About Jamal

Location Blasting open the phenomena
Website blog.alistairrobinson.me
Posts 10,818
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Favourite philosophers Socrates, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Adorno
Favourite quotations Is this the old loft
With the paint peeling off it
By the Chinese police
Where the dogs roll by?

Is this where they keep
The philostophers now
With the rugs and the dust
Where the books go to die?

How many ye's got?
Say ye's got quite a few
Just sittin' around there
With nothin' to do?

Well I just called ye's up
Cos I wanted to see
A philostopher be
Of assistance to me!

—Frank Zappa


When the light dove parts the air in free flight and feels the air’s resistance, it might come to think that it would do much better still in space devoid of air.

—Immanuel Kant


Philosophical system, in which the sovereign mind entertains delusions of its majesty, has its earliest history in the pre-intellectual realm, that is, in the animal life of the species. Beasts of prey are hungry; pouncing on a victim is hard, often dangerous. If the animal is to risk it, it will require not just the standard impulses, but an auxiliary set, as well. These fuse together with the un-pleasure of hunger to become a kind of rage against the victim, the expression of which, in turn—and expediently enough—terrifies that victim and stuns it. Along the pathway to humanity, this gets rationalized by means of a projection. The rational animal who develops an appetite for his opponent has to, as happy owner of a super-ego, come up with a reason for attacking. The more completely his actions accord with the law of self-preservation, the less he is able to concede, to himself or others, its primacy; otherwise, the status of what the Germans now call the zoon politikon, achieved after so much effort, would come to seem implausible.

Any creature marked out for eating had better be evil. This anthropological scheme has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. 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.

—Theodore W. Adorno
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