voices
complexity + limitation = ?voices
Embedded Files
responsibility
Moral wounds have this particularity, that they hide, but do not close; always painful, always ready to bleed when one touches them, they remain alive and gaping in the heart.Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo. Chapter 84.
Socrates: [D]oing what's unjust is actually the greatest of all evils.Polus: Really? Is that the greatest? Isn't suffering what's unjust a greater one?Socrates: No, not in the least.Plato. Gorgias, 469. Tr. by Zeyl (1987).
complexity
When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 452. Mariner (1973).
limitation
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Preface, A vii. Tr. by Guyer & Wood (1998).
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind; No pow'rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, To smart and agonize at ev'ry pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thunder'd in his op'ning ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heav'n had left him still The whisp'ring zephyr, and the purling rill? Who finds not Providence all good and wise, Alike in what it gives, and what denies?Pope. An Essay on Man: Epistle I, VI.
humanity
Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. ...[I]ndividuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man from another, is intolerable. As long as all men have not been made equally superfluous--and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps--the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved. Totalitarian states strive constantly, though never with complete success, to establish the superfluity of man--by the arbitrary selection of various groups for concentration camps, by constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass liquidations. Common sense protests desperately that the masses are submissive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous; if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: The apparatus seems superfluous to you only because it serves to make men superfluous.Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 457. Mariner (1973).
wisdom
As for you, Morrel, this is the secret of my conduct towards you. There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—"Wait and hope."Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo. Final chapter.
What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.Ecclesiastes. Chapter 3. ESV.
[T]hough Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it.Lewis. Mere Christianity. Book 3, chapter 12.
Google Sites
Report abuse