Tag: knowledge (118 entries)

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them…

Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.

Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.

So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is ’the norm’—and we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We don’t need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or ’move on’ from some emotional attachment or slight.

However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.

They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless it’s measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If they’re sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the ’other’… they cannot do this on their own.

That’s why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.

That’s why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, it’s not emotions for us, we’re stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.

Other. People. Never. Do.

So they’re reaching out to process and connect—they’re unfulfilled, or some door isn’t closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they ’must’—some how, reference off you to complete the task.

To you, that’s nonsense.

I mean, I’m saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue it’s not always like this—and it’s not.

But go read what ’mindfulness’ is—the thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell me—if, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because it’s describing a state you’re in 99 percent of the time as default.

That’s what I mean.

Defeatism is just a term society use to gaslight people into conforming with social expectations. You could very well be considered a defeatist in a capitalist society by embracing minimalism. There is no such thing as a defeatist in absolute terms. This term solely exist to shame and guilt trap people to fall in line with what is expected of them. It is also a relativistic term that requires a specific setting for the term to have a meaning. You might be considered a defeatist in capitalistic society by giving up on the rat race and becoming a minimalist. But on the other hand, you are an “optimist” within the minimalist community.

There is no such thing as “give up”. Even embracing nothingness requires effort. Activities that induces a sense of liberation such as meditation actually requires putting effort to work. Therefore, it is nothing but gaslighting to say one is a defeatist when one decide to go on a path of liberation rather than participate in the rat race. The word defeatism is designed to keep people trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. It is done by holding onto the idea that there is some kind of reward waiting for them at the end when they eventually “win” at whatever they are doing.

Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health – papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency – are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum… When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.

Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.

Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.

[…]

A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.

[…]

The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.

[…]

Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and it’s just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.

For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.

[…]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.

There wasn’t a point in your timeline where you were ever close into turning into a functional life.

[…] Maybe life is better enjoyed when we forget we even have one? […]

– There’s a common, sentimental notion that angels are all around us, solving little domestic problems. But in the Bible, when humans encounter an angel, they fall to their knees in fear. These are beings of tremendous power. Think of the first renegade angels, in league with Lucifer. They were strong enough to challenge God. And surely, God…

[…]

God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?

The police superintendent: – Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.

– Very good…

[…]

And what did we gain from that famous snake? Knowledge, free will, the ability to think for ourselves, which led to everything you see now in this room: civilization, art, culture, music… life. In some strange way, these rogue angels were the architects of all that we hold dear.

What does it mean – and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note – what does it mean to “anticipate death”? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You don’t rush like a desperate man, you don’t argue like a madman. You don’t kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you don’t despair, you don’t die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, it’s not as if life ends: you’re the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didn’t anticipated death, because they didn’t assumed it as a condition… like a thickness of the soul, here – let’s use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.

But let’s keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because it’s all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things don’t have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.

Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.

When I said to him: “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?”

And he said, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”

It’s not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness – that’s it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

If you believe everything you read, you better not read.

Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.

The point is – to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio… You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.

For me drugs aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – they are one god, who creates in three different ways.

I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, to…

WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.

So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, “About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).

Madness is simply pain.

Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

– You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isn’t the same for both sides?

[…]

But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing… the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small… [Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way… Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Because everything’s been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every government’s been tried, every fuckin’ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?

Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.

As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.

Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.

The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

“For [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened…”
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

Two useful lessons, of course: loneliness, isolation, exclusion on the one hand, then the continued distrust of the other caused by the loneliness, the isolation and the exclusion. And this as a child already…

My mother gave me away. I lay on a fishing cutter with a woman in Holland, in Rotterdam, for one year. My mother visited me every three or four weeks there. I don’t think that she cared much for me then. This changed, however, later. I was one year old, we went to Vienna, but the distrust even continued when I was brought to my grandfather who really loved me, in contrast to my mother. Then the walks with him, all these figures, male figures; in my later books, this is always my grandfather on my mother’s side. But beside my grandfather, again and again, you are alone. You can only develop alone, you will always be alone, the consciousness that a leopard can’t change its spots. Everything else is deception, doubt. It doesn’t change… During the school days, completely alone. You have a neighbor at school and you are alone. You talk to people, you are alone. You have views, strange ones, your own, you are always alone. And if you write a book, or as I write books, then you are even more alone…

It is impossible to make oneself heard. Solitude and loneliness become increased loneliness, isolation. Finally, you change the scenes more and more quickly. One puts his trust in bigger and bigger cities, the small town is not sufficient anymore, not Vienna, not even London. You have to go to another country, you try to go here and there, foreign languages, is it Brussels? Or maybe Rome? And there you go. And you are always alone with yourself and your increasingly dreadful work.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

If you spend time with the most erudite ones, it doesn’t mean that you get close to the absolute.

Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his “existential frustration,” “ontological despair” or “metaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,” the chances are that Zapffe (rather than “cured”) would be baffled by Frankl’s sophomoric philosophizing. “You may be psychologically healthier than I,” Zapffe would gladly admit, “but I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me – reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalker’s certainty – to realize that it’s all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our ’situation.’ You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naïve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which – if you will permit me to speak your language for once – I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his ’cosmic conditions,’ the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.” The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering “peace in heart,” “reconciliation with the world” and “atonement with the almighty,” or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.

Happiness is for the pigs.

– See how the smoke trembles in the roof hole? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they don’t know.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man… Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. “How is suffering to be avoided?” is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.

[…] only in madness
can one be clear.

Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.

The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell the children.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

Health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.

The old norms having collapsed, and the new ones not yet arisen or firmly established, it is natural that the concept of the relativity of everything has expanded in us to such a degree as to almost entirely make us lose our sense of evaluation. No one is any longer able to fix for themselves a firm and unshakable point of view.

As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anne’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.

[…] that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it; […]

Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[🡕]

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

One only hears what one understands.

Actually, when the student happens to attain a mind so ready and vigorous, he might go astray way wilder and perilouslier than his master.

A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

Two truths that men will generally never believe: one, that they know nothing; the other, that they are nothing. Add a third, which is closely related to the second: that they have nothing to hope for after death.

Mountains are silent masters and make silent students.

Eleandro. Therefore those are greatly mistaken who say and proclaim that the perfection of man consists in the knowledge of truth, and that all his ills arise from false opinions and from ignorance, and that mankind will at last be happy when each man, or most men, shall know the truth, and according to that alone compose and govern their lives. And this is said by nearly all the philosophers, ancient and modern. Now according to your judgment, those truths which are the substance of all philosophy ought to be concealed from the majority of men; and I believe you would readily agree that they ought to be ignored or forgotten by everyone: for, once known and kept in the mind, they can do nothing but harm. Which is the same as saying that philosophy must be extirpated from the world. I am not unaware that the final conclusion to be drawn from true and perfect philosophy is that one must not philosophize. From this it follows, first, that philosophy is useless, because to this end of not philosophizing, it is not necessary to be a philosopher; secondly, it is most harmful, since that final conclusion cannot be learned except at one’s own cost, and once it is learned, it cannot be put into practice; it being not in man’s power to forget the truths once known, and it being easier to lay aside any other habit than that of philosophizing. In short, philosophy, hoping and promising at the outset to cure our ills, ends by vainly wishing to remedy itself.

It is no longer possible to deceive ourselves or dissemble the truth. Philosophy has made us understand so much that the forgetfulness of our own selves, that once came so easy, is now impossible.

[…] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.

O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Out of the mouths of babes and drunkards comes the truth.

If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.

Life is, in man, the use of reason.

The expression goes back to the medieval scholastic philosophers, although already Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (“Μέσον τε καὶ ἄριστον” – The mean is the best thing), Horace in the Satires (“Est modus in rebus” – There is a measure in things), and Ovid in the Metamorphoses (“Medio tutissimus ibis” – by following the middle way, you will walk most safely) had expressed a similar concept.
A comparable idea is also found in Buddhism: The path that leads to the cessation of suffering is called the Middle Way, because it avoids the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, excessive behaviors that do not lead to mental peace. This path, developed in the Noble Eightfold Path, consists in cultivating virtue, meditative serenity, and wisdom.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly, and of their own accord, preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.