Realism And Naturalism Quotes

emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.

...in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: "My Lord and My God!" Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: "I will not believe until I see.

Spirituality isn't some quaint stepchild of an intelligent worldview, or the only option for those of us not smart enough to understand the facts of the real world. Spirituality reflects the most sophisticated mindset, and the most powerful force available for the transformation of human suffering.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

A bird is a bird Slavery means slavery A knife is a knife Death remains death

When you make a film, if you are an insider, you're usually the last person to know that your film is not right. But when you are an outsider, you have a little more objectivity.I think a part of my success is that I am naturally objective. I am not an insider.In many ways, Anupama is the same. Foreword, First Day First Show

Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity--a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices.

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

Now that the book is out in the world, I’m amazed all over again at what my friend did for me in prompting me to ditch realism for a more magical approach. In some ways, the Golem and the Jinni are the ultimate immigrants. They aren’t just new to New York or America; they’re new to people. Like those around them, they wrestle with issues of religion versus doubt and duty versus self-determination—but as inescapable aspects of their own otherworldly natures. For seven years I’ve lived with their questions, arguments, and adventures, and it’s been one of the greatest gifts of my life.

On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular color and shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for their special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be colored and cut in another way.

I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is we're actually living on a planet in space. For me that's an extraordinary thought. It's mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can't see the universe for eye-liner. And there are probably boys whose eyes are never raised above the horizon because of football. There can be quite a chasm between a small make-up mirror and a proper mirror telescope! I think it's what they call a 'matter of perspective'. Perhaps it could also be called an 'eye-opener' as well. It's never too late to experience an eye-opener. But many people live their entire lives without realizing that they're floating through empty space. There's too much going on down here. It's hard enough thinking about your looks. We belong on this earth. I'm not trying to dispute it. We're part of nature's life on this planet. Monkeys and reptiles have shown us how we breed, and I have no quarrel with that. In different natural surroundings everything might have been very different, but here we are. And I repeat: I'm not denying it. I just don't think that prevent us from trying to see a little beyond the ends of our noses.

A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

Imagination seems to come fast and true in the morning and evening light, the bookends of the day, shifting as books come and go like moments in time. It’s during these times in which the phrases “It is so” and “It is not so” become “It might be so” and “It might not be so.” In this way, the black and white realism of the day transforms into colorful winged possibilities of morning and night.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure. Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers: A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.

The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues. Detective stories, among the most successful literary genres of all time, concoct their suspense by sustaining uncertainty about hints and culprits. Mind-bending modern art, the multiplicities of poetry, Lewis Carroll’s riddles, Márquez’s magical realism, Kafka’s existential satire—ambiguity saturates our art forms and masterpieces, suggesting its deeply emotional nature. Goethe once said that “what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.” So it is with ambiguity.

man’s dignity consists in the following facts which distinguish man from animals. First, that he has a playful curiosity and a natural genius for exploring knowledge; second, that he has dreams and a lofty idealism (often vague, or confused, or cocky, it is true, but nevertheless worthwhile); third, and still more important, that he is able to correct his dreams by a sense of humor, and thus restrain his idealism by a more robust and healthy realism; and finally, that he does not react to surroundings mechanically and uniformly as animals do, but possesses the ability and the freedom to determine his own reactions and to change surroundings at his will.

There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition — well it wouldn’t, since shocks never console — or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so as much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even in its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays — even showboats and grandstands — to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers — in all of us — for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts — with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.

As any numbers of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.

More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords. There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry.

Self-doubt is that part of the soul that is able to taste the bitter in life as well as the sweet. It is open to a side of life that a sunny disposition must ignore in order to carry on smiling. It is less interested in pretense and more aware of the suffering entailed in daily living. It is realistic about the balance of suffering and happiness, but because of this realism is willing to be thankful for whatever genuine happiness is possible. It celebrates the melancholy nature of aloneness, but because of its refusal to shirk aloneness knows the worth of a real relationship.

Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.

Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.

Do people age into acceptance? Is this personality or maturity or a natural realism? Had he already accomplished what he wanted to do? Did he see his kids get married, reach an anniversary, or hit a milestone? What amounted to enough?

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

Much of contemporary "realism" turns out to be just a variation on good old fashioned fatalism: people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of 'nature'. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we try not to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean we should freely express violence? We cannot. Submission to genetic programming can become dangerous, because it leaves us helpless.

The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.

As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic. ‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, ‘is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’. At

One reason for this absence is that black writers have only recently entered the popular genres in force. Our writers have historically been regarded as a footnote best suited to address the nature of our own chains. So, if black writers wanted to branch out past the realism of racism and race, they were curtailed by their own desire to document the crimes of America. A further deterrent was the white literary establishment’s desire for blacks to write about being black in a white world, a limitation imposed upon a limitation.

The part of the Lake District that Beatrix Potter chose as her own was not only physically beautiful, it was a place in which she felt emotionally rooted as a descendant of hard-working north-country folk. The predictable routines of farm life appealed to her. There was a realism in the countryside that nurtured a deep connection. The scale of the villages was manageable. Yet the vast desolateness of the surrounding fells was awe-inspiring. It was mysterious, but easily imbued with fantasy and tamed by imagination. The sheltered lakes and fertile valleys satisfied her love of the pastoral. The hill farms and the sheep on the high fells demanded accountability. There was a longing in Beatrix Potter for association with permanence: to find a place where time moved slowly, where places remained much as she remembered them from season to season and from year to year.

Miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realist to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit that fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.

cult of cosmic pessimism. Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on.

However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.

Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality, otherwise known as bowdlerizing,is intolerably vulgar...Unimaginative realism evokes only the smug pleasure of recognition.the painter becomes popular because he assures everyone else that he sees no more than they see...Art is suggestive rather than explicit: it makes no attempt to persuade into general agreement or provide mediocre levels of explanation...the bold imagination produces great art; the timid one small art. But the healthy eye does not see more broadly and vaguely than the weak eye; it sees more clearly...a real miracle is an imaginative effort which meets with an imaginative response.

Russian realism was born in the second half of the forties. ... In substance it is a cross between the satirical naturalism of Gogol and an older sentimentalism revived and represented in the thirties and forties by the then enormously influential George Sand. Gogol and George Sand were the father and mother of Russian realism and its accepted masters during the initial stages.

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.

The world is simple and life is simple too’—if there is anything in this thesis that might contain truth, it would be life from a child’s point of view. Children do not have any obvious duties, like paying taxes or going to work. They are protected by their parents and society, and can spend days free from care. They can imagine a future that goes on forever and do whatever they want. They don’t have to see grim reality—they are blindfolded. So, to them the world must have a simple form. However, as a child matures to adulthood the world reveals its true nature. Very shortly, the child will know how things really are and what he is really allowed to do. His opinion will alter and all he will see is impossibility. His romantic view will end and be replaced by cruel realism.

it is perhaps worth introducing an elementary theoretical distinction from Lacanian psychoanalysis which Žižek has done so much to give contemporary currency: the difference between the Real and reality. As Alenka Zupancic explains, psychoanalysis’s positing of a reality principle invites us to be suspicious of any reality that presents itself as natural. ‘The reality principle’, Zupancic writes, is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are ... The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology. For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. Environmental

Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parliamentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions’. Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’. Harvey demonstrates that, in an era popularly described as ‘post-political’, class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy.

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no ‘value vacuums’ in human history, no ‘intermediary periods’, only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it. The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction. Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure. Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies. Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral. Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior. (Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognised by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The

In realism you get down to facts on which the world is based; that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealisable misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotism. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact

We can view politics as an art form, since political action shapes human beings destiny to be an ambassador of goodwill and humanitarian activities. Alternatively, we can perceive politics as a crime because it can give vent to collective passions of hatred and barbarism. Americans must decide whether to muster our collective political powers to end warfare and curb corporate exploitation of natural resources or pursue nationalism and perpetuate barbarous ruination of the environment. The outcome of these decisive challenges will alter our national consciousness.

Suspicion of the senses remained the core of scientific pride until in our time it has turned into a source of uneasiness. The trouble is that "we find nature behaving so differently from what we observe in the visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be 'true' "; at this point the indissoluble connection between our thinking and our sense perception takes its revenge, for a model that would leave sense experience altogether out of account and, therefore, be completely adequate to nature in the experiment is not only ''practically inaccessible but not even thinkable.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked at himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompose, and went presumably, to his bath. We many take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory - but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark spots had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change in sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando has always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised and felt the riddle and the hopelessness of human life, with its moments of transcendence that sink again to wretchedness, and the impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost of many days' enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human state is condemned—to its consuming despair.

The Communion controversy of the ninth century was merely the signal for a much greater controversy that divided the minds of men for centuries and had incalculable consequences. This was the conflict between nominalism and realism. By nominalism is meant that school which asserted that the so-called universals, namely generic or universal concepts such as beauty, goodness, animal, man, etc., are nothing but nomina, names, or words, derisively called flatus vocis. Anatole France says: “What is thinking? And how does one think? We think with words; that in itself is sensual and brings us back to nature. Think of it! A metaphysician has nothing with which to construct his world system except the perfected cries of monkeys and dogs.”10 This is extreme nominalism, as it is when Nietzsche says that reason is “speech metaphysics.

Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property...in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association between a person and that which is said to be possessed, which is to say that ownership was, in its strictest definition, the societal distinction between the owner and the non-owner with respect to the property in question. Beyond this, the concept of ownership varied further from society-to-society according to their respective derivations of natural law, legal positivism and legal realism. Some societies—the indigenous Itako tribes...for example—railed against their governments’ initiatives for private ownership in favor of maintaining equal access to available resources (in the case of the Itako, this was due primarily to the fact that theirs were kin-based tribes whose membership sought to live communally). All the same, even this notion of common possession seemed to me rather arrogant, for the necessitated existence of a public domain was rooted in the shared human dominance over the objects or organisms in question. And so, in my dizzying contemplation, I began to yearn for a greater law that stretched to vast limits beyond that which governed humanity alone. The voice in my mind spoke earnestly of the need for a unifying jurisprudence which could preside over all of Nature’s manifestations in a manner either probabilistically fair or mathematically arbitrary. And perhaps, still, this would not be enough.

The main thing is not to be deceived, that is, to lie and and simulate better than the others. All Stendhal's great novels revolve around the problem of hypocrisy, around the secret of how to deal with men and how to rule the world; they are all in the nature of text-book of political realism and courses of instruction in political amoralism. In his critique of Stendhal, Balzac already remarks that Chartreuse de Parme is a new Principe, which Machiavelli himself, if he had lived as an emigre in the Italy of nineteenth century, would not have been able to write any differently. Julien Sorel's Machiavellian motto, "Qui veut les fins veut les moyens," here acquires its classical formulation, as used repeatedly by Balzac himself, namely that one must accept the rules of the world's game, if one wants to count in the world and to take part in the play.

Twentieth-century empiricism made an important mistake here. We can make sense of science only by treating much of it as an attempt to describe hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena. This is a version of scientific realism, an idea that will be discussed later in this book. In science there are depths. There is not a simple and fixed distinction between two "layers" in nature-the empiricists were right to distrust this idea. Instead there are many layers, or rather a continuum between structures that are more accessible to us and structures that are less accessible. Genes are hidden from us in some ways, but not as hidden as electrons, which in turn are not as hidden as quarks. Although there are "depths" in science, what is deep at one time can come to the surface at later times, and there may be lots of ways of interacting with what is presently deep.

It is not miracles that prompt realists to belief. The genuine realist , if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The apostle thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said: "My Lord and my God!" Was it the miracle that forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said: "I do not believe till I see.

Hitler exploited images and tropes that were familiar to Christians: God, prayers, original sin, commandments, prophets, chosen people, messiahs—even the familiar Christian tripartite structure of time: first paradise, then exodus, and finally redemption. We live in filth, and we must strain to purify ourselves and the world so that we might return to paradise. To see paradise as the battle of the species rather than the concord of creation was to unite Christian longing with the apparent realism of biology. The war of all against all was not terrifying purposelessness, but instead the only purpose to be had in the universe. Nature’s bounty was for man, as in Genesis, but only for the men who follow nature’s law and fight for her. As in Genesis, so in My Struggle, nature was a resource for man: but not for all people, only for triumphant races. Eden was not a garden but a trench.

The pragmatists James, Schiller, and Dewey viewed science as a conceptual shorthand for organizing observations ... and now I, for all my vaunted naturalism, seem drawn into the same position. Is there no difference? The difference is to be sought in ontology ... Dewey's reality consisted of observable objects ... For naturalistic philosophers such as I, on the other hand, physical objects are real, right down to the most hypothetical of particles, though this recognition of them is subject, like all science, to correction. I can hold this ontological line of naive and unregenerate realism, and at the same time I can hail man as largely the author rather than discoverer of truth. I can hold both lines because the scientific truth about physical objects is still the truth, for all man's authorship. In my naturalism, I recognize no higher truth than that which science provides or seeks.

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives. Antirealism is always a conjectural possibility: the question can always be posed, whether there is anything more to truth in a certain domain than our tendency to reach certain conclusions in this way, perhaps in convergence with others. Sometimes, as with grammar or etiquette, the answer is no. For that reason the intuitive conviction that a particular domain, like the physical world, or mathematics, or morality, or aesthetics, is one in which our judgments are attempts to respond to a kind of truth that is independent of them may be impossible to establish decisively. Yet it may be very robust all the same, and not unjustified. To be sure, there are competing subjectivist explanations of the appearance of mind-independence in the truth of moral and other value judgments. One of the things a sophisticated subjectivism allows us to say when we judge that infanticide is wrong is that it would be wrong even if none of us thought so, even though that second judgment too is still ultimately grounded in our responses. However, I find those quasi-realist, expressivist accounts of the ground of objectivity in moral judgments no more plausible than the subjectivist account of simpler value judgments. These epicycles are of the same kind as the original proposal: they deny that value judgments can be true in their own right, and this does not accord with what I believe to be the best overall understanding of our thought about value. There is no crucial experiment that will establish or refute realism about value. One ground for rejecting it, the type used by Hume, is simply question-begging: if it is supposed that objective moral truths can exist only if they are like other kinds of facts--physical, psychological, or logical--then it is clear that there aren't any. But the failure of this argument doesn't prove that there are objective moral truths. Positive support for realism can come only from the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held and the development of new and improved methods and arguments over time. The realist interpretation of what we are doing in thinking about these things can carry conviction only if it is a better account than the subjectivist or social-constructivist alternatives, and that is always going to be a comparative question and a matter of judgment, as it is about any other domain, whether it be mathematics or science or history or aesthetics.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.

Dogmatists of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control. The dogmatists then try to take over the artist. The church, in certain periods, harnessed him to prescribed subjects and methods. Capitalism tries to take over the artist by buying him. And Soviet realism tried to do so by social proscription. The result, by the very nature of the creative impulse, is fatal to art. If it were possible to control the artist--and I do not believe it is--it would mean the death of art.

Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them, how the presence to myself that defines me and that conditions every external presence is simultaneously a depresentation and throws me outside of myself. Idealism, by making the exterior immanent in me, and realism, by subjecting me to a causal action, both falsify the relations of motivation that exist between the exterior and the interior and render this relation incomprehensible...On the level of being, we will never understand that the subject is simultaneously creating and created, and simultaneously infinite and finite. But if we uncover time beneath the subject, and if we reconnect the paradox of time to the paradoxes of the body, the world, the thing, and others, then we will understand that there is nothing more to understand.

But although realism does not add anything to the catalogue of entities or properties that a subjectivist believes to exist in the world, it does hold that certain truths that subjectivists think have to be grounded in something else do not have to be so grounded, but are just true in their own right. After all, whatever one's philosophical views, so long as there is such a thing as truth there must be some truths that don't have to be grounded in anything else. Disagreement over which truths these are defines some of the deepest fault lines of philosophy. To philosophers of an idealist persuasion it is self-evident that physical facts can't just be true in themselves, but must be explained in terms of actual or possible experience, just as it is self-evident to those of a materialist persuasion that mental facts can't just be true in themselves, but must be explained in terms of actual or possible behavior, functional organization, or physiology. The issue over moral realism is of the same kind.

And we oughtn't to be contrasting the imaginative, dreamy outlook of children with the realism and objectivity of adults. It is children who are the true realists: They never proceed from generalities. The adult recognizes the general form in a particular example, a representative of the species, dismisses everything else and states: that's a lilac, there's an ash tree, an apple tree. The child perceives individuals, personalities. He sees the unique form, and doesn't mask it with a common name or function. When you walk with children they enable you to see the fabulous beasts in tree foliage, to smell the sweetness of blossoms. It isn't a triumph of the imagination, but an unprejudiced, total realism. And Nature becomes instantly poetic. These outings are the absolute reign of childhood. You lose its charm in growing up, because you end by acquiring ideas and certainties about everything, and no longer want to know more of things than their objective representation (sadly called their 'truths').

Kant’s teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. The change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of really removing the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect. Neither Berkeley nor Malebranche is competent to do this, for these men remain too much in the universal, whereas Kant goes into the particular. And this he does in a way which is unexpected either before or after him, and one which has quite a peculiar, one might say immediate, effect on the mind. In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at all things in another light. But only in this way does man become susceptible to the more positive explanations that I am going to give. On the other hand, the man who has not mastered the Kantian philosophy, whatever else he may studied, is, so to speak, in a state of innocence; in other words, he has remained in the grasp of that natural and childlike realism in which we are all born, and which qualifies one for every possible thing except philosophy.

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

The wind was blustering again, whipping the curtains. Peter went over to close the window. The moon was now high on the eastern rise, radiant above the church where small water-cart clouds raced across the sky. About to fasten the window latch, his eye was drawn down to the garden. The fox stood under the apple tree looking up at him. The animal began to bark. Each monosyllabic yip and yap seemed to mimic human speech. By some strange power or spell, Peter could understand what the animal was saying. He heard the words loud and clear. ‘I-am Si-on,’ the fox barked. Man and beast looked unwaveringly at one another, neither moving a muscle. The wind stopped blowing, the curtains hung at rest. Peter leaned out the window. ‘What do you want from me?’ he called down. ‘Save-us-from-the-stea-lers,’ barked Sion. Peter’s mind reeled. It would be madness to believe he could understand what the fox was saying—lunacy to think he could commune with it! ‘I must still be asleep,’ he reasoned, closing the window. He sat down on the bed, folding his hands in his lap. But this is not a dream. Lying down, he pulled the bedcovers over himself. ‘Save-us! Save-us! Save-us!’ the fox kept barking from the garden.

When we get down to potential versus reality in relationships, we often see disappointment, not successful achievement. In the Church, if someone creates nuclear fallout in a calling, they are often released or reassigned quickly. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury when we marry. So many of us have experienced this sad realization in the first weeks of our marriages. For example, we realized that our partner was not going to live up to his/her potential and give generously to the partnership. While fighting the mounting feelings of betrayal, we watched our new spouses claim a right to behave any way they desired, often at our expense. Most of us made the "best" of a truly awful situation but felt like a rat trapped in maze. We raised a family, played our role, and hoped that someday things would change if we did our part. It didn't happen, but we were not allowed the luxury of reassigning or releasing our mates from poor stewardship as a spouse or parent. We were stuck until we lost all hope and reached for the unthinkable: divorce. Reality is simple for some. Those who stay happily married (the key word here is happily are the ones who grew and felt companionship from the first days of marriage. Both had the integrity and dedication to insure its success. For those of us who are divorced, tracing back to those same early days, potential disappeared and reality reared its ugly head. All we could feel, after a sealing for "time and all eternity," was bound in an unholy snare. Take the time to examine the reality of who your sweetheart really is. What do they accomplish by natural instinct and ability? What do you like/dislike about them? Can you live with all the collective weaknesses and create a happy, viable union? Are you both committed to making each other happy? Do you respect each other's agency, and are you both encouraging and eager to see the two of you grow as individuals and as a team? Do you both talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk? Or do you love them and hope they'll change once you're married to them? Chances are that if the answer to any of these questions are "sorta," you are embracing their potential and not their reality. You may also be embracing your own potential to endure issues that may not be appropriate sacrifices at this stage in your life. No one changes without the internal impetus and drive to do so. Not for love or money. . . . We are complex creatures, and although we are trained to see the "good" in everyone, it is to our benefit to embrace realism when it comes to finding our "soul mate." It won't get much better than what you have in your relationship right now.

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires. Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of the economic activities of man. To contribute to a similar development in the field of politics is indeed the purpose of political realism.

I want to share three warnings. First, to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back. Second, to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians. Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner, or else his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout. The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong–yet. You haven’t been cheated–yet. An idealist can be right her whole life and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. The time has come for a new view of human nature. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

The Naked Truth When the gift-giving meaning of the body is obscured, distorted, or misrepresented, art becomes a lie. This is what happens in pornography. The body—which was created to be a free gift from one person to another—is depersonalized and reduced to an object for lust. This concern for human dignity goes against the grain of “naturalism” in art. The so-called naturalists demand the right to reproduce “everything that is human.” What others call pornography, they defend as a realistic depiction of humanity. But in the end, it is precisely this—the whole truth about man—that is lost when privacy is violated and the body is reduced to an object for lust. In order to speak of true realism in art, the full truth about man as created in the image of God must be considered. In this respect, the principles governing interpersonal relations still apply within the realm of art. The naked human body has a “language.” It expresses the spirit. When given in trust and love, the body is the basis of a communion of persons. Because the naked human body has such importance, it must be depicted with great care to preserve its meaning in art. Only within certain boundaries can the truth about the body be preserved. In film, photography, and mass media, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the body from the person. Reproduced on paper or on screen, the naked body can cease to communicate the person. It often becomes, instead, an anonymous object. Because the glory and beauty of the human body is at stake, we cannot remain indifferent to culture. We do not oppose pornography out of a narrow, puritanical idea of morality. Nor do we oppose it out of a Manichaean fear or hatred of the body, as is often asserted. The exact opposite is true. We oppose pornography out of respect for the dignity of the body.

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame. So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.

Theistic absolutism and realism are the basic ontological principles of Kashmir Shaivism. In this philosophy everything that exists is real, and yet is spiritual as well, because everything is the manifestation of an absolute reality, described as pure, eternal, and infinite Consciousness. According to the ancient authors of this philosophy, the essential features of Consciousness are Its infinite, divine, and joyful vitality, and the inclination to manifest Its powers of creation, preservation, dissolution, obscuration, and revelation. The vibrant, creative quality is the divine essence of God. Consciousness is also described as luminous. It illuminates Itself and is always aware of Itself and everything within It. The ancient masters refer in various ways to this One creative force out of which everything emerges. It is known most commonly as the Ultimate, Absolute Reality, Consciousness, Paramasiva, and God. Yet, according to Kashmir Shaivism, Paramasiva cannot be fully described or clearly thought over because, being infinite in nature, He cannot be confined to any thinking or speaking ability. No words can fully describe Him, no mind can correctly think about Him, and no understanding can perfectly understand Him. This is His absoluteness, and Kashmir Shaivism considers this absoluteness to be one of His key attributes. Because the Absolute cannot be fathomed with the intellect or through ordinary logical reasoning and philosophical speculation, the ancient masters relied on revelation (darsana) in deep yogic states to arrive at their understanding and truths of Reality. Working from the foundation of absolute non-dualism, they discovered Paramasiva within their own consciousness; looking within they found the Whole. They were able to transcend the ordinary limited vision of the individual self, and to discover the universal Self. Since this Self of each individual is claimed to be none other than the Absolute, and because God and the Self are understood as one, this philosophy is truly theistic. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 15–16.

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.

In Leibniz we can already find the striking observation that *cogitatur ergo est* is no less evident than *cogito ergo sum*. Naturally, *est* here does not mean existence or reality but being of whatever kind and form, including even ideal being, fictive being, conscious-being [*Bewusst-Sein*], etc. However, we must go even beyond this thesis of Leibniz. The correlate of the act of *cogitatio* is not, as Leibniz said, being simply, but only that type of being we call "objectifiable being." Objectifiable being must be sharply distinguished from the non-objectifiable being of an act, that is, from a kind of entity which possesses its mode of being only in performance [*Vollzug*], namely, in the performance of the act. "Being," in the widest sense of the word, belongs indeed to the being-of-an-act [*Akt-Sein*], to *cogitare*, which does not in turn require another *cogitare*. Similarly, we are only vaguely "aware" of our drives [*Triebleben*] without having them as objects as we do those elements of consciousness which lend themselves to imagery. For this reason the first order of evidence is expressed in the principle, "There is something," or, better, "There is not nothing." Here we understand by the word "nothing" the negative state of affairs of not-being in general rather than "not being something" or "not being actual." A second principle of evidence is that everything which "is" in any sense of the possible kinds of being can be analyzed in terms of its character or essence (not yet separating its contingent characteristics from its genuine essence) and its existence in some mode. With these two principles we are in a position to define precisely the concept of knowledge, a concept which is prior even to that of consciousness. Knowledge is an ultimate, unique, and underivable ontological relationship between two beings. I mean by this that any being A "knows" any being B whenever A participates in the essence or nature of B, without B's suffering any alteration in its nature or essence because of A's participation in it. Such participation is possible both in the case of objectifiable being and in that of active [*akthaften*] being, for instance, when we repeat the performance of the act; or in feelings, when we relive the feelings, etc. The concept of participation is, therefore, wider than that of objective knowledge, that is, knowledge of objectifiable being. The participation which is in question here can never be dissolved into a causal relation, or one of sameness and similarity, or one of sign and signification; it is an ultimate and essential relation of a peculiar type. We say further of B that, when A participates in B and B belongs to the order of objectifiable being, B becomes an "objective being" ["*Gegenstand"-sein*]. Confusing the being of an object [*Sein des Gegenstandes*] with the fact that an entity is an object [*Gegenstandssein eines Seienden*] is one of the fundamental errors of idealism. On the contrary, the being of B, in the sense of a mode of reality, never enters into the knowledge-relation. The being of B can never stand to the real bearer of knowledge in any but a causal relation. The *ens reale* remains, therefore, outside of every possible knowledge-relation, not only the human but also the divine, if such exists. Both the concept of the "intentional act" and that of the "subject" of this act, an "I" which performs acts, are logically posterior. The intentional act is to be defined as the process of becoming [*Werdesein*] in A through which A participates in the nature or essence of B, or that through which this participation is produced. To this extent the Scholastics were right to begin with the distinction between an *ens intentionale* and an *ens reale*, and then, on the basis of this distinction, to distinguish between an intentional act and a real relation between the knower and the being of the thing known." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

David tried to relax. His gaze drifted to the crowded sidewalks of stressed humanity, comparing them to the idealized versions in billboards and storefronts. Even without hallucinations, it was a horrifying scene, he reflected. And Wharton believed he was going to bring a revolution to all this. “Most people are other people,” he said aloud. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” “Which is itself a quotation,” chimed Wharton. “Oscar Wilde, I believe.” “Nothing gets past you.” “Not anymore.” David glanced at the confident figure sitting next to him. He tilted again, “So, how are you going to save all these people? They’re just a bunch of dupes who don’t even realise they’re getting fucked. There’s no golden future for the human race.” “Whoo! We need to get you detoxed – fast! Your mind is toxic!” “The fucks running this planet – they got us all stupid and downtrodden. They’ve got the media, the corporations, the banks. They just fill our troughs and we come a-gathering around, pushing each other about in the mud. They’ve got all the aces … Shit, they print the fucking aces!” “Do you think you’re telling me something new? You’ve got it wrong. I’m telling you something new here.” Wharton faced him and moved closer, almost confrontational. “The guys in charge – the fucks – the fat old dudes in the smoky backroom. They’re sitting on a powder keg, which is this: humanity and its potential – a potential so hard wired, so written into every cell, that it’s destiny. And they’re desperate to avoid anything that might cause a spark.” Light and dark took turns on Wharton’s face as they rolled on. He continued, “We are that spark. … Think small, you’ll be small. It’s time to go beyond all that programming and conditioning. The very fact that this material reality even exists is a fact too wondrous to truly behold. Too wondrous to behold! So, naturally, most of the time, it’s not ‘beheld’.” Despite the hushed tone, he was enjoying himself. “Don’t get made mundane just because of what the system tells you – it’s only the reigning ideology of the day. ‘Naive realism’, we call it. (…)

the hypothesis of value realism is superfluous—a wheel that spins without being attached to anything. From a Darwinian perspective our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless. And if that is true for our most basic responses, it is also true for the entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up from them by practical reflection and cultural development—just as scientific realism would be undermined if we abandoned a realistic interpretation of the perceptual experiences on which science is based. Even a system based on the maintenance of coherence or consistency among one’s responses does not need the idea of mind-independent truth about value (as opposed to logic),

Oh it cannot be denied that in the monastery he believed completely in miracles, but in my experience miracles never bother a realist. It is not miracles that incline a realist towards faith. The true realist, if he is not a believer, will invariably find within himself the strength and the ability not to believe in miracles either, and if a miracle stands before him as a incontrovertible fact, he will sooner disbelieve his senses than admit that fact. And even if he does admit it, it will be as a fact of nature, but one that until now has been obscure to him. In the realist it is not faith that is born of miracles, but miracles of faith. Once a realist believes, his realism inexorably compels him to admit miracles too. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not belive until he saw, and when he saw, said: 'My Lord and my God.' Was it the miracle that had made him believe? The likeliest explanation is that it was not, and that he came to believe for the sole reason that he wanted to believe and, perhaps, in the inmost corners of his being already fully believed, even when he said: 'Except I shall see... I will not believe.' [John 20:25]

The Cold War liberal even discovered the political utility of a civil religion. He was prepared to put aside the secularism and rationalism that, historically, had been among liberalism’s defining elements and to seek validation for liberal anticommunism abroad and at home by appealing to theology, most notably that of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. Niebuhr was notoriously pessimistic, subscribing to a view that stressed the dark side of human nature.

The natural world is more recognizable and identifiable in its unaffected replies and usual predictability. This genuineness does have residual seepage observable in the surreal world of humanity as well, in instances where nature or a natural reality is observed in experience with an impassioned, ephemeral detection and the entirety of the world is shortly exposed as still living, composed of material, substance, texture and essence beyond the normalized human exposure of chosen limits of sensitivities, of closing endpoints of understanding, of illusory trickeries of senses, bewildering connotations of truth, and prospering beliefs in a newer, grander realism of self and the world without vital appreciation of a contextual reckoning of proportionality embedded within the curving, yielding designs of universal scales.” “Aspergic tendencies can establish a lifelong process of rebellious, reciprocated self-learning and self-teaching, whether the lessons taught are from oneself or insightful others during watchful experiences seeking new, keen-sighted inspirations to be marked by patterned, humorously strange and unexpectedly connected presences. It makes an individual believe in a perceived world which exists better in the enactions of others, while the real world of behaving, sensing and seeing a differently textured reality becomes an alleged fantasy.” “To an aspergic personality, allistic normalcy can be an enthrallment contrary to a naturally minded quest for equilibrium as a relationship with all reality. There can be guilt over one’s own social inadequacy. Inane separation can come from not wanting to impose such great exertion requirements on most others for the sake of a singular attending identity.” “As with multitudes of peoples under clever and hard-fought capitulation, nature quietly must adhere and defer to the idea of the perfect fusion of mind and body as fitting the successes of humanity accidentally shaped as the dualistic and sensitive personification of celestial, god-imaged spirituality within the universe.

How many times, since she was just a child, had her and Mum hung clothes together here as Mum told her stories? Some real, some pretend, some Helen couldn’t quite tell the difference between. For decades Mum insisted that as a child a true mermaid had been her friend. The mergirl had gotten injured by a fallen rock near Mum’s home, and she claimed to have helped the creature back to health. When Helen was small she accepted the tale as truth, but when she grew and dropped her belief in other fairy tales Mum would insist this was different. “Her tail felt smooth when I would slide my fingers down it, but the scales were sharp if I slid my palm up. I don’t have to pretend it’s true or convince you. I held magic in my hands. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I realized I had.” “But there’s no such thing as mermaids and magic,” Helen had refuted once. Mum had lowered herself to meet Helen’s eyes. “Oh, there’s magic in this world. Do you think that just because you can explain something that makes it not magic anymore? How a wildflower grows is magic. The first snow of winter? Absolutely. Stand on any theater’s stage and you can’t deny it’s there. Sit on any shore and you’ll always feel it.

Therefore Whitman failed radically in his dearest ambition: he can never be a poet of the people. For the people, like the early races whose poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. They have no doubts about the absolute desirability of wealth and learning and power, none about the worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their chosen poets, if they have any, will he always those who have known how to paint these ideals in lively even if in gaudy colours. Nothing is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive. They instinctively look toward a more exalted life, which they imagine to be full of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble admiration. If the people are ever won over to hostility to such ideals, it is only because they are cheated by demagogues who tell them that if all the flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits would become more abundant. A greater share of happiness, people think, would fall to their lot could they destroy everything beyond their own possible possessions. But they are made thus envious and ignoble only by a deception: what they really desire is an ideal good for themselves which they are told they may secure by depriving others of their preeminence. Their hope is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction themselves; and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque aspects of labour and vagrancy will hardly be the poet of the poor. He may have described their figure and occupation, in neither of which they are much interested; he will not have read their souls. They will prefer to him any sentimental story-teller, any sensational dramatist any moralizing poet; for they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamoured of themselves or of the conditions of their existence.