“Practice yourself in little things; and thence proceed to greater.”— Epictetus, Discourses
Philosophy Bits
Interesting and insightful quotes from humanity's greatest minds!Curated by: @suliqyre
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Moral choice is free, and therefore unforeseeable. The child does not contain the man he will become. Yet, it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. […] The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the form of contingency.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Nihilism tells us nothing has value and by doing so it frees us from our worries about the value of things, the value of others, and the value of our own lives. By making everything worthless, we allow ourselves the strange comfort of knowing that nothing we do can possibly matter. Freedom from meaning is also freedom from responsibility, and in this there can be a kind of morbid excitement.
But just like any dogma — whether ideological or religious — there can be no genuine certainty about any of nihilism’s claims, for they rely on foundations just as uncertain as anything else. Skepticism is such a powerful antidote that it can defeat not only any possible dogma, but also the most severe nihilism.
It follows that to use skepticism as a justification for nihilism or any kind of cynicism is absurd. For all that skepticism can do is to show us that everything is ultimately uncertain and there are no foundations to our knowledge. The conclusion that follows is not that there is no value but that we cannot be certain of value.
“I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.”— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
Democratic society as a whole must move from a mere recognition of abstract rights and liberties, from the formal principle of legally recorded right of voting and speaking to a real freedom which provides life with aim and purpose.
Nikolai Berdyaev, “Political Testament”
“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”— Oscar Wilde, “Preface”, The Picture of Dorian Gray
He who cannot make poems will also be only able to judge them negatively. True criticism requires the ability to create the product to be criticized oneself. Taste alone only judges negatively.
Novalis, Logological Fragments I
“Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Whatever difference you want to imagine in the one living, death makes him just like the person whose dissimilarity did not make him distinguishable. To the vain person, the mirror of life sometimes depicts his dissimilarity with flattering faithfulness, but the mirror of death does not flatter; its faithfulness shows all to be identical; they all look alike when death with its mirror has demonstrated that the dead person is silent.
Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
“Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.”— Coretta Scott King, in Understanding Cultural Diversity in Today’s Complex World by Leo Parvis
A brave soldier will plunge alone into the midst of nine armies. He seeks fame and can bring himself to this. How much more, then, is possible for a man who governs Heaven and earth, stores up the ten thousand things, lets the six parts of his body be only a dwelling, makes ornaments of his ears and eyes, unifies the knowledge of what he knows, and in his mind never tastes death. He will soon choose the day and ascend far off. Men may become his followers, but how could he be willing to bother himself about things?
Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, Watson tr. (Ch 5)
When you encounter a fragment, you have to do something about the gaps in the text. You cannot simply allow the gaps to remain, because then the fragment would say everything and nothing. You must fill them in for the text to make sense in the context of your normative understanding, so you do.
The result is that a fragment always has two authors: the one who writes and the one who reads. What the fragment says is always partly a reflection of yourself. But what it reflects is not always what you expect, and it might even be something intolerable. As such, your reaction to the text can be intense and visceral, especially if it seems to say something you do not like.
But if you’re aware that you’re filling the gaps, then an alternative approach becomes possible. The fragment can be approached as a question. A question demands a response, but there are always many possible responses. The question that a fragment always asks is: how does this text fit with your present understanding?
“There is no common benchmark for all the things that people think are good — except for a few, the ones that affect us all. So the goal should be a common one — a civic one. If you direct all your energies towards that, your actions will be consistent. And so will you.”— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (11.21)
“All escapes are on the same level; there are no superior or inferior escapes, there are no spiritual escapes apart from the mundane. All escapes are essentially similar; and if we recognize that the mind is constantly escaping from the central problem of anguish, of emptiness, then we are capable of looking at emptiness without condemning it or being afraid of it.”— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Total Freedom
“It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.”— Blaise Pascal, Pensées