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Ronald Jean-toussaint
https://substack.com/@theludocrat
“Intellectuals make their breakthroughs, changing the course of the flow of ideas, because of what they do with the cultural capital and emotional energy flowing down to them from their own pasts, restructured by the network of tensions among their contemporaries.”
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“Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides were adventurers in the world of thought. To read their plays without any sense of new ways of understanding the world and of savouring its emotions is to miss the vividness which constitutes their whole value. But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message.”
― Adventures of Ideas
― Adventures of Ideas
“The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals to create problems at the very moment they solve them. In India the issue of how to escape from the bonds of karma did not exist until the Buddhists proposed a means of escape. Epicurus made fear of the gods an issue at the same time that he propounded a solution to these fears. Kant discovered that science was threatened when he announced a Copernican revolution to end the threat.”
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“To change with honor seems terribly difficult. Most people are like weathercocks, turning with every change of wind. They rush from one creed to the next as if change of faith were nothing, and in the end become nothing themselves.
In a Time of revolution, our own volition contributes very little to our change. Volition and intention can do very little in a world which makes a principle of changing everyday. Perhaps The real danger in such period comes from our own inertia, which makes us accept all these change stoically but without conviction or personal decision. We cannot really change without a period of waiting and relearning. To change with honor seems to be the paradoxical effort that is asked of us today. It means keeping away from both extrêmes, that of rigid honor which kills the force of progress,and that of a mechanical change which leaves the potentialities of the soul untouched.”
― Out of Revolution: Autobiography of a Western Man
In a Time of revolution, our own volition contributes very little to our change. Volition and intention can do very little in a world which makes a principle of changing everyday. Perhaps The real danger in such period comes from our own inertia, which makes us accept all these change stoically but without conviction or personal decision. We cannot really change without a period of waiting and relearning. To change with honor seems to be the paradoxical effort that is asked of us today. It means keeping away from both extrêmes, that of rigid honor which kills the force of progress,and that of a mechanical change which leaves the potentialities of the soul untouched.”
― Out of Revolution: Autobiography of a Western Man
“« Reason, l’esprit, the intellect of the writing and reasoning nation, is constantly fighting against the darkness of « illiteracy ». You must know how to read and write to be a real member of a civilized nation.(…) In clearing up the underbrush of the privilege and prejudice, liberalism or rationalism was convinced that it held in its hand the naked truth, undisguised, unstained by dogma or tradition. Reason discovering nature can test everything by experiment. There is no room for traditional habits: Fashion takes the place of habit. But it is precisly Fashion which enslave Reason. The Philosophizing mind had its prison of sensuality and drudgery exactly like a pupil of the Jesuits or a child in a backwoods village. Its fairy-tale and its prejudice are not dependent upon miracles or dogmas or incenses or witchcraft, but the apparatus of Reason is subject to the same laws of sensuous disguise as any other part of the human soul. Superstition sends us to the medicine man, physical pain to the physician. We have a native sense that urges us on toward Reason and Philosophy: this sense is curiosity. Without a sense for novelty, no thinker can succeed or affect the life of the community. The self-indulgence of Reason is its predilection for the new. »”
― Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
― Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
Ronald’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Ronald’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
11,976 books
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541 friends
1,996 books
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3,829 friends
502 books
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97 friends
687 books
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59 friends
1,078 books
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103 friends
398 books
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1,033 friends
1,573 books
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641 friends
799 books
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406 friends
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