The people we are tempted to call clods and boors are just those who seem to find nothing fascinating in being human; their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them. There is also something incomplete about those who find nothing fascinating in being. You may say that this is a philosopher's professional prejudice—that people are defective who lack a sense of the metaphysical. But anyone who thinks at all must be a philosopher—a good one or a bad one—because it is impossible to think without premises, without basic (and in this sense, metaphysical) assumptions about what is sensible, what is the good life, what is beauty, and what is pleasure. To hold such assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, is to philosophize. The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

• humanity
• beauty
• life
• thought
• pleasure
• self
• philosophy
• prejudice
• assumptions

The sociologists who have begun to raise questions about the living conditions created by modern social developments (first of all in the United States) have gathered a great deal of empirical data, but they have failed to grasp the true nature of their object of study because they fail to recognize the critique that is inherent in that object. As a result, those among them who sincerely wish to reform these conditions can only appeal to ethical standards, common sense, moderation, and other measures that are equally inadequate for dealing with the problems in question. Because this method of criticism is unaware of the negativity at the heart of its world, it focuses on describing and deploring an excessive sort of negativity that seems to blight the surface of that world like some irrational parasitic infestation. This outraged good will, which even within its own moralizing framework ends up blaming only the external consequences of the system, can see itself as critical only by ignoring the essentially apologetic character of its assumptions and methods.

• other
• will
• nature
• character
• consequences
• assumptions
• criticism

Ecological experience, like the body image, belongs to the unreflexive realm of primary consciousness and is, accordingly, normally inaccessible to conscious examination and representation. [John M] Hull's blindness, however, like Sack's injury, seems to have created for him a window through which he was privileged to observe how his sense of self was shaped by the usually invisible sensory reception of data from the world. In both cases, a sensory deficit is experienced as a deficit of identity. Because Hull became blind only in midlife, in his forties, after a lifelong struggle with failing vision, his new condition sensitized him to probe the unexamined assumptions that the sighted take for granted in their conception of identity. \r\n\r\n*note*: would increased sensory experience lead to an increase of sense of identity?

• experience
• body image
• senses
• identity
• consciousness
• perception
• self-observation
• blindness
• assumptions
• note
• flag
• self
• struggle
• body

suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego‑dominator cultural style. It is time for change.

• meaning
• life
• time
• change
• ego
• assumptions

most of the “central person’s” functions do have to do with guilt, expiation, and unambiguous heroics. The important conclusion for us is that the groups “use” the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges. W. R. Bion, in an important recent paper22 extended this line of thought even further from Freud, arguing that the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his “individual distinctiveness” by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.23

• freedom
• thought
• functions
• guilt
• freud
• assumptions
• other

Q. What is self-will? And what is the difference between self-will and wilfulness? A. There is no particular difference. Both are manifestations of the same thing— generally, manifestations of resistance. It is will created and controlled by opposition. This will we have, but it does not come from us, it comes from the obstacle. Self-will is when, for instance, someone sees that a man does not know how to do a thing and offers to explain, but the man says, 'No, I will do it myself', 'I will decide it myself', 'I don't want to listen to anybody', and so on. Wilfulness is much the same only more general—it can be a kind of habit. It is mechanical will, generally based on wrong assumptions about oneself and one's experience. Self-will is self-assertion. If you compare self-will with a normal action there is always some opposition in it—you want to do something you should not do. It is very characteristic in work. In studying ideas you know that certain things you must avoid, but you want exactly those things. If you start with this in thinking about self-will you will find your own examples.

• work
• will
• experience
• self
• how to
• ideas
• assumptions
• habit

Every human being is a metaphysician just as every philosopher has appetites and emotions - and by this I mean that we all have certain basic assumptions about the good life and the nature of reality.  Even the typical businessman who asserts that he is a practical fellow unconcerned with higher things declares thereby that he is a pragmatist or a positivist, and not a very thoughtful one at that.

• humanity
• spirituality
• life
• nature
• reality
• emotions
• assumptions

It is not so much the girl herself as what goes with her, and you must always be careful to discover a person's religion.  For everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life.

• existential
• love
• religion
• humanity
• assumptions
• life
• existence