Context: It was very dispiriting because a lot of things needed to be done. One of the things that happened was, if you had a good rank-and-file activist in a trade union situation, they would make them an offer to become part of the staff—at which point the person was totally lost to the campaign where they were a catalyst and became part of an apparatus that was basically going nowhere. The odd thing is, despite The Permanent Revolution being on the bookshelves, they would explain everything by going back and finding a quote from Trotsky or from Lenin in order to explain things, as opposed to explaining how things were in the real world.... They were basically just living in their own universe as opposed to making real life connections.
Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and The Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer (1998).
“These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things.”
Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Ground Book
Context: These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the Way of strategy there will not be one thing you cannot see. You must study hard.
“I would get up and explain how things really work. That was my job.”
In a Interview With Shirley K. Cohen http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/32/1/OH_Patterson.pdf
Variant: It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.
Source: Asfixia
Newtonian Studies (1965).
Context: There is something for which Newton — or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general — can still be made responsible: it is splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world — the world of quantity, or reified geometry, a world in which, though there is place for everything, there is no place for man. Thus the world of science — the real world — became estranged and utterly divorced from the world of life, which science has been unable to explain — not even to explain away by calling it "subjective".
True, these worlds are everyday — and even more and more — connected by praxis. Yet for theory they are divided by an abyss.
Two worlds: this means two truths. Or no truth at all.
This is the tragedy of the modern mind which "solved the riddle of the universe," but only to replace it by another riddle: the riddle of itself.
“things explain each other,
Not themselves.”
This in Which (1965), "A Narrative", 3
A Factless Autobiography, number 424, trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics edition
The Book of Disquiet
