The Enlightened Virtuoso: Irrational Beliefs, Fantasy, and Anti-Semitism

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Irrational Beliefs, Fantasy, and Anti-Semitism

"Irrational beliefs appear when individuals confuse nonrational beliefs central to their sense of identity with knowledge, attempt to defend those beliefs against rational doubts by suppressing their own capacity to think rationally and empirically about the characteristics of certain objects, events, and people, and attribute empirical characteristics to them that have never been observed." Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 271.

Consequently, anti-Semitism is both an "abstraction" and an absence of realistic examinations of the external world. ~Gavin I. Langmuir,Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 336-337.

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Welcome

Dear reader,

Welcome! This blog started off as a personal project meant more for myself than anyone else. In that regard, it has served as a catalog for the resources I tend to enjoy. However, recent circumstances have changed the way I have utilized this medium. For a while I began using it as a public journal, following the example of my personal journal. While it may seem strange, I use my journals as a record of intellectual exposure and growth rather than mediums of creative outpouring. I often post quotes that I have found particularly meaningful. For me, this is a way of documenting what I have been exposed to and how my own thinking has developed. In that sense, my journaling is perhaps a bit unusual. It works for me though and I hope that it may be of interest to you as well.

To some extent, this journal is an experiment with Siegfried Kracauer's note that, "We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life" (Die Angestellten, in Schriften, vol. 1, 252). This blog is obviously public, yet it's not really created for anyone other than myself. If you find something that's of use or value, all the better! It does, after all, serve as one of my research resources and it may serve that purpose for you as well.

Thanks for taking the time to read what I've either recorded or written.