Adversaria (19)
‘Spinoza does not believe in the sufficiency of clarity and directness, because he doesn’t believe there is any satisfactory way of proceeding from the knowledge of an effect to a knowledge of its cause’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 157)
‘…do not place a false value on tears. Crying is not completion. One of you make a commitment to supply tissues’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 70)
‘A man who is to become reasonable, strong and free, begins by doing all in his power to experience joyful passions. He then strives to extricate himself from chance encounters and the concatenation of sad passions, to organize good encounters, combine his relation with relations that combine directly with it, united with what agrees in nature with him, and form a reasonable association between men; all this in such a way as to be affected with joy’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 262)
‘The person being forgiven need never know that it has happened. Remember, never forgive anyone directly to their face’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 140)
‘And the world is defined not just by the places and peoples in it, but also by the passage of time as it is experienced by those places and peoples’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 27%)
‘Soldiers, merchants, priests, consuls, ambassadors, politicians of every kind, and even scholars and philosophers happily fed at the trough filled by lack. Lack of leadership? Perhaps. But it could hardly be said the common citizen or subject was particularly wanting for leadership. Most would say they could get along very well without the regulations and taxes that leadership seemed inevitably to impose. How roads and sewers would miraculously spring into existence, to say nothing of trade networks and currency, literacy or public safety, those were questions that went unanswered because they generally went unasked’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 52%)
‘A clear and distinct idea does not in itself constitute real knowledge, any more than it contains in its own ground within itself: the sufficient reason of clarity and distinctness is to be found only in adequacy, and a clear and distinct idea constitutes real knowledge only to the extent that it follows from an idea that is itself adequate’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 152)