Tears of love

'Then the tears of love filled my eyes at my own selflessness' - Maya Angelou

Tread Softly!

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

William Butler Yeats

Fighter!

I am a fighter,have always been one.
Theres one problem this time,i have to learn to fight against myself.In other words, i have to learn to 'think against myself'. Now, few will ask me that how is it a problem? My answer is quite simple.When you fight against yourself, it doesn't really matter who wins or loses.However,none the less one remains a fighter.

Evolution!

The other day i was watching a video of Richard Dawkins where he tells the audience how silly people can really be.He gives the account of a preacher who refused to accept the theory of evolution.When Dawkins asked him why he doesn't believe in it the preach replied ,He will only believe in evolution the day he will see an Ape giving birth to a man.

Haha!,what a nincompoop.

I thought to myself that had i been Dawkins,i would certainly have told the preacher that when that will happen we wont call it evolution but a revolution. :P

Starving one's Mind!

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

William Butler Yeats

Problem with Picture Theory of Language !

Ludwig Wittgenstein used to believe in 'Picture Theory' of language before turning to 'Tool Theory'.According to picture theory,language gives us a picture of the world.For instance ,the word chair is picture of a chair. But the problem with such a theory is that it cannot give us a picture of how language pictures it.Just like we can see something,but we cannot see ourselves ,while seeing something.

Dream!

'I have a dream a fantasy,to help me through reality'.




Westlife - I have a dream

Difference!

N: Why are you unhappy?

Me:I am not unhappy but just a stranger in my own city.In the words of Sartre,i feel like standing between two cities.One knows nothing of me ,the other knows me no longer.
Did u get what i mean?

N:Yea,in urdu we say 'Dubi ka kuta na ghar ka na ghat ka'!

Me:Goodness me ,thats a crude way of putting it but theres no difference i believe.

Madness!

"I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us"

Khalil Gibran (The Madman)

Graffiti by Aishah.

Freedom or Slavery!

A freedom that cannot give account of itself is indistinguishable from slavery - Rosen

Heart v Mirror

The only difference between heart and mirror is that heart conceals secrets but mirror does not - Rumi

Diplomat.

Diplomat is a person who always remembers the birthday of a girl but never her age -Robert Frost

:)

Nietzsche on morality.

Nietzsche has become a cliche in popular philosophy.He has an immense fan following across the globe specially among angst-ridden young individuals.Yet,he remains the most misunderstood philosopher of all times.Most of my friends who have a superficial understanding of Nietzsche regards his philosophy 'destructive' rather than 'constructive'.Others just ignore him as a mad man ,who has been hyped by statements like 'God is dead'.

When it comes to morality ,the general perception is that Nietzsche turned the tables over .It is commonly believed that he was an 'immoralist' who prechead hatred and contemp for everything that is considered morally 'good' by general public.But that is just a common misunderstanding that results due to an overly simplified reading of Nietzsche.

Actually Nietzsche was a psychologist first and then a philosopher.Generally,philosophers establish the truth of a belief but for Nietzsche the important question is not the truth of a belief but rather 'why we believe what we believe'.Nietzsche was not solely 'dectructive' ,a better understanding of him can lead one to realize what he was trying to achieve by persistent critique of morality.

Now,i will qoute a passage from Nietzsche that will allow us towards a better understanding of Nietzche's critique of morality.

" I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged - but I think that the one should be avoided and the other encouraged for other reasons than hitherto."

(Nietzsche from Daybreak)

I would like to conclude that Nietzsche reagarded a philosopher noble only if that philosopher lived his philosophy.Nietzsche was the embodiment of his own philosophy to some extent.Its not easy to say that Nietzsche meant 'this' or he meant 'that'.As he himself said,'there are no truths only interpertations'.And that is my interpertation of Nietzsche.

Being strong..

One can never know how strong one is until its the only choice one is left with - Anonymous

Nothing Gold Can Stay!

Ponyboy reciting the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost :]]

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Guilty.

Qasim Aziz is found guilty of being alive and therefore sentenced to endure his own existence.

The price of freedom!

Long long time ago,i started a journey to seek mysely.'Know thyself' was the voice that was constantly coming from within.So,i set away to seek myself .But after years of search i actually lost 'myself' in search of myself.Why did it happen?


Kafka answers me:
'You are free,thats why you are lost'.

Happiness!

Oh! Great Star,what will be your happiness if you havn't got the one for whom you shine? - Nietzsche

Cavatine can heal your soul!

Woody Allen's view of Love.

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down." -

Diane Keaton from Movie 'Love and Death'

Literature.

People often ask this question that what is the point of reading literature?
What is the objective of literature other than the fact that it may give its reader a sense of fullfilment ?
For me literature is much more than aesthtic pleasure,its a mirror in which i see my reflection standing on one side and the reflection of humanity on the other side.

Love ceases to be..

Love ceases to be ,when its not filled with fear,uncertainity and hope.

The only answer.

Usually,its the question that begs an answer.But life is the only answer that begs a question.

Good and Evil.

Pythogras said good is something finite and certain,whereas evil is infinite and uncertain.Theres only one way of hitting the bull's eye,and many ways of missing it.

Interesting analysis.

Bitter-Sweet Madness!

Q.Whats your problem?
Me.I suffer from bitter-sweet madness.
Q.Woh kia hoti hai?
Me.Is bemaari ka dosraa naam 'bebaasi' hei.

Sometimes...

Sometimes it just happens that a person cannot really understand whether he is trying to love a person ,he actually hates ;or trying to hate a person ,he actually loves.Whatever the case maybe,the person is in a miserable situation :)

Solipsist Woman!

A woman wrote to Russell: "I think solipsism is such an attractive position. I wonder why more people don't believe it."

haha!
:)

No Stone in town!

Here is translation of a persian verse that i have come across recently.


"The madman is going his way ,and chlidren are going there own.Oh my friend! Are there no stones in your town".

When Ludwig met Karl ...

Did Wittgenstein threaten Popper with a red-hot poker in Cambridge 55 years ago? John Eidinow and David Edmonds on the truth behind a row described as a watershed in 20th-century philosophy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/31/artsandhumanities.highereducation


On the evening of Friday October 25 1946, the Cambridge Moral Science Club - a discussion group for the university's philosophers and philosophy students - held a meeting. The members assembled in King's College at 8.30pm, in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building - number three on staircase H.

Although its tenant was a don, Richard Braithwaite, H3 was just as neglected as the other rooms in the building, squalid, dusty and dirty. Heating was dependent on open fires and the inhabitants protected their clothes with their gowns when humping sacks of coal.

That evening, the guest speaker was Dr Karl Popper, up from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, Are There Philosophical Problems?. Among his audience was the chairman of the club, Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most brilliant philosopher of his time. Also present was Bertrand Russell, who for decades had been a household name as a philosopher and radical campaigner.

Popper had recently been appointed to the position of reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. The Open Society and Its Enemies, his remorseless demolition of totalitarianism, had just been published in England. It had immediately won him a select group of admirers, among them Russell.

This was the only time these three great philosophers - Russell, Wittgenstein and Popper - were together. Yet, to this day, no one can agree precisely what took place. What is clear is that there were vehement exchanges between Popper and Wittgenstein over the fundamental nature of philosophy. These instantly became the stuff of legend. An early version of events had Popper and Wittgenstein battling for supremacy with red-hot pokers.

In Popper's account, found in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest, published in 1974, more than two decades after Wittgenstein's death, he put forward a series of what he insisted were real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein summarily dismissed them all. Popper recalled that Wittgenstein "had been nervously playing with the poker", which he used "like a conductor's baton to emphasise his assertions", and when a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. "I replied: 'Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.' Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out."

Those 10 or so minutes in October 1946 still provoke bitter disagreement. Above all, one dispute remains heatedly alive: did Karl Popper lie in his published account of the meeting?

If he did, it was no casual embellishing of the facts but directly concerned two ambitions central to his life: the defeat at a theoretical level of fashionable 20th-century linguistic philosophy and triumph at a personal level over Wittgenstein, the sorcerer who had dogged his career.

To an outsider, a violent confrontation between Wittgenstein and Popper might have seemed implausible. They were both Jews from Vienna and, superficially, they had in common a civilisation - and its dissolution. Although Wittgenstein was the older by 13 years, they had shared the cultural excitement of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They had in common, too, the impact on their lives of the lost first world war, the attempt to raise a modern republic on the ruins of the monarchy, the descent into the corporate state, and the maelstrom of Hitler and Nazism. With their Jewish origins, interest in music, contacts with cultural radicals, training as teachers, and their connections with the fountainhead of logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein and Popper had many potential links. That they had never met was remarkable.

Of the great figures in 20th-century philosophy, only a very few have given their names to those who follow in their path. That one can be identified as a Popperian or a Wittgensteinian is a testament to the originality of these philosophers' ideas and the power of their personalities. Those extraordinary qualities were on display in H3. The thrust of the poker becomes a symbol of the two men's unremitting zeal in their search for the right answers to the big questions.

Three years after Popper's death, a memoir published in the proceedings of one of Britain's most learned bodies, the British Academy, recounted essentially Popper's version of events. It brought down a storm of protest on the head of the author, Popper's successor at the LSE, Professor John Watkins, and sparked off an acerbic exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement. A fervent Wittgenstein supporter who had taken part in the meeting, Professor Peter Geach, denounced Popper's account of the meeting as "false from beginning to end". A robust correspondence followed as other witnesses or later supporters of the protagonists piled into the fray.

There was a delightful irony in the conflicting testimonies. They had arisen between people all professionally concerned with theories of epistemology (the grounds of knowledge), understanding and truth. Yet they concerned a sequence of events where those who disagreed were eyewitnesses on crucial questions of fact.

But why was there such anger over what took place more than half a century before, in a small room, at a regular meeting of an obscure university club, during an argument over an arcane topic?

Of the 30 present that night, nine, now in their 70s or 80s, responded by letter, phone and, above all, email from across the globe to appeals for memories of that evening. Their ranks include a former English high court judge, Sir John Vinelott. There are five professors. Professor Peter Munz had come to St John's from New Zealand and returned home to become a notable academic. His book, Our Knowledge of the Search for Knowledge, opened with the poker incident: it was, he wrote, a "symbolic and in hindsight prophetic" watershed in 20th-century philosophy.

Professor Stephen Toulmin is an eminent philosopher, co-author of a demanding revisionist text on Wittgenstein, placing his philosophy in the context of Viennese culture and fin de siècle intellectual ferment. As a young King's research fellow, he turned down a post as assistant to Karl Popper.

Geach, an authority on logic, lectured at Birmingham University, and then at Leeds. Professor Michael Wolff specialised in Victorian England, and his academic career took him to the US. Peter Gray-Lucas became an academic and then switched to business, first in steel, then photographic film, then papermaking. Stephen Plaister became a classics master.

"Consider this poker," Geach hears Wittgenstein demand of Popper, picking up the poker and using it in a philosophical example. But, as the discussion rages on between them, Wittgenstein is not reducing the guest to silence (the impact he is accustomed to), nor the guest silencing him (ditto). Finally, and only after having challenged assertion after assertion made by Popper, Wittgenstein gives up. At some stage he must have risen to his feet, because Geach sees him walk back to his chair and sit down. He is still holding the poker. With a look of great exhaustion, he leans back in his chair and stretches out his arm towards the fireplace. The poker drops on to the tiles of the hearth with a little rattle. At this point Geach's attention is caught by the host, Braithwaite. Alarmed by Wittgenstein's gesticulating with the poker, he is making his way in a crouching position through the audience. He picks up the poker and somehow makes away with it. Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein rises to his feet and, in a huff, quietly leaves the meeting, shutting the door behind him.

Wolff sees that Wittgenstein has the poker idly in his hand and, as he stares at the fire, is fidgeting with it. Someone says something that visibly annoys Wittgenstein. By this time Russell has become involved. Wittgenstein and Russell are both standing. Wittgenstein says: "You misunderstand me, Russell. You always misunderstand me."

Russell says: "You're mixing things up, Wittgenstein. You always mix things up."

Munz watches Wittgenstein suddenly take the poker - red hot - out of the fire and gesticulate with it angrily in front of Popper's face. Then Russell takes the pipe out of his mouth and says firmly: "Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!"

Wittgenstein complies, then, after a short wait, gets up and walks out, slamming the door.

From Gray-Lucas's standpoint, Wittgenstein seems to be growing very excited about what he obviously believes is Popper's improper behaviour and is waving the poker about. Wittgenstein is acting in "his usual grotesquely arrogant, self-opinionated, rude and boorish manner. It made a good story afterwards to say that he had 'threatened' Popper with a poker."

Plaister, too, sees the poker raised. It really seems to him the only way to deal with Popper, and he has no feeling of surprise or shock. To Toulmin, sitting only six feet from Wittgenstein, nothing at all out of the ordinary is occurring. He is focusing on Popper's attack on the idea that philosophy is meaningless and his production of various examples. A question about causality arises and at that point Wittgenstein picks up the poker to use as a tool in order to make a point about causation. Later in the meeting - after Wittgenstein has left - he hears Popper state his poker principle: that one should not threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.

Vinelott alone sees the crucial point - whether Popper makes what was probably an attempt at a joke to Wittgenstein's face - in Popper's way. Vinelott hears Popper utter his poker principle and observes that Wittgenstein is clearly annoyed at what he thinks is an unduly frivolous remark. Wittgenstein leaves the room abruptly, but there is no question of the door being slammed.

The debate continues and the story has achieved the status, if not of an urban myth, then at least of an ivory-tower fable. The story goes beyond the characters and beliefs of the antagonists. It is also the story of the schism in 20th-century philosophy over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language. In the end, of course, it is the story of a linguistic puzzle in itself: to whom did Popper utter what words in that room full of witnesses, and why?

And what of the sine qua non of this story? The fate of the poker remains a mystery. Many have searched for it in vain. According to one report, Braithwaite disposed of it - to put an end to the prying of academics and journalists.

• This is an edited extract from Wittgenstein's Poker: the Story of a Ten- Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, published on April 9 by Faber, price £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 plus p&p, freephone Guardian CultureShop on 0800 3166 102

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/31/artsandhumanities.highereducation

Expectations.

A man can live up to anyone's expectations but his own.

Silence as hardest argument to refute?

They say ,silence is the hardest ardument to refute.I believe ,silence is not at all an argument,infact its ignorance 'intellectualised '.:)

Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd!

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;


Alexander Pope from An Essay on man.

O ME! O life!

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?' Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

Tom Schulman
from "Dead Poets Society"

Who is free?

Only an irrational person lives a free life.Freedom lies in irrationality and capriciousness.

Conflict!

Intellect can only develop through dissent,thats why 'I' and 'Me' are always in a conflict with each other. )

Brave coward!

Every brave man is an honest coward.

Indifference!

Indifference is the worst form of hatred.

What ever does not kill me!

What ever does not kill me ,leaves me to suffer.

A whole life time!

M - Qasim beta i can get almost everyone to do what i want,and i am begining to figure out just how your mind works.All i need is a little time *evil smirk*!


Qasim - Same here,except i dont need more time.;)
Waise be,it will take you a whole life time to understand what i am NOT,another life time to get a glimpse of what i AM.

Hope.

Q.What do i love in others?
Ans.My hopes.



Nietzsche from Joyful wisdom.

Heroism!

Q.What makes me heroic?
Ans.Dreaming with a broken heart.

Punishment.

The more i learn to deceive others,the more i lose the ability of deceiving myself.Strange punishment !

Life without love.

Imagine how serene and peacefull life will be without love?
Not to forget how dull.


Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

What is left?

Q.What is left in life,if one gets what one wants?
Ans.Nothing.

Agnostic Dyslexic!

What does an agnostic dyslexic do when experiencing insomnia?
ANSWER: Sit up all night wondering if there really is a dog.
:)
Bad Jokes of the Day

Concept of 'hypercosmic God' wins Templeton Prize

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), the largest annual prize in the world.

This year it goes to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d'Espagnat for his "studies into the concept of reality". D'Espagnat, 87, is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and is known for his work on quantum mechanics. The award will be presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace on 5 May.

D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin, at the invitation of the legendary physicist John Wheeler. But what has he done that's worth £1 million?

The thrust of d'Espagnat's work was on experimental tests of Bell's theorem. The theorem states that either quantum mechanics is a complete description of the world or that if there is some reality beneath quantum mechanics, it must be nonlocal – that is, things can influence one another instantaneously regardless of how much space stretches between them, violating Einstein's insistence that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

But what d'Espagnat was really interested in was what all of this meant for discerning the true nature of ultimate reality. Unlike most of his contemporaries, d'Espagnat was one of the brave ones unafraid to tackle the thorny and profound philosophical questions posed by quantum physics.

Third view
Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

Looking back at d'Espagnat's work, I couldn't help but wonder what the Templeton Foundation – an organisation dedicated to reconciling science and religion – saw in it that they thought was worth a £1 million. Then, scanning the press release, I found it:

"There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments."

But even if there is a partially unknowable reality beneath reality, I'm not sure how that implies that spirituality is a viable means to access it. I have a suspicion that this still comes down to good old-fashioned faith.

Unconventional 'God'
So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.

"Independent Reality plays, in a way, the role of God – or 'Substance' – of Spinoza," d'Espagnat writes. Einstein believed in Spinoza's God, which he equated with nature itself, but he always held this "God" to be entirely knowable. D'Espagnat's veiled God, on the other hand, is partially – but still fundamentally – unknowable. And for precisely this reason, it would be nonsensical to paint it with the figure of a personal God or attribute to it specific concerns or commandments.

The "veiled reality", then, can in no way help Christians or Muslims or Jews or anyone else rationalise their specific beliefs. The Templeton Foundation – despite being headed up by John Templeton Jr, an evangelical Christian – claims to afford no bias to any particular religion, and by awarding their prize to d'Espagnat, I think they've proven that to be true.

I happen to believe that drawing any spiritual conclusions from quantum mechanics is an unfounded leap in logic – but if someone out there in the world is willing to pay someone £1 million for pondering the nature of reality, that's a world I'm happy to live in.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16769-concept-of-hypercosmic-god-wins-templeton-prize.html

Peace!

Peace lies in accepting our differences not in eliminating them.

What is 'I'?

I is not an entity in my life,infact 'I'is whole of my life in its totality.

Betrayal!

Its better to be betrayed by friends then to betray them - Goethe

Plato's refutation of subjectivism.

I was reading Plato's critique of Sophist's subjectivism.Sophists of ancient Greece used to argue that only an individual knows what is good for himself and what is harmful.The only scale of judgement in this regard is subjective conception of every particular individual.But Plato argues that if every individual knows what is good for himself then it follows that no one will make mistakes.But we see that people do make mistakes.So,one cant always say that one knows what is good for oneself.

Love and Bonding.

We were exactly like each other.Same habits,same nature,same passions and same feelings.Yet we were not meant to be together.We could only had been together ,if we were different from each other.The opposites always attract each other ,and we found ourselves repulsive because we were similar and not different.Then what else is love ?

Nietzsche answers,

"What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…? "
Friedrich Nietzsche

Wake up!

Some Brahmin once asked Buddha whether he considered himself God or Human.Buddha answered saying, "Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping." .

Aechey Loog!

Hasan:Aechey loogon sei hamesha buraa kiun huta hei?
Me:"Bhai, is liey key hum un ko aacha hi is wajah sei kehtey hein key un sey buraa hota hei".:)

Fate and free will.

Fate is God's way of dealing with man and free will is man's way of dealing with God.:)

Most romantic sight.

The most romantic sight for me is, to see two unromantic people having a discussion about love. :)

Stand by who you are.

The one who hates you for who you are,will also never like you for who you want to be.