Great Throughts Treasury

"Children grow up without the uniformity and consistency of experience which used to form them into conventional, strongly singular personalities."

"Character is not quite as constant as we tend to assume."

"Cognitive dissonance: the mental discomfort caused by holding incompatible beliefs. In such situations humans are very good at eliminating the dissonance by means of rationalization."

"Discovering that your childhood idols are now virtually ancient is usually a disturbing reminder of your own mortality. But for me, realizing that 5th May 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of S?ren Kierkegaard's birth was more of a reminder of his immortality. It's a strange word to use for a thinker who lived with a presentiment of his own death and didn't reach his 43rd birthday. Kierkegaard was the master of irony and paradox before both became debased by careless overuse. He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today?s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined to be fully attuned to none."

"Confabulation in this sense has nothing to do with deliberately lying or making things up. The mind confabulates any time that it comes up with a story of an event which didn?t actually happen."

"Confidence in our ability to know the characters of others, and ourselves, is misplaced. It would be absurd to deny that there is any predictability and stability to character."

"Do not confuse unpredictability with freedom."

"Dispositions are active if they are the result of an individual?s attempts at self-constitution, to build who they are."

"Dissociation is essentially a coping mechanism for tolerating the intolerable. In a strange way it is entirely rational."

"Each time a memory is recalled, it is changed in some way."

"Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the threat of moral nihilism. Atheists are quite rightly keen to counter the accusation that life without God cannot be moral. The British Humanist Association, for instance, claims that ?Right and wrong can be explained by human nature alone and do not require religious teaching?. But, just as with happiness, there is a need to distinguish the possibility of atheist morality from its inevitable actuality. Anyone who thinks it?s easy to ground ethics either hasn?t done much moral philosophy or wasn?t concentrating when they did. Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail. In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that?s exactly what will sometimes happen."

"Dualism?s mistake is to argue that since minds, thoughts and feelings are not identical with any particular physical things, they must be non-physical things."

"Every time we recall an event, we must reconstruct the memory, and with every recollection the memory may be changed? Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretive realities."

"Fortunately, there is no great mystery about how unexamined or mistaken lives can have meaning. Throughout this book we have seen many ways in which life can have meaning. The overall idea is that life is worth living just as long as it is a good thing in itself. Such a life has meaning because it means something to us, it is valuable to those who have it. Many things can contribute to this: happiness, authenticity and self-expression, social and personal relationships, concern for the welfare of others... Hence it is more than possible for someone to live a full and meaningful life without ever having thought in terms of life's meaning."

"First, there is no thing or part of you which contains your essence. Your body, your brain and your memories are all very important for who you are, but none of these is the pearl of self in which your identity resides."

"For the sake of simplicity, we can crudely schematize any given individual?s character into a hierarchy of types. The weakest kind of character traits are those which are passive and variable, neither self-chosen nor constant. Slightly more robust are passive, constant traits, which at least exhibit a kind of consistency. Next are active, variable traits, which, being self-chosen, are more fully ?ours? but lack constancy. The traits which are most ?characterful? are those which are both active and constant, ones we have in part chosen for ourselves and we display with a measure of consistency. Every person will exhibit a mixture of these traits."

"Gender dysphoria: the feeling of being trapped in a body of the wrong gender."

"Fourth, the unity which enables you to think of yourself as the same person over time is in some ways fragile, and in others robust."

"Gender is the medium through which we swim. When the gender is wrong, life becomes like swimming through treacle."

"Hans was actually responding to changes in the posture and expression of onlookers, who visibly relaxed when he got to the right number. What psychologists call the Clever Hans Effect."

"I am only me for practical purposes."

"I don?t think it aids the cause of clarity to continue to focus on something closely correlated, but not identical to, the issue that matters, rather than the issue itself."

"I never thought I would say this, but in this very particular sense, life is like a Celine Dion concert: if we want to know why we are here, we can look backwards or forwards, and the answers we get, or fail to get, are very different and satisfy different needs."

"He would fly off into these most awful tantrums, which he did when I was with him. And I talked to his wife afterwards and asked, ?How do you cope with this, how do you deal with this?? because it happened quite a lot. And she said, ?Well when it happens I tell myself it?s not really Geoff. When he does that he?s not Geoff anymore.? But if it?s not Geoff why does she stay with him? What?s the commitment? What?s it based on? It?s that belief that at some level it really is Geoff. But that?s a magical belief ultimately, isn?t it? It?s a magical belief that there?s some essential Geoffness about Geoff. But if you pick away at it, there isn?t really, it falls apart.?"

"Hofstadter is another kind of bundle theorist, who thinks we are ?strange loops?, not things, but patterns of information that feedback on themselves to create higher, more complex networks of abstraction."

"History is created by the stories we tell about the past, and there are innumerable different such stories we can tell about the same events."

"How can we remain the same people over time, even as we change, sometimes considerably?"

"How we are seen by others affects how we see ourselves."

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

"Humans make sense of their world by telling stories. Meta-narratives are the big stories that tie everything together."

"If the science of humanity has shown anything at all over recent decades it is that human beings are far less autonomous, rational and free than we usually suppose. As a matter of fact, I don?t think any of these challenges defeats what really matters about the humanist view of ourselves. But to argue this would be difficult and I?m not sure I could successfully do so as yet. What?s more, it remains possible that progress in science really will shatter a few atheist shibboleths in time. These are reasons enough to think that by embracing science so closely, atheists are only making it easier for it to stab them in back."

"If we start to think about the different facets of ourselves as different people, we actually make each self or persona less than a full person. To be a whole person is precisely to have depth and more than one side."

"If you want to understand why people believe what they do, you first have to identify what beliefs act as their bedrocks."

"In a pluralist world, there is no hope of understanding people who live according to different values if we only judge them from the outside."

"If you want to remember an event or fact, it is better to be in the same situation or state as you were when the event took place or when you learned the fact."

"If people are treated very differently depending on how they appear, that can change how they perceive themselves."

"If what we are is not just given, we therefore have to choose what we become, and such choices have an ethical dimension, for we can choose to become faithful or faithless, honest or deceitful, generous or mean."

"If postmodernism has a unifying theme it is one of fragmentation, which it picked up from modernism and ran with wildly."

"If there is no single moral authority. . . we have to in some sense ?create? values for ourselves. . . that means that moral claims are not true or false in the same way as factual claims are... moral claims are judgments it is always possible to someone to disagree with... without saying something that is factually false... you may disagree with me but you cannot say I have made a factual error."

"If you reject the singular grand narrative, it does not follow that we should embrace an infinity of contradictory narratives."

"In that sense, we can perhaps see the wedding vows as being even deeper than usually thought: it is not just that I promise to have and to hold, I promise to try to build future selves that will be able to maintain this vow."

"It all came to a head on a mindfulness retreat. Part of the practice involves observing what thoughts and feelings arise in the mind and considering what such thoughts depend on. What stimulated it? What was the trigger?"

"It is important to distinguish between ?mere constructs?, which exist solely as ideas, and real constructions, which we pick up, use and live in."

"It is important to recognize the limits of reason, and also to acknowledge that atheists have no monopoly on it. The new atheism, however, tends to claim reason as a decisive combatant on its side only. With its talk of ?spells? and ?delusions?, it gives the impression that only through stupidity or crass disregard for reason could anyone be anything other than an atheist. ?Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,? says Dawkins, once again implying that reason and evidence are strangers to religion. This is arrogant, and attributes to reason a power it does not have."

"In different mind-states one does not have access to the same bag of memories."

"In evocative aphorisms, Kierkegaard captured this sense of being lost, whichever world we choose: ?Infinitude?s despair is to lack finitude, finitude?s despair is to lack infinitude.? Kierkegaard thus defined what I take to be the central puzzle of human existence: how to live in such a way that does justice both to our aesthetic and our ethical natures. Kierkegaard showed that taking religion seriously is compatible with being against religion in almost all its actual forms."

"In western culture, mind and reason are ?coded? masculine, while emotion and body are coded feminine. Men are ruled by their heads, women by their hearts."

"It is often said that we construct our sense of self from our memories, but in some ways we construct our memories from our sense of self."

"It is a truism to say that how we behave is a result of two factors: our own natures and the situations we find ourselves in."

"It is only because of historical accident that atheism is not widely recognized as a world-view in its own right. This world view is essentially a very general form of naturalism, in which there are not two kinds of stuff, the natural and the supernatural, but one. The forces that govern this substance are also natural ones and there is no ultimate purpose or agency behind them. Human life is biological, and thus does not survive beyond biological death. Such a worldview needs defending, and a special name, only because for various reasons, it is not the one that most humans have adopted. But the view itself is true whether or not there are people who disagree with it. In a totally atheist world, we may stop noticing that it is a view at all, in the same way that most people do not notice that they believe objects exist whether we perceive them or not. But it would still be a view. So in my book, I tried to articulate the grounds for this view with as little reference to the religious alternative as possible. The new atheism, however, is characterized by its attacks on religion. ?There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds,? wrote Richard Dawkins, quite typically, quoting approvingly Stephen Weinberg, who said, ?for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.? Hitchens goes so far as to explicitly say that ?I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist.? This antitheism is for me a backwards step. It reinforces what I believe is a myth, that an atheist without a bishop to bash is like a fish without water. Worse, it raises the possibility that as a matter of fact, for many atheists, they do indeed need an enemy to give them their identity. A second feature of atheism is that it is committed to the appropriate use of reason and evidence. In order to occupy this intellectual high ground, it is important to recognise the limits of reason, and also to acknowledge that atheists have no monopoly on it. The new atheism, however, tends to claim reason as a decisive combatant on its side only. With its talk of ?spells? and ?delusions?, it gives the impression that only through stupidity or crass disregard for reason could anyone be anything other than an atheist."