The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.
This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos __ chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
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This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos __ chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
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