True philosophical insight must set out, not from facts or from rationalised versions of our ordinary understanding, but on the contrary; from those moments in which such understanding is suspended. Insight is never a matter of actual fact. It can begin when the pressures of practical action yield in favour of a disinterested and ultimately disembodied intuition - intuition of reality as it is in itself. Such intuition is available to anyone who literally opens their mind, by interrupting their habitual state of practical distraction. It is most dominant in those who live most creatively, those who realise that to live is simply to engage in the process of 'creating oneself endlessly'. More, such self-creating is itself simply a facet of a more general, properly universal or cosmic creation. Those who realise this most profoundly - the dreamers, the artists, the philosophers, the mystics ... - are precisely those people who most succeed in subordinating their personal or creatural interests to the impersonal imperatives of creation itself.
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Peter Hallward :
True philosophical insight must set out, not from facts or from rationalised versions of our ordinary understanding, but on the contrary; from those moments in which such understanding is suspended. Insight is never a matter of actual fact. It can begin when the pressures of practical action yield in favour of a disinterested and ultimately disembodied intuition - intuition of reality as it is in itself. Such intuition is available to anyone who literally opens their mind, by interrupting their habitual state of practical distraction. It is most dominant in those who live most creatively, those who realise that to live is simply to engage in the process of 'creating oneself endlessly'. More, such self-creating is itself simply a facet of a more general, properly universal or cosmic creation. Those who realise this most profoundly - the dreamers, the artists, the philosophers, the mystics ... - are precisely those people who most succeed in subordinating their personal or creatural interests to the impersonal imperatives of creation itself.
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