Probably one of the most intellectually titillating prefaces to a book I've read in a while:

"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

Nils Loc, 1-4-19 in "The Future Of Fantasy"

"The only virtual world is the actual world."

Your pithy post was put in The Philosophy Forum Quote Cabinet.

Might be posting quite a few passages from Cavell in the next few weeks;

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".

"It is like trying to throw a feather; for some things, breath is better than strength; stronger". — StreetlightX

Or you could tape it to a tennis ball.

@Baden, Bart Simpson wisdom.

More Cavell! - On Morality:

"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".

Yet more Cavell - On Horror and the Human:

"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."

Cavell on modernism and philosophy:

"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."

New favorite quote:

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

Cavell on shame:

"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."

Following the current reading group:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6214/reading-group-preface-to-hegels-phenomenology-of-spirit-trans-walter-kaufman

I enjoyed this:

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.

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

150 quotes from Hegel, linked to the context. — the only genuine source of Hegel quotes on the internet, where you can verify the quote and read it in its context.

From an interview with Alenka Zupancic:

"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"

The unsurpassed master of such analysis was Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom food also serves as 'food for thought'. The three main modes of food preparation (raw, baked, boiled) function as a semiotic triangle: we use them to symbolize the basic opposition of ('raw') nature and ('baked') culture, as well as the mediation between the two opposites (in the procedure of boiling). There is a memorable scene Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Freedom in which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper: 'Where is that place, you know?' and sneak away to a small room in the back. As a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is thus tempted to propose that shit can also serve as 'food for thought': the three basic types of toilet design in the West form a kind of excremental counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking.

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.

“I’m generally opposed to wisdom! I think wisdom is the most disgusting thing you can imagine. Wisdom is the most conformist thing you can imagine. Wisdom is this, you know, whatever you do, a ‘wise man’ will come and justify it [ … ] ‘Why are we running after these miserable earthly pleasures? Think about eternity, the only satisfaction is eternity.’ If I were to say it with proper pathos, it would sound [like] a deep thing to say … Now let’s say the opposite: ‘Why run after the spectre of eternity? Carpe diem! Grasp what you have here.’ It sounds wise. Now I will say the third option: ‘Why be caught in the contrast between eternity and temporary existence? The true wisdom is to see eternity in fleeting, temporary pleasures.’ It is wise. Then I say the fourth variation: ‘We are forever condemned [to be caught] between the two, [so] a wise man accepts this.’ You know - whatever I say - that’s my point! - you can sell it as ‘a wisdom’.” ~Slavoj Žižek, interview

Sounds like he's not opposed to wisdom?..

"Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars." ~George Steiner



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 ...

"Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars." ~George Steiner — 180 Proof

Meanwhile, among others:

:cool: Thanks!

:sad:

Heh, where's this from?

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:

On the list!

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:

"... Not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs...." ~William Gass

"... Not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs...." ~William Gass — 180 Proof

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

Meaning is first spilled, and then produced.

"For a brief moment after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001, it seemed as if the shock of these events might bring about a general process of reflection by Americans on the place of the United States in the wider world. Unfortunately, the form this reflection eventually took was self-defeating. One normal way of going about determining why someone did something is to ask the person in question. The question why Al-Qaeda bombed the Pentagon and the World Trade Center has a relatively clear answer: “They say they did it because of U.S. support for the corrupt Saudi monarchy and the garrisoning of American troops in Saudi Arabia."

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"