Quotations, thoughts, and incomplete half-baked musings I found worth recording while I read a bunch of books. Mostly on spirituality, Christianity, philosophy.
May 16, 2025 ”
May 16, 2025 ”This is the conflict that singularly characterizes the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as a female because she does not want to mutilate herself, but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a sexed human being. Woman is a complete individual and equal to the male only if she too is a sexed human being. Renouncing her femininity means renouncing part of her humanity.” - Beauvoir, The Second Sex
May 14, 2025 To Beauvoir, woman “worries” because she “does not do anything.” Movement, action is always primary for Beauvoir. The question of “toward what?” has no objective answer, but is entirely subjective and situational. Personally I doubt if there is even a subjective answer for an existentialist.
May 14, 2025 “No existent is able to satisfy itself with an inessential role: he quickly makes ends out of means—as can be observed in politicians, among others—and in his eyes the value of the means becomes an absolute value. Thus utility reigns higher than truth, beauty, and freedom in the housewife’s heaven.” - De Beauvoir, The Second Sex
May 13, 2025 “[Feminists] want transcendence to prevail over immanence in themselves as in all of humanity; they want abstract rights and concrete possibilities to be granted to them, without which freedom is merely mystification.” - De Beauvoir, The Second Sex
May 12, 2025 What I find so frustrating about the existentialists (De Beauvoir in particular) is that their worldview is dominated by an antagonistic attitude toward nature. Nature is ultimately a brute fact - a situation - which is to be surpassed. I actually agree with them that we are not to look at nature simply as perfection - but the fact that nature is entirely arbitrary leaves them unmoored, alone, and anxious. The world is their project, but their “situation” is baseless and cannot inform them at all about why they must undertake this project or what it should produce except more freedom.
May 10, 2025 “He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not of the wise of the earth because maybe they don’t need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read but with the heart. Because the men who wrote His Book for Him were writing about truth and there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart.” - Faulkner, The Bear
May 9, 2025 If you want your children to read the Great Books, mark them as “forbidden” - too potent/powerful for them at this age. That will get them interested.
May 9, 2025 “Love and work….work and love, that's all there is.” - Freud