/tag/ambition

5 quotes tagged 'ambition'

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

139-140

Some have tried to argue a finalistic view of the unprecedented accumulation of energy in the atomic era. Theodor Litt, for example, has suggested that man might realize his own nature in the face of a crisis situation by using his free will, deciding in full responsibility, taking the risk, in one direction or the other. Currently the decision is over the destructive and military use of atomic energy, or its 'constructive,' peaceful use. \nIn an epoch of dissolution, such an idea seems completely abstract and fantastic, typical of intellectuals with no sense of reality. First it presupposes the existence of men who still possess an inner law and sure ideas about what course should really be followed — and this, beyond anything that relates to the purely material world. Second, it presumes that these hypothetical men are the very ones entrusted with the use of the new means of power, in one direction or the other. Both suppositions are chimerical, especially the second. Today's leaders are caught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control; they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at the service of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom, a decision as an 'absolute person.' \nIn fact, even the alternative suggested above, over which our contemporaries agonize so much, may present itself in terms very different from those advanced by a pacifist, progressivist, moralizing humanitarianism. I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope for man should think of the imminence of quasi-apocalyptic destruction. It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all its nakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evil than that of mankind's safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment to the kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche's 'last man': a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo?

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

100

Obviously, it takes discipline to make any radical change in one's own behavior patterns, and psychotherapy can drag on for years and years. But this is not my suggestion. Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as 'Your Honor' or 'Mi Lud,' without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this. He plays the role of judge all the better for realizing that on the next turn of the Wheel of Fortune he may be the accused, and that if all the truth were known, he would be standing there now. If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior, or to pluck out evil root and branch.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

To Have or to Be?

Author: Erich Fromm

Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver,' he is part of the labor force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organization of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organization, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinized in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinized, and prefabricated. How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

For Spinoza, mental health is, in the last analysis, a manifestation of right living; mental illness, a symptom of the failure to live according to the requirements of human nature. \r\n \r\n>But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as 'illness' (Ethics, 4, prop. 44). \r\n \r\nIn this statement, so foreign to the thinking of our time, Spinoza considers passions that do not correspond to the needs of human nature as pathological; in fact, he goes so far as to call them a form of insanity.