Joseph Scalice

human potentiality

Joseph — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:11:22 +0000

Man carries within himself not only his individuality but all of humanity, with all its potentialities, although he can realize these potentialities in only a limited way because of the external limitations of his individual existence.

Goethe, as quoted by Erich Fromm in the introduction to Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, edited by Erich Fromm (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), vii.

I am unable to locate the original source of this quote as Fromm does not provide any citation. Anyone know its provenance?

“I’m gonna miss Ramona.”

Joseph — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:06:24 +0000

Elizabeth and I finished reading through the Ramona Quimby series last night. We sat silently next to each on the floor of her room after I finished reading the last page.

“I’m gonna miss Ramona,” Elizabeth said after several minutes pause.

“Me too.”

I put Ramona’s World back on the small pine bookshelf at the foot of her bed next to the other volumes of Beverly Cleary.

“Don’t worry, we’ll read it together again soon.”

Elizabeth smiled, stood up, and went off to take her evening shower.

Novenary of the Motherland

Joseph — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:53:06 +0000

I have now posted the English translation of the novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente under the documents tab on this website.

The translation was published a year after the Tagalog translation. It was again printed by Isabelo de los Reyes in Manila. The printing of the English version is of much poorer quality. The translator is invisible, as is so often the case.

Pagsisiyam sa Virgen sa Balintawak

Joseph — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:51:00 +0000

I am still hard at work on my thesis. I have been collecting relevant primary source materials during my research, many of which I have scanned as Adobe PDF files. I intend to begin making some of these materials available here.

The first item which I am posting is a Novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Originally written by Gregorio Aglipay in Spanish, this text was translated into Tagalog by Juan N. Evangelista and published in 1925 in Manila by Isabelo de los Reyes.

The text is fascinating. It walks through, in the nine days of a novena, a series of scientific, critical, and rational ideas; it instructs the participant in ideas of evolution and natural selection and a historical-critical approach to the Bible and theology.

You can access the entire text from the Documents tab of this website.

ruthless criticism of all that exists

Joseph — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:53:13 +0000

[I]t is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one… but if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Karl Marx, Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, September, 1843 in Collected Works, Volume 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 142-43.

fetters

Joseph — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:20:57 +0000

1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.

2nd Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 36.

ephphatha

Joseph — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:15:20 +0000

Only a sheep’s fodder bush and a screw pine
And a dark sea going by at a piaffer
And a little palæocrystic light keeping watch
Through the phengites of this panopticon
On mankind in the last stages of pellagra.

Now the light, the paxwax of infinity,
Becomes rigid as a bar of iron.
No phosphene or photopsia any longer
Can supplement or supplant it, and in vain
A voice still cries ‘Ephphatha’ which means nothing
In the poor pasilaly of all other sound
Which is no more than a rattle of broken bones
On the invisible pamphract of God.

from The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume I (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), 393.

faith

Joseph — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 06:29:38 +0000

I have implied that the original faith which Luther tried to restore goes back to the basic trust of early infancy. In doing so I have not, I believe, diminished the wonder of what Luther calls God’s disguise. If I assume that it is the smiling face and the guiding voice of infantile parent images which religion projects onto the benevolent sky, I have no apologies to render to an age which thinks of painting the moon red. Peace comes from the inner space.

Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,1958), 265-66.

slapdash notes

Joseph — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:37:42 +0000

“Not to weep, not to laugh, but to understand.” Spinoza.

Ecotone: the boundary between two ecosystems.

“A society does not stamp personalities from a die, but no one can go beyond its possibilites for freedom and growth.” Sidney Finkelstein, How Music Expresses Ideas.

“Society has no fringe … no one is ever outside it even in the depths of dungeons.” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

epic life

Joseph — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:52:12 +0000

Theresa [of Avila]’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel, and fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), vii-viii. Emphasis added.