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The Discontents of Thinking
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth…
~ Hermann Hesse
*
…one of my professors gave the following soliloquy:
“You should study philosophers the same way you would watch a ballerina build a house. You want to observe how gracefully, or ungracefully, she moves. You want to note how skillfully, or unskillfully, she holds a hammer. But, you NEVER want to take up residence in the house she has built.”
From that day on I have been a greedy crow stealing insights from every possible source with which to build my own nest. No philosopher, prophet or expert can think for us. Trying to live in someone else’s answers misses the point that answers only make sense to someone who has actually asked the questions.
— Jim Rigby
*
Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes.
So there we are.
But considering man at his best, he is at the start faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father…
