Against Loyalty
The true act is insupportable.
The true act is not based on ethics.
The true act is not a matter of empathy.
For the capacity factor of psychophysical energy the name ‘empathy’ is proposed. Empathy is then a physical quantity, a physiological brain-function, and is defined as the relation of the whole energy at any change of the central organ to the intensity.
– 1895 K. Lasswitz(1)
The true act is silent.
The true act is incoherent.
The true act self-coheres.
The true act has no precept.Human reason, therefore, is nothing other than the expression of man's adaptedness to the average run of events, which have gradually become deposited in solidly organized complexes of ideas that constitute our objective values.
– C. G. Jung(2)
The true act has no concept.
The true act will not admit aphorism.
The true act counts no hours.Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We hypothesize that there will be structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events that engage our minds and hearts.
– The Global Consciousness Project(3)
The true act observes no holiday.
The true act is not a ritual.
The true act is inexplicable.It's not the thing pointed out but the evocative act of pointing that arouses the emotions.
– Gordon Cullen(4)
The true act slips away.
The true act rises on its hind legs and spurts.
A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. What
is it the sign
of? The sign of
an owl.– Lorine Niedecker(5)
The true act is not liberation.
The true act is not servile.
The true act is not the bigger picture.
The true act understands nothing.. . . to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp.– John Milton(6)
The true act researches nothing.
The true act teaches nothing.
Empathy: Psychology and Aesthetics. The quality or power of projecting one's personality into or mentally identifying oneself with an object of contemplation, and so fully understanding or appreciating it. Now rare.
– OED.com
The true act is blind.
The true act is wind.
The true act is a stumble.
The true act is inevitable.Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.
― Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari(7)
The true act is a fait accompli.
The true act is always on the agenda.
The true act is a guerrilla soldier.Our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation. All those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them in her despite.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau(8)
The true act is a strategist.
The true act has no cause.
Let us admit that a man is no more than an instrument in an orchestra directed by the muse of History.
– Cseslaw Miloscz(9)
The true act is its own body.
The true act cares for nobody.
The true act is not charity.
The true act has no personality.. . . Hubczejak would respond that this unique genetic code of which, by some tragic perversity, we were so ridiculously proud, was precisely the source of so much human unhappiness.
– Michel Houellebecq(10)
The true act is deadpan.
The true act never dresses up.
The true act is not a qualifier.For we have seen a myriad faces
Ecstatic from one lie . . .– W. H. Auden(11)
The true act has no situation.
The true act belongs in no category.
Forsaking Christianity, Alpha became a more religious writer than he had before, if we grant that the ethic of loyalty is an extension of religious ethics and a contradiction of an ethic of collective goals.
– Czeslaw Milosz (12)
_________________________
Footnotes
(1) 1895 K. Lasswitz, transl. E. L. Hinman tr. In Philos. Rev. 4, 673 (Quoted at OED.com)
(2) Quoted in Neumann, Erich, Origins and History of Consciousness Vol. II.
(3) http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
(4) The Concise Townscape. Architectural Press / Routledge, 1971. 37.
(5) Early poem, untitled. From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf. The Jargon Society, 1985. 18.
(6) Paradise Lost. Book II, lls.255-257.
(7) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R, Lane. London: Continuum,, 2004. 375.
(8) Émile. Translated by Barbara Foxley. Everyman’s Library, Dent 1974. 173.
(9) The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. London: Penguin, 2001. 11.
(10) Atomised. Translated by Frank Wynne. London: Vintage, 2001. 375.
(11) “Sonnets from China,” XII. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 190.
(12) Op. cit., 92.