Miscellaneous Quotations For Friday
These lines, the first four from What Is Philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, and the last from this mornings front page of the New York Times have weighed on my mind. These are snapshots, evidence of a state of things that will continue to move, to change inexorably according to contingent factors which by definition are hidden from our awareness. We will live, survive as best as we can. Our science, our technology leaves us helpless to alter the scale of the change in climate, as well as the apparent absence of a defined self that has altered the possibilities of friendship, of reciprocal support among the beleaguered generation, that faces a bleak future. Are we any better off than our prehistoric ancestors as we enter the inverse of the ice age?
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Greeks lived and thought in Nature but left mind in the “mysteries.” We live, think, and feel in the Mind, in reflection, but leave Nature in profound alchemical mystery that we constantly profane.
A society of friends is a condition of thought. But this society has suffered a catastrophe that changes the nature of friendship. p 102
Philosophy finds a way of reterritorializing itself in the modern world in conformity with the spirit of a people and its conception of right. p 104
A concept is acquired by inhabiting, by pitching ones tent, by contracting a habit. That which is contemplated is contracted. Habit is creative. Like a plant contracting water, earth, chlorides, etc. in order to acquire its own concept. p 105
For many scientists, this is the year they started living climate change rather than just studying it.
“What we are seeing today is making me, frankly, calibrate not only what my children will be living but what I am currently living,” said Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “We haven’t caught up to it. I haven’t caught up to it personally.”
excerpt, The Year Global Warming Turned Model Into Menace by Semini Sengupta, NY Times reporter