
Assorted Themes, On the Meaning of Life
56
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Assorted Themes, On the Meaning of Life
As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee
Context: Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us.... We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
“We were ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.”
1:14 http://books.google.com/books?id=9dJGZkTAqJsC&q="we+were+ensnared+by+the+wisdom+of+the+serpent+we+are+set+free+by+the+foolishness+of+god"&pg=PA10#v=onepage
Latin: Serpentis sapientia decepti sumus, Dei stultitia liberamur.
De doctrina christiana
Source: Article, "Breaking Out of the Box -A Crash Course in Paradigm Thinking" Debra Feinstein, BENCHMARK Magazine, FALL 1989 p.3
As quoted in the Sunday Mail, Glasgow.
Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)