September 26, 2006
The Difference Between Scepticism and Cynicism
These are the bits that stood out to me in Milton Glaser’s essay, Ten Things I Have Learned:
“The brain is … like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. It is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have … We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain … Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.”
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“Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right.”
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“Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.”