TPF Quote Cabinet
Place your quotable quotes here! Words of beauty, words of wisdom; all things silly and sage, the quote cabinet is open to all!
Here's part of a recent read of mine to kick things off:
“We can be loved by someone only to the extent that we definitely expel from ourselves every possible resemblance to the rest of humanity. For this reason, love does not have an angelic nature. The angel is, in fact, according to medieval theology, one who gathers in themselves all the possible matter of the species. He who repels it, who expels it from themselves, is called a demon. The angels mediate and fade the face of the single into the universal; the demons divide and distinguish; they impede the recognition in this individual of the mark and character of the human.
Eros is a demon, and it is only thanks to life’s demons that it enters into love: it is always the absolute individual, and never the ‘type’ who is loved … Without the influence of love, every life becomes generic, resuming obvious, universal characteristics, losing its demonic nature and becoming human, and angelically common. Every angel is the end of love … every love is a struggle with an angel, with our own angel, custodian and guardian of our identity."
- Emanuele Coccia, End of Love
Here's part of a recent read of mine to kick things off:
“We can be loved by someone only to the extent that we definitely expel from ourselves every possible resemblance to the rest of humanity. For this reason, love does not have an angelic nature. The angel is, in fact, according to medieval theology, one who gathers in themselves all the possible matter of the species. He who repels it, who expels it from themselves, is called a demon. The angels mediate and fade the face of the single into the universal; the demons divide and distinguish; they impede the recognition in this individual of the mark and character of the human.
Eros is a demon, and it is only thanks to life’s demons that it enters into love: it is always the absolute individual, and never the ‘type’ who is loved … Without the influence of love, every life becomes generic, resuming obvious, universal characteristics, losing its demonic nature and becoming human, and angelically common. Every angel is the end of love … every love is a struggle with an angel, with our own angel, custodian and guardian of our identity."
- Emanuele Coccia, End of Love
Comments (470)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, [I]Twilight of The Idols[/I]
- Peter Zapffe, On the Tragic
- Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
It really does feel good to scold you softly here.
The suspicion is that the TPF elites all already know the source and that the omission is to further exclude us lesser educated laypersons.
Viva la revolución
Moderator's Note
The source has since been added by myself, Sapientia.
"...the feeling of moral "rightness" is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly".
Yeah, the killing joke, I was watching it and had to share that sweet quotable. Has kind of mixed reviews, but I thought it was pretty good.
I've been reading Neil Gaiman stories lately. He's cool.
What did you think?
- Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
What must be explained: particular universals or universals in general?
:)
--The Soup Nazi
-Slavoj Zizek
"Different persons growing up in the same languages are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike."
-Quine
And, just for the sake of balance, one for the lawyers:
"When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff."
Both quotations from Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Edmund Burke
-- Norman O. Brown.
- David Lewis
- Bertrand Russell
Y'know he was real proud when he came up with this one.
It was previously explained that what is commonly called love is a state of reaching out for possession. It's a state of dissatisfaction. Possession has to do with identity and power.
? William Shakespeare, Hamlet
It was only a matter of time.
- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature", Dialogues II
(end of 1st stanza)
- Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity
-- Emerson
A bear is bare and so bears nothing.
? Tsunetomo Yamamoto
? Tsunetomo Yamamoto
- Raymond Geuss
- Wendy Brown
Franz Kafka
Knowledge of logical fallacies are more often than not used to defend one's own views instead of entertaining new ones.
That strikes me as one of those quotes that might sound good superficially, but upon analysis makes little sense. There's a problem with the grammar of it, and knowledge of logical fallacies is more often than not used to identify faults in the reasoning of others, rather than to defend one's own views. The "are" should be an "is", and that last part, "...instead of entertaining new ones" needs to be reworded. Maybe "...instead of being used to entertain new ones", but it seems odd to suggest that knowledge of logical fallacies should be used in that way.
- Herbert Butterfield [The Whig Interpretation of History]
(When you quote yourself, you're asking for a kicking)
Well, that would only apply to a solipsist, wouldn't you say? Therefore, everything a solipsist says is a truism...
Yes, I agree that that would be a better way to word it. Maybe Question could hire someone like you as a ghost quote-maker. :D
Strangely enough, it was originally an 'is' instead of an 'are', but Grammarly corrected it to 'are' from 'is', and for whatever reason, 'are' sounds right to me...
Quoting Sapientia
Yeah, with that I agree.
And here I was thinking you were talking about the Q continuum.
copy-pasted without permission from some Reddit board
Says the lord
Though your sins are like scarlet
They shall be as white as snow
Though they are crimson
They will become like wool." Isaiah 1:18
"Why these names so heavy, too charged with themselves, as charged with all the surcharge of language, over which they are called to stand? God is thus a name, pure materiality, naming nothing, not even himself. Whence the perversion, magical, mystical, literal, of the name, the opacity of God to any idea of God. And still, like fear, like madness, it disappears, if only as a messenger of another language, of which such a disappearance could not take the place of a beginning. The "death of God" is perhaps only the help that historical language vainly brings to allow a word to fall outside of language without another announcing itself there: absolute slip".
"Friendship: fraternity without law".
"To die: as if we only died in the infinitive".
- Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond.
I could read this book forever.
You're crazy.
What can I do to convince you otherwise? If you were I would make a video stripping my socks off to Beyoncé's Partition, but I gather feet are not your thing, you hopeless romantic you.
And no, Worf is a real Klingon, he chose his battles wisely. He is Klingon enough to drink prune juice and be proud.
Where's the egg-plant emoji when you need it? But no: ironically I respond more positively to something akin to the Klingon mating ritual, in which we sniff each other's hands and squeeze them till they bleed.
Quoting TimeLine
I'm convinced.
EDIT: I now see that you were repulsed by my all-too-easy and entirely false capitulation, rather than by the thought of Klingon-style mating.
You are unworthy.
"I AM WHAT I AM." Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility".
"It's dizzying to see Reebok's "I AM WHAT I AM" enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them".
"I AM WHAT I AM," then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn't everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities."
- Quotes from The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee.
My kind of self-help.
? Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings
Was that a barb, Eric? Or a narrow drawn?
(Y)
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad."
--Wallace Stevens
You remain underterred?
(Y)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Peter Hoffman, Life's Ratchet
<3
-Ciceronianus the White
Richard O. Prum - The Evolution of Beauty
Also: "In the Chinese literary world today we can see a similar process. If a novel is very successful, fakes immediately appear. They are not always inferior imitations that simulate a nonexistent proximity to the original. Alongside the obvious fraudulent labeling, there are also fakes that transform the original by embedding it in a new context or giving it a surprising twist. Their creativity is based on active transformation and variation. Even the success of Harry Potter initiated this dynamic. There now exist numerous Harry Potter fakes that perpetuate and transform the original. Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, for instance, makes the story Chinese. Together with his Chinese friends Long and Xing, Harry Potter defeats his Eastern adversary Yandomort, the Chinese equivalent of Voldemort, on the sacred mountain of Taishan. Harry Potter can speak fluent Chinese, but has trouble eating with chopsticks, and so on."
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese
--
"Theory in the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity. It makes a decision determining what belongs and what does not. As a mode of highly selective narration, it draws a line of distinction. On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent. Without the negativity of distinction, matters proliferate and grow promiscuously. In this respect, theory borders on the ceremonial, which separates the initiated and the uninitiated. It is mistaken to assume that the mass of positive data and information — which is assuming untold dimensions today — has made theory superfluous, that is, that comparing data can replace the use of models.
Theory, as negativity, occupies a position anterior to positive data and information. Data-based positive science does not represent the cause so much as the effect of the imminent end of theory, properly speaking. It is not possible to replace theory with positive science. The latter lacks the negativity of decision, which determines what is, or what must be, in the first place. Theory as negativity makes reality itself appear ever and radically different; it presents reality in another light".
Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society
- jamalrob
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nature of Culture
"Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other, just as science is the opening up of the universe to practical action, to becoming-useful and philosophy is the opening up of the universe to thought-becoming. Art is the most direct intensification of the resonance, and dissonance, between bodies and the cosmos, between one milieu or rhythm and another.
... What philosophy can offer art is not a theory of art, an elaboration of its silent or undeveloped concepts, but what philosophy and art share in common—their rootedness in chaos, their capacity to ride the waves of a vibratory universe without direction or purpose, in short, their capacity to enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. They are among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought."
Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art
What's not to love about PoMo? :P
If you admit that you cannot make any sense of that, then your stakes in the name-dropping game will go wwwaaayyy down.
Man, that's some tinsel-strewn horseshit; in which paddock did you find it?
It's not really that difficult if you've done any research on the terms. Wheesht.
Rhizomatic is an adjective to describe, simultaneously, a way of thinking about composite objects and a way composite objects can be. It's essentially 'complex system without reduction to emergent whole'. It's contrasted to 'arboreal' composite objects and ways of thinking about them - which are essentially 'reduction to emergent whole conditioning complex system'.
As for Proveti, I don't know. But if you look at the context in the thread, they're talking about how soldiers act together in battle. To talk of 'distributed cognition' is probably something like 'how does the battle plan unfold in real time over all the participants', and the 'battle plan' is adapted to how the 'battle plan' has already unfolded and to whatever events are screwing it up. 'distributed cognition' makes sense as what is making the battle plan real is the composite of actions of soldiers, their goals, and over-arching strategic/tactical operational guidelines.
This is just referencing that Deluze's ontology has 'difference' as a central concept, and differences generate identities (which are rhizomatically composed of differences) - think about how different rates of change of surface tension over a soap film can realise an individual soap bubble. We end up with 'the soap bubble' as an individual thing, but it's also a balance of composite water/soap molecules and their related rates of expansion/constraint by surface tension.
So a 'gestalt' is some sub-composite object of a big one, like a local tactical situation on the battlefield, but it isn't identical to all the nitty gritty of things the soldiers are doing in relation to their environment which generates the 'gestalt'.
Then SLX thread moved into a dissection of that claim, essentially criticising the poster apo quoted for treating 'gestalts' and 'distributed condition' in an arboreal manner - since the poster apo quoted was currently criticising a consequence of what 'rhizomatic' meant and how it was treated in the battlefield example.
As for the Heidegger/Derridean reference, I can't speak much to Derrida, but it is indeed similar to how language/social functions are interpreted. Social stuff - meaningful activity (that is all activity) works because of the whole - or a large chunk of - the context it's in. Say when you've got a broken string on a guitar and go to fix it, that requires socially conditioned preconceptions of how a guitar should work, strings, string material, tuning etc etc etc. So it isn't too much of a stretch to offer a very condensed description of 'social stuff' and 'social context' as a gestalt entity - coimplicated components - in Heidegger's phenomenology of language.
Thanks fdrake, I understand that it's an arcane game that one can learn to play. I spent some time over a few years deciphering Derrida, and concluded that the reward does not warrant the effort. Deleuze I find far more interesting but whatever is good in him is better and far more rigorously expressed in biosemiotics, in Peirce and Whitehead, as far as I can tell. I have limited time to waste.
People wasting their time in different ways is why forums like this remain interesting.
That's true, although it is likely that you will be most interested in conversing with those who waste their time in similar ways to yourself, meaning areas of common interest, no? Also, if certain approaches seem pointless or vacuous to you, then it's not surprising if you think they are pointless or vacuous, full stop?
I try not to find anything pointless.
Then you aspire to be a truly catholic thinker! Does your catholicism include, for example, theology?
Yes. I literally lived with a nun for a year.
OK, cool, I incorrectly had you pegged as an antitheist.
Edit: Actually I'm dying to ask how you came to be living with a nun for a year, at what stage of your life and so on...
What made you peg me as an anti-theist?
I had to leave university for a year since I couldn't walk even short distances, especially with all the hills in the town where I studied. When I had to take leave from my studies, I had to find a place to live for the year after so I could resume them. The only place I found that I could afford was the house of a radical Franciscan nun whose duties to her church were, essentially, as a PR agent to the student population of the town for the faith.
We talked a lot about God and theology, and we did a trade, she taught me about the faith and we debated it, and I taught her things from mathematics and science and we debated them too. If it's good enough for Feynman it's good enough for a pleb like me.
Her faith was quite beautiful - mystic, sophisticated, reflexive and self critical, but fundamentally concerned with amplifying the goodness in humanity rather than the power of her religion. We did things like trying to analyse why and how the prayers of some agents of God had a habit of coming true; attempting to discover mechanical truth in the old addage that 'God helps those that help themselves'.
Her excellence as a person was not mirrored by her excellence as a landlady. The heating was broken, my room's window was cracked and it got into negative temperatures on winter nights, and the bed and carpets were ridden with parasites. I was fed on so much in my sleep I developed an allergy to bug bites in general, and have a smattering of recurrent, painful but small cysts in my legs. I couldn't complain to any housing authority as she wasn't a registered landlady, nor was the property registered, so it was either live there, be homeless and study, or terminate my studies entirely.
While her faith was sophisticated and largely consistent with the way she lived her life, the sanctity of life can be inconvenient for a tenant of a property; largely when the corpse of her dead cat is left near a radiator wrapped in a blanket for several days so it (poor Foursocks) can receive a dignified funeral. At least she only kept the dead bird the cat killed on the kitchen table for a day and a half, eh?
Another amusing way this interposed was that I volunteered to help her rearrange her attic, I might've had trouble with my legs but she was elderly and becoming infirm - there was a large wasps' nest in the attic which you could hear buzzing in the summer I moved there. Because she didn't want to disturb their peace, they were left in the attic with no food and with the skylight constantly closed; they all starved to death. Some of the attic rearrangement was removing dead wasps from old, rotting keepsakes and irrelevant tat she had accumulated through her life.
Her faith was a barrier between her ex-husband and her, and lead to a messy breakup; with her son angry at the God who denied him the love of both parents. The most tragic thing I found in the attic was a young boy's cuddly toy, one eyed and loved until the stuffing half fell out, covered in spider webs and dead insects, alongside train-sets and homework books.
The attic rearrangement was making this vault of rotting memories accessible to her again.
Many thanks, that's a fascinating story, very sensitively and evocatively recounted, fdrake!
I'm not sure what led me to think you were opposed to theism. Probably an irrational tendency to jump to ill-conceived conclusions based merely on some set of associations or other.
I'm opposed to transcendent Gods on logical grounds and the supernatural on methodological ones. I'm not that sympathetic to theism or theology in general - especially Gods emptied of content through theology. If someone's faith is less about having the correct divine or philosophical meta-narrative and more about the valorisation of humanity I find it respectable. If someone is just a theist, lives an entirely secular lifestyle but hedges their bets with a hollow belief in God without worship or appreciation of God's works, I find it difficult to respect.
I'm opposed to substantivistic notions of transcendence on logical and ethical grounds and to the supernatural insofar as it consitutes a substantivistic conception of transcendence. (Visions of the supernatural such as Blake's may have great poetical and allegorical power, though, and I am saying only that the supernatural carries, and should carry, no intersubjective weight). In the context of science then it would seem right to ignore the supernatural for methodological reasons, or ignore nothing and consider everything that can be investigated to be part of the natural order.
I agree with you about "valorization of humanity" but I would like to extend it to valorization of life. I respect and admire attempts to create ever more comprehensive metanarratives, while acknowledging that no metanarrative could ever be adequate to the Real. I also agree with you about 'lip service' theists.
- Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics
And the classic!:
"Idealism — and Fichte most emphatically — is governed unknowingly by an ideology which says that the not-I, l’autrui, anything, finally, that reminds one of nature, is worth almost nothing, so that the unity of the self-sustaining thought can devour it in good conscience. This vindicates the principle of thought and, equally, whets its appetite. Philosophical system is the belly turned mind, just as rage is the defining mark of idealism in all its forms ... The view of the man in the center of the world is akin to contempt for humanity: to leave nothing uncontested or unchallenged."
-Ghandi
I think he was wrong about that. Idealism at its extreme is the view from the grave, the world gone gray. The materialist is seeking to live fully in this world, which is honorable. The casual observer is waiting for the materialist to notice that at materialism's extreme, all meaning is lost.
- Alphonso Lingis, Phenomenological Explanations
“If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing...If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.”
? Ludwig Wittgenstein
That's a good one. Too bad Wittgenstein's motivation/volition to do philosophy was in large part driven by his tormented soul.
Why is that too bad?
Well, this runs deep into what I fundamentally believe philosophy is to many (not all!) people. A coping mechanism meshed with a large amount of the defence mechanism of reality manifest in intellectualization. Some call it mental masturbation; but, I digress.
I just want to read something inspiring from Wittgenstein instead of the constant deepness present in all his remarks about language, reality, and the world.
There's certainly plenty of mental masturbators around these parts. That's not the same as real inner anguish, though; quite the opposite...
Quoting Posty McPostface
Surely there's other folks to turn to for inspiring quotes other than Witty.
See, and this is in my opinion the problem with philosophy or continental philosophy. Namely, that that inner anguish serves as a volition to create a world view (through intellectualization and emotive reasoning) via philosophy. Not all philosophers fall into that trap, as Wittgenstein did not; but, some never recover (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, nihilism, pessimism, and so on etc.)
Quoting Noble Dust
Indeed, Hegel stands pretty high on my list, along with Kant. Hegel for asserting the truth that every person can find a place working towards the betterment of society, and Kant for being true, genuine, and sincere in his philosophy.
Can you blame anyone who experiences inner anguish to want to formalize a worldview? What's another way to respond to inner anguish in which a worldview isn't subsequently formed?
I believe that one ought not to jump too deep into the pessimism, nihilism, and absurdism rampant in philosophy. It seems like every other day we get a thread about the need for therapy instead of dwelling on the sad and negative emotions.
Obviously, there's nobody around to tell you that. Is this a failure of philosophy as a discipline itself?
I don't know that I would characterize the corpus of Western philosophy as a whole as pessimistic. For myself, I've found that inner anguish lead me to philosophy, which lead to a sharpening of my ability to reason and intuit, and think. My life hasn't gotten better since getting into philosophy, but that's because of my own poor choices and character deficiencies. Maybe that's the limit of philosophy, per academia. Academic philosophy, as much as I've tasted, has helped me think. Thinking as is doesn't help one live life. Thinking needs to have a motivation which prompts action. Philosophy itself is never enough to prompt action.
Amen.
I just re-read through, as I tend to do (because I tend to respond too quickly), and I think you edited this, right? It's interesting you bring up nihilism and absurdism, things that I don't think I would say are rampant on the forum, but definitely present. As far as I can tell, these perspectives are a cocktail of inner anguish, simple ignorance, and the blotation of academic philosophy into a masturbation contest, like you hinted at. Nothing about those views has anything to do with real life...until academia inevitably bleeds down into real life...
Yeah, I tend to edit everything I post. For spelling mistakes and clarification of my position and thoughts about things.
Quoting Noble Dust
Well, they are strong triggers to the emotional aspect of human beings, especially those that display an attitude of depression or pessimism. I would call them the logical consequence of a depressive mindset. Since, they are based on emotions and emotive reasoning, they are hard to argue with and seem very real to the arguer. Hence, it is easy to get 'stuck' in that mindset and then indulge in the philosophers who also felt that way about life.
It's interesting, because that makes total sense; get stuck in pessimistic thoughts = gravitate to the pessimists. But for myself (and I'm sure for others) it's been the opposite; I get stuck in pessimism and nihilistic thoughts, and it just makes me crave the sort of "sacred" optimism of certain thinkers. But this is obviously because of my religious background; I'm craving the certainty of a religious truth. But philosophers like Berdyaev and Maritain, and the Christian mystics, who have ultimately optimistic views, are actually the thinkers I turn to when I'm in the worst depression. But I can't see how either approach might be better; it can be equally unhealthy to turn to pessimism or optimism in those circumstances... again, the issue seems to come down to action. If neither approach can lead to real action in the real world, then?...But what can catapult action in the real world, when depression is preventing action? Again, not just ideas, not even optimistic ideas.
What you're really talking about is change. That's hard to do through reason alone. Though, I am in the same boat, so to speak, and treat philosophy as therapy.
Yes, reason can't change a person's life, qualitatively. If you're addicted, depressed, emotionally paralyzed, then reason won't help you. Philosophy as a whole, if you're of sound enough mind to interface with the concepts, can, at best, give you a deeper understanding of thinking, and maybe the human condition as well.
I don't treat philosophy as therapy, though. I treat it as a way to sharpen the sword-brain, if you will. Or at least, that's how I treat it now-adays.
Well, isn't that some form of prophylactic therapy in your mind? To better address any potential future issues that may arise in your mind or in the real world?
I was thinking more in terms of the therapy I've had myself, but sure, it could be prophylactic.
- Francois Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event
"How do I recognize that this colour is red? One answer would be: 'I have learnt English.'"
You can almost hear the "you imbicile" tacked on to the end of that.
— Hacker, Insight and Illusion, op cit., n. 3, pp. 99-100.
You could, for a long time, be moving towards action, and yet not know it. And then suddenly....
Are you speaking from experience?
Yes.
Care to elaborate, here or via PM? No worries either way. Your idea reminded me of this Rilke poem, which, as a quote, is, I guess, apropos to the thread. The translation from German is always clunky, but it came to mind:
Imaginary Career
At first a childhood, limitless and free
of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.
And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.
Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,
a longing for the first world, the ancient one...
Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.
I like Rilke's poetry, although I have read it only in English translation and, not being an adequate Deutscher sprecher, cannot comment on the 'clunkiness' compared to the originals.
But you are on the right track as to what I had in mind. "God leaping out" is a metaphor for the kinds of shifts that can, sometimes seemingly inexplicably, occur, and lead you to a different kind of action and activity. Of course, we always imagine that we are, or at least should be, the conscious masters of our own destinies. Consciousness, and its attending rationality or rationalizations, is vastly overrated. Pure reason, the life of cognition, is wrongly thought to be the primary life of the spirit, when the primary life is really pre-cognitive affect, as I see it.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
-Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
- Selected quotes of Wittgenstein.
@Janus
- Giorgio Agamben, Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture
"Many contemporaries are in one important sense neither theists nor atheists—it isn’t so much that they think that God does exist or that he does not, or even that they are ‘agnostic’ in the traditional sense. Rather, as Richard Rorty once said, he just wished people would shut up altogether about the whole topic because for him and those like him the categorical dimension within which something like ‘God’ could—or could not—be said to exist has just disappeared (or been abolished).
The question of the existence of some entity that might instantiate this category has simply lost all meaning or relevance. From the point of view of a religious believer this is the worst possible state of affairs: at least the militant atheist agrees that something very important is at issue in the discussion of ‘God’. For a committed theist, Rorty’s position would seem to be a particularly intractable form of what he or she would call atheism."
- Raymond Geuss
Anyone who agrees with that is a monster.
- Kierkegaard
"Philosophers, past and present alike, have invariably been prone to be long on promises and short on performance. Priding themselves on their 'solutions', they are in fact remembered and cherished for the problems which they raised. Their 'solutions', above all, have proved to be - for us - problems. I know of scarcely one philosopher (Socrates always excepted) who ever raised a problem as a problem. I mean terminally as a problem, not merely by way of entry into his theme.
Thus Zeno himself never viewed his paradoxes as problems; he advanced them only as proofs calculated to establish the impossibility or unintelligibility of motion. There have been dogmatic and there have been sceptical, but there have been no problematic philosophers. More precisely, there have been no problematic philosophers eo nomine, though in fact none has succeeded in being anything case. They have lacked self-knowledge. They have failed to understand the true dignity of their achievements. For the problematic character of philosophy, certainly of all philosophy up to the present, need not be altogether a misfortune. It is the happy suggestion of Leo Strauss that Plato understood the eternal Ideas to be the great range of problems that preside over man's deepest reflections and that it is in being open to those problems, as problems, that he acquires Socratic ignorance, which is the same as Socratic wisdom"
- Jose Benardete, Infinity
"The only virtual world is the actual world."
Your pithy post was put in The Philosophy Forum Quote Cabinet.
On pain and words:
"Utterances [of pain] are expressions of it: "I know I'm in pain", "It's getting worse", "It's throbbing", are as much expressions of pain as "I'm in pain" is. Pain gets into the words, as hope or comfort get into words of hope or comfort (they wouldn't be such words otherwise). Or words are part of its suppression, or of distraction from it. They need not be to distract me from my pain, in which case the words may race, as if to get out of range; but to distract you from it (as in Chekhov); there is nothing anyone can do about it, and it might deprive me of your company if you knew; and anyway I don't know any words for it. Here my words don't reach all the way to my pain".
On speaking and politics:
"To speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them — not as a parent speaks for you, i.e., instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e., speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all — of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all — those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice — in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in love, in art — and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. So are the others.
But in the political, the impotence of your voice shows up quickest; it is of importance to others to stifle it; and it is easiest to hope there, since others are in any case included in it, that it will not be missed if it is stifled, i.e., that you will not miss it. But once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn't, i.e., until you show that you do. A fortunate community is one in which the issue is least costly to raise; and only necessary to raise on brief, widely spaced, and agreed upon occasions; and, when raised, offers a state of affairs you can speak for, i.e., allows you to reaffirm the polis".
On strength:
"It is like trying to throw a feather; for some things, breath is better than strength; stronger".
Or you could tape it to a tennis ball.
@Baden, Bart Simpson wisdom.
"I take it that most moral philosophers have assumed that the validity of morality depended upon its competence to assess every action (except those which are "caused, "determined) and that the possibility of repudiating morality anywhere meant its total repudiation as fully rational; that a fully rational morality must be capable of evaluating the highest excellence and the most unspeakable evil, and that persons of the highest excellence and most unspeakable evil must agree with our moral evaluations if these evaluations are to be fully rational. I think of this as the moralization of moral theory - it makes any and every issue a moral issue, and for no particular reason. Such a conception has done to moral philosophy and to the concept of morality what the events of the modern world have often done to the moral life itself: made it a matter of academic questions.
Morality must leave itself open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationship against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself or others. Other ways of settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion, and withdrawal. Morality is a valuable way because the others are so often inaccessible or brutal; but it is not everything; it provides a door through which someone, alienated or in danger of alienation from another through his action, can return by the offering and the acceptance of explanation, excuses and justifications, or by the respect one human being will show another who sees and can accept the responsibility for a position which he himself would not adopt".
"I do not expect that horror movies really cause honor, but, at best, "horror". But I also do not know that I know the difference. I do not suppose that what I have, when I am horrified, is horror; it may only be "horror". - What is the object of horror? At what do we tremble in this way? Fear is of danger; terror is of violence, of the violence I might do or that might he done me. I can be terrified of thunder, but not horrified by it. And isn't it the case that not the human horrifies me, hut the inhuman, the monstrous? Very well. But only what is human can be inhuman. - Can only the human be monstrous? If something is monstrous, and we do not believe that there are monsters, then only the human is a candidate for the monstrous.
If only humans feel horror (if the capacity to feel horror is a development of the specifically human biological inheritance), then maybe it is a response specifically to being human. To what, specifically, about being human? Horror is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable"
On Descartes:
"In the light of this passing of the question of the other, a change is noticeable in the coda Descartes supplies his argument at the end of this third Meditation:
'The whole force of the argument I have here used to prove the existence of God consists in the fact that I recognize that it would not be possible for my nature to be what it is, possessing the idea of a God, unless God really existed- the same God, I say, the idea of whom I possess, the God who possess all these high perfections... [who] cannot be a deceiver...'
The main point of summary is that I could not have produced the idea I have of God, for it can have come from nothing less than God himself. But a new note of necessity is also struck, that without the presence of this idea in myself, and (hence) the presence of the fact of which it is the imprint, my own nature would necessarily not be what it is. (Nietzsche's idea of the death of God can be understood to begin by saying roughly or generally as much: the idea of God is part of (the idea of) human nature. If that idea dies, the idea of human nature equally dies.) So not only the fact, as it were, of my existence, but the integrity of it, depends upon this idea. And so these meditations are about the finding of self-knowledge after all: of the knowledge of a human self by a human self."
"The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic. Innovation in philosophy has characteristically gone together with a repudiation — a specifically cast repudiation — of most of the history of the subject. But in the later Wittgenstein (and, I would now add, in Heidegger’s Being and Time) the repudiation of the past has a transformed significance, as though containing the consciousness that history will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgement of it (in particular, our acknowledgement that it is not past), and that one’s own practice and ambition can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past.
But “the past” does not in this context refer simply to the historical past; it refers to one’s own past, to what is past, or what has passed, within oneself. One could say that in a modernist situation “past” loses its temporal accent and means anything “not present.” Meaning what one says becomes a matter of making one’s sense present to oneself.
...The modern [is] ... a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; the time in which music and painting and poetry (like nations) have to define themselves against their pasts; the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one’s present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one’s mind, such as it is."
--
On words and world:
"Now imagine that you are in your armchair reading a book of reminiscences and come across the word “umiak.’’ You reach for your dictionary and look it up. Now what did you do? Find out what “umiak” means, or find out what an umiak is? But how could we have discovered something about the world by hunting in the dictionary? If this seems surprising, perhaps it is because we forget that we learn language and learn the world together, that they become elaborated and distorted together, and in the same places. We may also be forgetting how elaborate a process the learning is. We tend to take what a native speaker does when he looks up a noun in a dictionary as the characteristic process of learning language. (As, in what has become a less forgivable tendency, we take naming as the fundamental source of meaning.)
But it is merely the end point in the process of learning the word. When we turned to the dictionary for “umiak” we already knew everything about the word, as it were, but its combination: we knew what a noun is and how to name an object and how to look up a word and what boats are and what an Eskimo is. We were all prepared for that umiak. What seemed like finding the world in a dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary. We had the world with us all the time, in that armchair; but we felt the weight of it only when we felt a lack in it. Sometimes we will need to bring the dictionary to the world. That will happen when (say) we run across a small boat in Alaska of a sort we have never seen and wonder—what? What it is, or what it is called? In either case, the learning is a question of aligning language and the world. What you need to learn will depend on what specifically it is you want to know; and how you can find out will depend specifically on what you already command. How we answer the question, “What is X?” will depend, therefore, on the specific case of ignorance and of knowledge."
In every discourse, whether of the mind conversing with its own thoughts, or of the individual in his intercourse with others, there is an assumed or expressed limit within which the subjects of its operation are confined. The most unfettered discourse is that in which the words we use are understood in the widest possible application, and for them the limits of discourse are co-extensive with those of the universe itself. But more usually we confine ourselves to a less spacious field. Sometimes, in discoursing of men we imply (without expressing the limitation) that it is of men only under certain circumstances and conditions that we speak, as of civilized men, or of men in the vigour of life, or of men under some other condition or relation. Now, whatever may be the extent of the field within which all the objects of our discourse are found, that field may properly be termed the universe of discourse. Furthermore, this universe of discourse is in the strictest sense the ultimate subject of the discourse.
—?George Boole
"Shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at, the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different; there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long as no one knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame.
...Shame itself is exactly arbitrary, inflexible and extreme in its effect. It is familiar to find that what mortifies one person seems wholly unimportant to another: think of being ashamed of one’s origins, one’s accent, one’s ignorance, one’s skin, one’s clothes, one’s legs or teeth... It is the most isolating of feelings, the most comprehensible perhaps in idea, but the most incomprehensible or incommunicable in fact. Shame, I’ve said, is the most primitive, the most private, of emotions; but it is also the most primitive of social responses.
With the discovery of the individual, whether in Paradise or in the Renaissance, there is the simultaneous discovery of the isolation of the individual; his presence to himself, but simultaneously to others. Moreover, shame is felt not only toward one’s own actions and one’s own being, but toward the actions and the being of those with whom one is identified—fathers, daughters, wives . . ., the beings whose self-revelations reveal oneself. Families, any objects of one’s love and commitment, ought to be the places where shame is overcome (hence happy families are all alike); but they are also the place of its deepest manufacture, and one is then hostage to that power, or fugitive."
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6214/reading-group-preface-to-hegels-phenomenology-of-spirit-trans-walter-kaufman
I enjoyed this:
Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
And so looked for others, here:
Hegel Quotes:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/quotes.htm
"Social valorization of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal maneuver, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit out protests to declarations of these affects — say, declarations of suffering — rather than becoming active agents of social change. I’m of course not saying that suffering shouldn’t be expressed and talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject into the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting the position of the victim on all possible levels.
Valorization of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem — injustice, say — would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. This would also involve naming — not only some people but also social and economic inequalities that we long stopped naming and questioning"
In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way up front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of any illness; in the typical French toilet the hole is far to the back, so that shit may appear as soon as possible; finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles — the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that, in the famous discussion of different European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that 'German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.' It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement that comes from within our body is clearly discernible in it.
— How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek.
Sounds like he's not opposed to wisdom?..
I felt something like this lament last July as the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 obliviously came and went like so much of the Greenland icesheet ...
Meanwhile, among others:
:cool: Thanks!
My current read: https://www.plutobooks.com/9781783713004/the-mythology-of-work/
You'd like it, I think. Lots of references to Deleuze in there. :cheer:
I have been trying to get time to read another of his books for some time now. I have a few days off work this week so maybe I will get lucky.
The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation - Peter Fleming
:up:
Getting hot around here! I prefer silence when lips and nipples are involved, Except for the moaning of course.
Mmmmm ... "the moaning".
:zip:
"I, of all people, should not have been so startled to read: that there may be no way to filter bot-generated from human-generated text because a lot of the time, conversing Humans are nothing more than Chinese rooms themselves [ ...] So it may be impossible to distinguish between people and bots not because the bots have grown as smart as people, but because much of the time, people are as dumb as bots." ~Peter Watts, author of Firefall
One might then expect people to start asking why U.S. troops should be in Saudi Arabia anyway, why exactly control of this region is so important, and finally, how much real power the United States has and how it can be best deployed. Instead public discussion almost immediately began to focus on elaborating various fantasies about Islamic fundamentalism, “their” hatred of “our” values, freedom, and way of life, etc. The creation of imaginary hate figures may give some immediate psychic satisfaction, but in the long run it only spreads and increases confusion and aggression. Troops can in principle be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, policy toward the Saudi monarchy can change, but how can one deal in a satisfactory way with inherently spectral “Islamic terror”?
It no doubt suits some political circles in the United States that the population continue to be fearful, mystified, and frustrated, the better to gain their acquiescence in various further military operations, but it is hard to believe that this kind of emotional and cognitive derangement of the population contributes to increasing U.S. political power."
-Raymond Geuss, "The Politics of Managing Decline"
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
-Nietzsche's assessment of humanity.
Seems like an over-simplification:
"In Osama Bin Laden's November 2002 "Letter to America",[3][4] he explicitly stated that al-Qaeda's motives for their attacks include: Western support for attacking Muslims in Somalia, supporting Russian atrocities against Muslims in Chechnya, supporting the Indian oppression against Muslims in Kashmir, the Jewish aggression against Muslims in Lebanon, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia,[4][5][6] US support of Israel,[7][8] and sanctions against Iraq.[9]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks
~Oscar Wilde
?—Slavoj Žižek
:death: :flower:
NB: Also, grudgingly, usually a fan of Mr. Gray ...
Clever.
~Catherine Sellers, actress, one of Camus' lovers
Who said that? :chin:
~Jonathan Miller 1934-2019
(JM was so much more than a "disbeliever in god", as we all are, of course; I revere him for his irreverently comic & artistic accomplishments, yet even more I remember his intellectually scrupulous commitment to freethought. Even though for generations JM had lit countless other candles with his own flame before it went out, today the world's a slightly darker ruin ...)
EDIT 1.7.2020
Jonathan Miller as Bertrand Russell :rofl:
Along with Jonathan Miller, Clive James and Gary Rhodes died yesterday as well. Rhodes, being a chef and not a writer, wasn't known for his words, but James wrote a lot of good stuff:
Personally, I liked his criticism:
"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
~Toni Morrison
-- forgot to record the source.
(12.8.80)
?Reason's Greetings?
:death: :flower:
- Terry Hoitz, The Other Guys
This unique relation between producers and appropriators is, of course, mediated by the 'market'. Markets of various kind have existed throughout history and no doubt before, as people have exchanged and sold their surpluses in many different ways and for many different purposes. But the market in capitalism has a distinctive, unprecedented function. Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market. And even more fundamentally, both capital and labour are utterly dependent on the market for the most basic conditions of their own reproduction. ... This market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution, but the principle determinant and regulator of social reproduction."
- Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism
adieu, rabbi ...
:death: :flower:
"In capitalist democracy, the separation between civic status and class position operates in both directions: socio-economic position does not determine the right to citizenship - and that is what is democractic in capitalist democracy - but, since the power of the capitalist to appropriate the surplus labour of workers is not dependant on a privileged juridical or civic status, civic equality does not directly affect or significantly modify class inequality - and that is what limits democracy in capitalism. Class relations between capital and labour can survive even with juridical equality and universal suffrage. In that sense, political equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with socio-economic inequality but leaves it fundamentally intact".
--
On why the American idea of democracy is particularly shit:
"We have become so accustomed to the formula, 'representative democracy', that we have tended to forget the novelty of the American idea. In its Federalist form, at any rate, it meant that something hirthrto perceived as the antithesis of democratic self-government was now nbot only compatible with but constitutive of democracy: not the excercise political power but its relinquishment, its transfer to others, its alienation.
The alienation of political power was so foreign to the Greek conception of democracy that even election could be regarded a an oligarchic practice, which democracies might adopt for certain specific purposes but which did not belong to the essence of the democratic constitution. Thus Aristotle, outlining how a 'mixes' constitution might be constructed out of the elements from the main constitutional types, such as oligarchy and democracy, suggests the inclusion of election as an oligarchic feature. It was oligarchic because it tended to favour the gnorimoi, the notables, the rich and well born who were less likely to be sympathetic to democracy. ... Not only did the 'Founding Fathers' conceive representation as a means of distancing the people from politics, but they advocated it for the same reason that Athenian democracts were suspicious of election: that it favoured the propertied classes".
via Democracy Against Capitalism
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths —
But is that an answer?"[/i]
~Heinrich Heine
"I would reframe the question a little bit. Philosophy, almost by definition, is the subject concerned with the biggest questions you could possibly ask. Like the ones you mentioned: Are we living in a simulation? Are we alone in the universe? Should we even think about such questions? Is the future determined? What do we even mean by it being determined? Why are we alive at this time are and not some other time? And when you contemplate the enormity of those questions, I think you could ask: 'Why be concerned with anything else? Why not spend your whole life on those questions?'. And I think that is the right way to phrase the question."
*swoon*
I did. :)
So what do you base your statement on? Usually on is expected to provide some sort of evidence. :cool:
This is a thread on quotes and in the Lounge section,. no evidence or justification is required.
My personal evidence and justification for the quote is too esoteric and perhaps long to put into the form of a concise and logical argument.
I don't expect everyone to agree with me.
That is very convincing proof of what you said. :lol:
BF Skinner
~Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology
"I can't breathe!"
again ...
:clap: :flower:
Uhuru!
Instead of burning the streets-
No, they are just burning any old mother down.
~Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
~Samuel Beckett, from letter to Emil Cioran
:love:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=10s&v=78y06QkpnC8
:death: :flower:
Ain't dat de trut mon. :lol: :rofl:
~Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone
e.g. hard core tRump deplorables
Quoting Leiton Baynes
"Yo, semites" ... wtf.
:mask:
~Keith Richards
:cool:
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
~Abraham Lincoln, corporate lawyer
~Thomas Jefferson, slave owner
- Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
Now - now that you know
that the preacher
is lyin' ...[/i]"
~BMW
-- Mohamed Choukri
In reality, the outcome of the struggle matters little, likewise its recuperation - that "disenchanted concept"; the important thing is the struggle itself, the forces it obliges us to muster, even if everything falls apart or goes bad later on. If there is a disenchanted concept, it is first of all that of the future. It is always in its name that we give up or betray a struggle ("think of your future"). To become capable of action, we must paradoxically give up the idea of the future. We must leap into another temporality and discover the new forces of time."
-David Lapoujade, Aberrant Movements
"Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." ~Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1945
-A guy I recently drug tested at work.
[i]"Love can mend your life
But love can break your heart
...
Seems I'm not alone at being alone"[/i]
~Gordon Sumner, 1979
:clap: :100:
(I never saw a black before)
He'll set me free before I die,
I thought, he must be the Messiah."[/i]
~Sonia Weitz, poet and Holocaust survivor liberated from a concentration camp by the all-Black 761st Battalion
But who will liberate the liberators? (BLAM)
"The children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles." ~Brian Epstein, interview with Larry Kane, 1964
"No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide."
~Cesare Pavese
It takes strength of character to seek out a reason to live while the darkness of life bears down upon us.
new year, new fear
2021
We will Rise my friends, We Will Rise :sparkle:
:victory: :mask:
-Anastasia.
– b.w.
-Umberto Eco, "Kant and the Platypus", p. 9
[i]"What's a philosopher?" said Brutha.
"Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," said a voice in his head.
"An infidel seeking the just fate he shall surely receive,' said Vorbis. "An inventor of fallacies. This cursed city attracts them like a dung heap attracts flies."
"Actually, it's the climate," said the voice of the tortoise. "Think about it. If you're inclined to leap out of your bath and run down the street every time you think you've got a bright idea, you don't want to do it somewhere cold. If you do do it somewhere cold, you die out. That's natural selection, that is. Ephebe's known for its philosophers. It's better than street theater."
"What, a lot of old men running around the streets with no clothes on?" said Brutha, under his breath, as they were marched onward.
"More or less. If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless."
"Why doesn't anyone lock them away safely, then? They don't sound much use to me," said Brutha.
"Because the hundredth idea," said Om, "is generally a humdinger."[/i]
-Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods'
that's why in ancient societies the aristocrats always had one or more long fingernails.
~Ted Chiang
"If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
~Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama
“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” ~Victor Hugo
:fire:
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-57022757
Found in the forum wild, in reply to @Banno.
Glorious.
Apropos the subject of waffles and this particular discussion, here is the Waffle House philosophy:
Waffle House's philosophy is to aim “to deliver a unique experience to our customers through delivering great food, friendly, attentive service, excellent price and a welcoming presence”.
Nice line. And correct, we're living in quite unique times, all over the world...
"There is no inevitable The Future, just as there is no inevitable Right Side of History ... But there are consequences of actions." ~ Margaret Atwood
"Paths are made by walking." ~Franz Kafka
"Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention." ~Amy Tan
(Like god or love) Freedom is a verb almost always mistaken for a noun. ~180 Proof
- Muriel Spark
- Muriel Spark
tell me the answer
You may be a lover
but you ain't no dancer!"[/i]
~Macca, '68
- John le Carré
*
[i]"There's nowhere you can be
that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy"[/i]
~John Lennon
"Our moment permits interest in one question only – Will we of Deadwood be more than targets for assfucking? To not grab ankle is to declare yourself interested. What's your posture, Bullock?" ~Al Swearengen to Seth Bullock
"The fundamental problem of political philosophy: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" ~Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus
- C.I. Lewis
--Abraham Maslow
Thank you. I didn't know of bell hooks. Great quotes. Here's more with references.
From the Guardian.
Here's one under 'On Community':
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/15/bell-hooks-best-quotes-feminism-race
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12268/is-philosophy-a-game-of-lets-pretend/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/632795
Quoting David Hume
–Neil deGrasse Tyson on the show Hot Ones
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12284/can-a-metaphor-be-a-single-word/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/634130
Philosophy is the battle against [the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language]. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109)
— SEP: Metaphor
Following your post and wonderful quotes, just read a bit in the Guardian.
Quoting Guardian - Joan Didion
I wish I'd read that 30 years ago ! Yes, desire and fear - the prime motivators - would have been good to have explored that, all the better to know self. Perhaps, a different path would have been taken...
I have read similar to:
'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking'
That's something TPF is good for, I find. Well, sometimes... :wink:
:yum: MERRY SOLSTICE :sparkle:
He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not see long for instances of his ignorance...
The clearest and most enlarged understandings of thinking men find themselves puzzled and at a loss in every particle of matter... all the simple ideas we have are confined... to those we receive from corporeal objects by sensation...
But how much these few and narrow inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings, will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things...
But to say and think there are no such, because we conceive nothing of them, is no better an argument than if a blind man should be positive in it, that there was no such thing as sight and colors, because he had no manner of idea of any such thing, nor could by any means frame to himself any notions about seeing.
The ignorance and the darkness that is in us no more hinders nor confines our knowledge that is in others, than the blindness of a mole is an argument against the quicksightedness of an eagle."
- John Locke
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.3.22
- David Hume
*
"Everything in moderation, including moderation."
~Oscar Wilde
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
*
[i]Only in uncertainty
are we naked
and alive ... [/i]
~Peter Gabriel
- Wolfgang Streeck
My fav definition of populism I've come across. Also!:
"In the United States, the sacrosanct nature of dreams, never to be critically assessed, may be the most powerful impediment to political radicalization and collective action".
Kill your dreams.
The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history.
~Dr. McCoy to Spock, s3e21
https://philosophynow.org/issues/148/Iris_Murdoch_and_The_Mystery_of_Love ... :broken:
~Malcolm X
- Ralph Cudworth A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality
*Italics added
Into the files.
- Gillian Rose, Paradiso
"Don't never buy nothin' what has a handle attached. It means work."
"Good, fast, cheap: pick any two."
"It depends."
Regards, stay safe 'n well.
[i]Why buy when you can rent the cow?
Why rent the cow when you can borrow her milk?
Why borrow her milk when you can steal some?
But why steal when you can live without?[/i]
Thus Spoke 180 Proof
:fire:
After @schopenhauer1 replied to my post with that [math]\uparrow[/math], I hadta do some soul-searching!
:smile:
"I wish I could have skipped college."
~Saul Kripke 1940-2022
Superb!
@Moliere
Magnifique!
@Bartricks
:cool:
Sublime! :100:
:up:
[Moses] said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.[/i]
Exodus 2:22
*
You heard it here first!
So if every human has a metaphysic, then should philosophy address itself to every human?
That quote gave me the good feels. :hearts:
As Freddy Zarathustra subtitles his hymn to the "the meaning of the Earth" (TSZ), philosophy is "for all and for none". Indeed, my friend, some are only born posthumously and die many times while still alive. :fire:
Caveat: "a philosophy" that would "address itself to every human" soon becomes a religion (or political myth). :mask:
So -- no! :D
Or, at least, only in part -- the part of philosophy I still have no idea what to do with. (the mythic)
Elaborate.
I'm thinking along the lines of The Forms and the cave. Maybe there's a way of concieving the forms elsewise -- but my thoughts with regards to the mythic, at least, are along those lines: the cave makes sense to me. When Plato writes about the light which you turn to, this is a feeling, at least, that I think I've had.
And yet it is also a myth which orients me, rather than a truth. I'm tempted to say "literal", but I know I mean more than that.... I'm just uncertain how to make more of a differentiation at this point.
Philosophy aims to tell truth-based myths no?
Logic, like math, is "addressed to everyone", yet illogic and innumeracy prevail.
I'm thinking it does more than that too, though.
Squeeze the myth so hard that the truth pops out.
:flower:
Kenzaburo ?e, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Page 54.
Just finished that book :heart:
And now, after an abortive foray into another book that I didn't really like...
:)
:smirk:
Nietzsche — Twilight of the Idols
Said by one skeptic about another. It takes a skeptic to know how to read a skeptic.
Plato, following Socrates, is a zetetic skeptic. This is redundant since both terms originally mean to inquire. He knows he does not know. He desires to be wise, but is not. And so he inquires.
In the Antichrist Nietzsche says:
(52)
The term ephexis (Greek ephektikos) means suspension of belief.
He goes on:
(54)
Since this area is for quotations rather than discuss I will leave off, but I have discussed Plato's zeteticism elsewhere.
From what I can tell the word was coined and used by the Flat Earth society in the 19th century and still today (Rationalwiki). Anyway, right, this is not the place to resolve a terminological dispute.
- Martin Amis
Accurate critique or posturing "white guilt"? Both or neither? I've no doubt what Fanon would say. :chin:
Irony of representation, I wonder what Ms. Sontag thought of this scene ...
Cormac McCarthy 1933-2023
:death: :flower:
*
Wow! Amazing quote.
Emerson, I think. I like this one.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/622702 :smirk:
And therefore many times, when the Intellect or Mind above is Exercised in Abstracted Intellections and Contemplations, the Fancy will at the same time busily employ itself below, in making some kind of Apish Imitations, counterfeit Iconisms, Symbolical Adumbrations and Resemblances of those Intellectual Cogitations of Sensible and Corporeal things.
And hence it comes to pass , that in Speech , Metaphors and Allegories do so exceedingly please , because they highly gratify this Phantastical Power of Passive and Corporeal Cogitation in the Soul, and seem there by also something to raise and refresh the Mind itself, otherwise lazy and ready to faint and be tired by over - long abstracted Cogitations, by taking its old Companion the Body to go along with it, as it were to rest upon, and by affording to it certain crass, palpable, and Corporeal Images, to incorporate those abstracted Cogitations in, that it may be able thereby to see those still more silent and subtle Notions of its own, sensibly reflected to itself from the Corporeal Glass of the Fancy."
- Ralph Cudworth
- John Locke
d. 2023
Quoting Murakami
:party:
I see Paul Auster won the prize in 2006.
:death: :flower:
From the game Disco Elysium, an insect says this to a human.
Quoting Wayfarer
Couldn't let this one go by even if it's one of mine.....
01.01.24
Yes please.
— BR
That would depend on the definition of stupid would it not.
According to some dictionaries:
Stupid, adj
Stupidity, n. Habitual refusal to think (i.e. maladaptive judgment or conduct); H. Arendt's "banality" ...
*
But the blame for stupidity cannot be laid upon the educational systems, when they fail to do their job properly the product is ignorant people.
Stupidity is a personal choice or [s]habit[/s] disease picked up from other stupid members of society.
Good one. I deeply miss Sagan. With Chomsky on his way out, I’m running out of heroes.
“Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model is gone, gone…He ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.” — Paul Simon
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/881459
---Gotthold Lessing
Not necessarily because I would do the same, but because I think that encapsulates the human struggle in matters of philosophy. And not out of humility, but more the opposite. Presumably, Socrates told his disciples the Truth about the futility of pursuing knowledge, but Plato went off pursuing anyway. Cant blame him. It's what we do. We displace the "God given"* Truth with our constructedKnowledge.
*I don't mean scripture nor revelation. I mean we are already the Truth. Like every organism, the Born Truth.
AND
"Not the wind, not the flag. It is the mind that is moving!"
---Huineng, the 6th Chinese Patriarch of Chan
For reasons which I cannot disclose. And I mean literally cannot; not, "not at liberty to".
understanding or the natural light which God gave me is no greater than it is; for it in the nature of a finite intellect to lack understanding of many things, and it is in the nature of a created intellect to be finite. Indeed, I have reason to give thanks to him who has never owed me anything for the great bounty that he has shown me, rather than thinking myself deprived or robbed of any gifts he did not bestow."
- Descartes
Indeed.
Great quote. :cheer:
— some say Kurt Vonnegut, but I’m not sure.
Sure, but we do everything based on imaginary stories in our minds.
Quoting C.S. Peirce
Nonsense. We, and all the other animals, seek territory and food to address hunger and security, basic animal impulses, i.e. instincts. Humans and perhaps a few other animals tell ourselves stories while we do that - explain to ourselves what we're doing and why.
Quoting T Clark
...Reason sheweth that it must be so; for as we are conscious that we have a perceivance of Objects under certain Images, and Notions, so we are not conscious of any Action by which our faculties should make those Images and Notions; and therefore being sensible that we are Affected with such Images, and Notions, so long as, and no longer than we do attend to things without is (which things are therefore called Objects) and not being sensible that we are so by any Action from within our selves it cannot but appear that we are Affected only from the things without us, and so, what really is only in our selves, must seem to come from those things, and consequently to be really in them."
- Richard Burthogge
The upholding of duty. Definitely not sex, as it may seem.
Trump Reelected.
And sometimes even the territory and food are imaginary.
I'm saving this. I'm sure I'll find use for it later.
addendum to
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/945412
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/851181
Bemusings 2 ...
(To be continued ...)
those scpetics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest
of any measures of truth and falsehood; I shou’d reply, that this question is entirely superfluous,
and that neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion.
Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to
breathe and feel…”
- David Hume
"And, that these cogitations of the passive part of the soul called sensations, are not knowledge… is evident by experience also, not only in the sense of hunger and thirst, pain and corporal titillation, but also in… perceptions of light and colours, heat and cold , sounds… For if they were knowledges or intellection, then all men would rest satisfied in the sensible ideas, or phantasms of them and never inquire any further… as when we see the clear light of the meridian sun, or hear the loud noise of thunder, whereas… one dazzle or eyes, the other deafens our ears, but neither enlighten or inform our understandings."
- Ralph Cudworth
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
- Thomas Pynchon
"For first; is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension."