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William James
Henry James
Xenophanes
Henry Adams
Richard Rorty
Isaiah Berlin
Salman Rushdie
Henry Miller
Bertrand Russell
Nicholas Fearn
Erich Fromm
Thomas Merton
Peter Gay
Milan Kundera
Ernest Becker
Norman O. Brown
Don Cupitt
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henri Bergson
D.T. Suzuki
Jonathan Lear
Joesph Campbell
Leo Tolstoy
James Joyce
L. Wittgenstein
Sigmund Freud
Andre Maurois
Adam Phillips
Paul Tillich
C
“The desire to enlarge oneself is the desire to embrace more and more possibilities, to be constantly learning, to give oneself entirely over to curiosity.”
— Richard Rorty
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“I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western
frontier / and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder.”
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“If only we could discover in ourselves or people like us an
activity somehow related to creative writing.” — Sigmund Freud
jonfobes@excite.com • jonfobes@yahoo.com | 4025 Cambridge Ave. • Lorain, Ohio 44053
SOMETHING OLD
A BOMB IN THE CHURCH (2002) • THE NAME OF THE ROSE • KANT MEETS CAN (2002) • VANITY AND JUDGMENT • CERTAINTY RIP (2003)
SOMETHING NEW
WELCOME 2004 • MY CARRIE BRADSHAW IMITATION • PD DIVERSITY COMMITTEE • JUDGMENT: A FOUR-WAY STREET • THE FAILURE OF JUDGMENT • BRUTE INSISTENCE • THE FOG OF WAR | COLD MOUNTAIN •
SEE JOURNAL SECTION FOR MORE NEW ITEMS
SOMETHING BORROWED
RELIGION IN FLUX • DAVID DENBY REVIEWS “THE PASSION” • MUSLIM FREETHINKER, PART 1 • KANT: “WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?” • SOCRATIC SHRINK: THE BAD BOY OF PHILOSOPHICAL COUNSELING
UNCERTAINTY:
Living with no
supernatural justifications,
no complete explanations,
no promise
of permanent
stability, with
guides of merely
probable validity.
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Karen Armstrong
Harold Bloom
L. Ferlinghetti
Walter Kaufmann
Henri Nouwen
Walker Percy
David Bohm
Rumi
John Dewey
J.P. Diggins
W.T. Anderson
Bryan Magee
Iris Murdoch
Charlie Kaufman
C.S. Lewis
Ross and Hills
Rilke
Jane Smiley
Donald Palmer
Lucretius
Paul Elie
Huston Smith
Diana Eck
NEW SITES: Rumors of Order Forum. The Nightsiders Blog. A Life in the Day. All these link off the main page at www.fobes.net.
JOURNAL: 6 AUGUST 2004 — UPDATES
A new piece of art for the home page, with a simplified URL: fobes.net. A collection of core essays. And a improved quote bank. HOME> CORE> QUOTES>
24 JUNE 2004 — PASCAL
Freedom is more foundational, crucial and momentous than any belief system: Bigger than “God.” MORE>
“GOD” MADE PEOPLE FREE?> PASCAL POINTS AT FREEDOM>
8 JUNE 2004 — UNDER THE INFLUENCE II
Nietzsche called on philosophy to study the shapes, colors and appetites of the world at hand, rather than indulge in abstract speculation. One of his means was to doubt any pretensions to One Truth. There was after all a kind of music of the personality that attracted perceptions into a particular key — let's say, here Christian, there Buddhist; here artistic, there scientific — all of which went under the grand banner of “thinking” but which was, in truth, not objective. ... Concealed in the body of Nietzsche's work was the powerful suggestion that the cogitating subject, the infallible “I” of Descartes, was probably not the key to understanding the truth of the world. — Lesley Chamberlain, “Nietzsche In Turin: An Intimate Biography” MORE>
24 MAY 2004 — LINCOLN AND TRANCSENDENCE
Lincoln — who never belonged to a church — understood the probelms of faith and judgment. MORE> When it comes to spiritual transcendence ingenious metaphysical systems have more customers than the real supernatural reality — if there is such a thing. MORE>
4 MAY 2004 — THE FAILURE OF JUDGMENT
It is obvious that human intelligence and judgment are not up to the task of discerning what constitutes right religion and true belief. We don't need to be philosophers, psychologists or theologians to grasp this fact; it's an undeniable part of our human heritage. There's one saving grace: The failure of judgment is the birth of freedom. MORE>
MARCUS BORG AND CHRISTIAN DIVERSITY> THE FOG OF WAR>
JOURNAL: 18 JANUARY 2004 — MONTAIGNE
Reading “Doubt: A History” by Jennifer Hecht re-acquainted me with a hero from my past, Michel de Montaigne. He wore a self-designed medal inscribed with his motto, “What Do I Know?” And he said: “There is a plague on man: the opinion that he knows something.” And he said that in his writing, “I am free to give myself up to doubt and uncertainty, and to my predominant quality, which is ignorance.” He added: “These are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.” MORE >
MORE NEW ITEMS
“DOUBT” BOOK REPORT PART 1 • BOOK REPORT PART 2
KARL POPPER AND THE PRE-SOCRATICS • “DOUBT” BOOK REVIEW
Coming soon, more sayings and reflections on Montaigne.
“What is truly remarkable about Proust and Freud is the coincidence of a theory of mind which all but locks the individual in his subjectivity.”
“What Freud wants to say psychologically is that there is a pattern of energy in us that wants to get free ... that this force will hitch a lift with any idea, socially appropriate or inappropriate ... to realize its intention. Proust said something very similar in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ ... that in order to know where the hidden intensity comes from that often spoils our lives, we work back from the way we consciously perceive reality.”
— “The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud” by Lesley Chamberlain
“You can't live in the world without an idea of the world.”
— “Angels in America”
“Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house
a world, and beyond its world a heaven.
Build therefore your own world.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
© jon fobes 2004