Monthly Archives: December 2013

Reason and Passion

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Reason and Passion

By Kahlil Gibran
(1883 – 1931)

 

And the priestess spoke again and said: Speak to us of Reason and Passion.
And he answered, saying:
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.
Surely you would not honor one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows — then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”
And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, — then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”
And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

Shared by Mirza Ashraf

 

“Madiba, Mahatma and the Limits of Nonviolence” By Misha Lepetic

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“Mandela himself was not removed from the US terrorist watch list until 2008, a full 15 years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize and serving as South Africa’s first president.”

“And if you can’t bear the thought of messing up
your nice, clean soul, you’d better give up the
whole idea of life, and become a saint.”

 ~ John Osborne, “Look Back in Anger”

The perpetuation of the saccharine narrative is enabled by, among other things, the cherry-picking of Mandela’s own words. One endlessly quoted passage has been the end of Mandela’s opening statement at the start of his trial on charges of sabotage, at the Supreme Court of South Africa, on April 20th, 1964:

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

This is stirring stuff, and worthy of being engraved into the marble of a monument, but only if you bother to read the preceding 10,000 words. In a far-reaching statement notable for its pellucidity, Mandela lays out the circumstances and philosophy that resulted in armed struggle against the regime.

“I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto [we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC]. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.”

Without this context, Mandela’s lofty concluding paragraph is as cheap as a Hallmark card. It’s now clear to the reader exactly the lengths to which Mandela would be willing to go to die for his beliefs – not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a fiery revolutionary. It is difficult to conceive of Gandhi initiating such actions. But why was Mandela prepared at that point to resort to violence? –

I am not gratuitously bringing up Gandhi’s name. His example is especially instructive, since he lived in South Africa for 21 years, and it was in the course of resistance to discrimination against the Hindu, Muslim and Chinese minorities in that country that he first formulated the idea of satyagraha and non-violent resistance that would prove to be so effective, decades later, in India. And yet, as an exclusive strategy, non-violence failed in South Africa, or at least was found to be ineffective enough that, 50 years after Gandhi’s initial experience, ANC leaders like Mandela were forced to conclude that armed resistance was in fact appropriate and necessary. So why did Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolence succeed in India but not in South Africa? In hindsight, we tend to see effective strategies of resistance as almost inevitable, partly thanks to their ennobling nature, but also as a result of the absence of any historical counterfactual. Hannah Arendt, who knew a thing or two about power, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1969:

“In a head-on clash between violence and power the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy—Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even pre-war Japan, instead of England—the outcome would not have been decolonization but massacre and submission -”

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/12/madiba-mahatma-and-the-limits-of-nonviolence.html#more

( Posted by F. Sheikh )

 

” What did the Greeks ever do for God?” By Kenan Malik

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Interesting article on how the concept of Gods evolved from immortal and powerful, but as immoral as humans, to most powerful, immortal and unrivaled moral God- and humans became nothing but morally frail, who need God’s graciousness to become moral. (F.Sheikh). Some excerpts from article;

”  Cruelty, treachery, disloyalty, corruption, meanness – the myths and tales of most ancient societies were alive to the worst aspects of human nature. Such moral frailty was not, however unique to humans. The gods were often equally wretched in their behaviour. The line between humanity and God was drawn not in morality but in power.  Gods possessed powers that humans could only dream of, and as immortals they were untouched by death, but their power and immortality did not improve their moral conduct.

Monotheism remade that line between human nature and divine nature. Gods remained powerful, humans restricted in their powers. Indeed, as a whole divinity of gods was reduced down to a single Creator, that single Creator became far more powerful than previous gods had been.  But the key distinction between human beings and God was now not simply one of immortality and power.  It was also one of morality. The monotheistic faiths drew a new contrast between corrupted humanity and incorruptible God, a contrast that transformed moral frailty into a condition, not of the cosmos, but of being human. It was in Christianity that this distinction was made clearest.

In redrawing the line between humanity and God, monotheism both adopted and discarded major themes in Greek philosophy. Greek philosophers had recognized human moral frailties, but had also believed that through reason and education some individuals at least could overcome the lure of the baser aspects of the soul. It was in the use of reason to accommodate life to the exigencies of fate that human dignity lay. At the same time, there was a strand within Greek philosophy that  helped make more profound the distinction between Man and God. The distaste for the idea of capricious gods, and the desire for naturalistic explanations, evident from the Presocratics onwards, led some, like Democritus, to dismiss the very idea of gods and to insist on a purely materialist universe. Others redefined the nature of godliness.”

“Greek philosophers had accepted that the standards followed by virtuous people are too demanding for ordinary folk, but believed that, given the appropriate knowledge and character, human individuals are capable of satisfying the most exacting moral measure. For Aristotle, humans were capable both of establishing what constituted the good and of working their way towards it. For Plato, the Good was defined by a transcendental Form in a different realm. Humans, however, or at least some humans, possessed the capacity to apprehend the Good and to attempt to create the good life on Earth. For Christians, however, only through the grace of God could humans be moral. ‘None is good’, as Jesus was to say, ‘save one, that is, God.’ Or as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God’. The other side of faith in the goodness of God was the insistence on the moral wretchedness of human beings. Not for more than a millennium would a new vision of human nature, and of human capacities, begin to challenge Pauline despair.”

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/what-did-the-greeks-ever-do-for-god/