“Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
Context: A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.

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Miguel de Unamuno 199

19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher 1864–1936

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 127

“Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

VI.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

“Contentment and happiness didn't exist in my life for more than a few moments at a time, and they were really only illusionary. There was always something hidden. Lying in wait to spring up and ruin everything.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

“People, even poor people, were in general more contented before the 1914-18 war than they are now, although not nearly so well provided with comforts and luxuries. Incidentally they were also more often people of strong individuality, "characters" or "personalities" as we might say; not of course always either virtuous or agreeable, but qualitatively distinctive, not mere drops in an ocean of mediocrity. And they were more content with their lot than we are. What then is the true criterion of contentment? Can it be anything but the acceptance of one's lot, whatever it may be? Or in other words, knowing one's place and fulfilling faithfully whatever function may be associated with it, with a pride in the quality of the product as the principal incentive rather than any tangible reward; knowing, perhaps, that not to want is better than to have; and above all being intelligent enough not to place one's best hopes in nothing but the satisfactions which a short sojourn in this world can bring. All these things are criteria of contentment, and at the same time they are universal ethical constituents of every religion and tradition.”

Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982) British rower, agriculturalist and translater

Intellectual Freedom (1971)

“Two normal observers viewing the same object from the same place under the same physical circumstances do not necessarily have identical visual experiences, even though the images on their respective retinas may be virtually identical.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 5.

“To be a person, a being must be self-conscious, aware of its identity and its continued existence over time.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 202

“There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence…. The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 12.

“A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Greeks and Us", p. 15
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

“I think of Abstract Art in the same way I think of all Art, Past and Present. I see it as divided into two Major categories, Objective and Subjective. Objective Art is Absolute Art. Subjective Art is Illustration, or communication by Symbols, Replicas, and Oblique Emotional Passes. They are both Art, but their Content has no Identity. Their difference cannot be defined as a difference of Idiom, because all Paintings have the Laws of Design as a common denominator. Design exists as an Idiom of Color-Space Logic, and it also exists in an Idiom of Representational Likenesses. Objective Art and Subjective Art exist in both Idioms. Their difference can only be defined in terms of what the Artist thinks his Purpose means-its Content as a Design Image.”

Stuart Davis (1892–1964) American painter

Source: George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis. " What Abstract Art Means to Me http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250," in: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Variant: Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and i learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

“Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence.”

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Miguel de Unamuno 199

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