really managed to communicate honestly with o...
W illiam James once offered the following summary of his critique of Hegelian philosophy: 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different qualities...