The Experience of Clarity

150 The remedy for the error prone “mind” is not the amputation of the “higher faculties.”  On the contrary, this error-making organ, once it ceases to take itself too seriously, can actually lend a hand in the redemption of everything petty.  But first it must see through itself. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

25 If we believe that virtue is not achieved through weakness, then we do not escape hypocrisy when we yield to a compulsion to confess our sins. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

151 Two “realists” can hold a conversation and soon it becomes evident that they are only disappointed mystics, trying to console themselves for that “something more” they had lost ... no thought whatsoever toward how far they should or could carry “realism” ... no thought that realism could yield control and promote advance ... or drown us. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

152 If physiological reality could be seen as a scale, along which one may have more or less force, more or less joy from existence, then I would say that certain orientations toward … from reality elevate; others, send us downward.  This is my objection to modern realists.  In the process of building their perspective, they give no thought for their own physiological reality.  That is, the physiological perspective is, as it were, more akin to a glass elevator than a duck blind.  Ignoring the physiological flux of the observer does not bring one closer to disinterested objectivity.  Rather, such ignorance precludes the goal.  Yet as descendants of the ascetic order, the realists have acquired the habit of resignation, and so they resign all to a single, myopic honesty.  They travel up and down the whole scale of possible heights and depths, sitting in the corner, cursing their fate or rejoicing their fortune ... never seeing that realism is a ...

153 The Lost and their Leap Over: A man who faces his condition is not to be admired if he loses the illusion that improves him ... the identity he does not have, yet is chasing.  If he should look at his condition and tally up a conclusion, he must not forget the element of delirium — of nurturing a vanity that will leap over his static realism.  He can only do this by having at one time capitulated all, and in calmer moments, sought out a final redemption for having capitulated, a distilling of a foul experience into a fine wine that intoxicates him to climb above his condition.   The goal ... the height of his identity is not just one element within his conditions; it is that which leaps out of those conditions and re-establishes all in new combinations, allowing him to include and exclude—and where he can do neither, he can usually reorganize their order of appearance, or allot them in new proportions, and so experiment toward a new condition for the higher iden...

154 Realist: The word means so many things to so many different people that it should never be used without the utmost care.  Nevertheless, one might rashly put up the word now and then as a farmer puts up a scarecrow, in the hope that ungrounded minds might fly elsewhere. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

155 The farmer already does what the botanist does not yet “know.”  This does not make the botanist inferior, but it certainly does not leave the world hungry with waiting either. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism