Philosophers From England

"It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself."

"We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment."

"It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it."

"It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself."

"Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness."

"If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing."

"Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others."

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."

"Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry."

"Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace."

"If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades."

"All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object."

"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."

"Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author."

"All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill."

"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."

"I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller."

"What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian"

"Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional."

"The trouble about the Christian standard of chastity is that it isn't and never has been generally lived by; not that it would be profitless if it were. Quite the contrary: it would be colossally productive of earthly happiness. All the same it is a virtue, not like temperance in eating and drinking, not like honesty about property, for these have a purely utilitarian justification. But it, like the respect for life, is a supra-utilitarian value, connected with the substance of life, and this is what comes out in the perception that the life of lust is one in which we dishonour our bodies. Implicitly, lasciviousness is over and over again treated as hateful, even by those who would dislike such an explicit judgment on it. Just listen, witness the scurrility when it's hinted at; disgust when it's portrayed as the stuff of life; shame when it's exposed, the leer of complicity when it's approved. You don't get these attitudes with everybody all of the time; but you do get them with everybody. (It's much too hard work to keep up the façade of the Playboy philosophy, according to which all this is just an unfortunate mistake, to be replaced by healthy-minded wholehearted praise of sexual fun.)"

"A severe morality holds that intercourse (and may hold this of eating, too) has something wrong about it if it is ever done except explicitly as being required for that preservation of human life which is what makes intercourse a good kind of action. But this involves thoroughly faulty moral psychology. God gave us our physical appetite, and its arousal without our calculation is part of the working of our sort of life. Given moderation and right circumstances, acts prompted by inclination can be taken in a general way to accomplish what makes them good in kind and there's no need for them to be individually necessary or useful for the end that makes them good kinds of action. Intercourse is a normal part of married life through the whole life of the partners in a marriage and is normally engaged in without any distinct purpose other than to have it, just as such a part of married life."

"You can argue truly enough, for example, that general respect for the prohibition on murder makes life more commodious. If people really respect the prohibition against murder life is pleasanter for all of us - but this argument is exceedingly comic. Because utility presupposes the life of those who are to be convenienced, and everybody perceives quite clearly that the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim, whose life is not inconvenienced, it just isn't there any more. He isn't there to complain; so the utilitarian argument has to be on behalf of the rest of us. Therefore, though true, it is highly comic and is not the foundation: the objection to murder is supra-utilitarian."

"If a kind of love cannot be commanded, we can't build our moral theology of marriage on the presumption that it will be present. Its absence is sad, but this sadness exists, it is very common. We should avoid, I think, using the indicative mood for what is really a commandment like the Scout Law ("A Boy Scout is kind to animals" - it means a Boy Scout ought to be kind to animals). For if we hear: "a Christian couple grow in grace and love together" doesn't the question arise "supposing they don't?" It clears the air to substitute the bite of what is clearly a precept for the sweetness of a rosy picture. The command to a Christian couple is: "Grow in grace and love together." But a joint command can only be jointly obeyed. Suppose it isn't? Well, there remains the separate precept to each and in an irremediably unhappy marriage, one ought still to love the other, though not perhaps feeling the affection that cannot be commanded. Thus the notion of the "marriage debt" is a very necessary one, and it alone is realistic: because it makes no assumption as to the state of the affections. Looking at the rightness of the marriage act like this will help in another way. It will prevent us from assuming that the pleasant affection which exists between a happy and congenial pair is the fulfilment of the precept of love. (It may after all only be a complacent hiving off together in a narrow love.) We ought absolutely not to give out a teaching which is flattering to the lucky, and irrelevant to the unhappy. Looked at carefully, too, such teaching is altogether too rigorist in a new direction. People who are not quite happily married, not lucky in their married life, but nevertheless have a loyalty to the bond, are not, therefore, bound to abstain from intercourse."

"The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him."

"Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn't be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn't sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide, compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are usually very mediocre."

"But we lay people are not less called to the Christian life, in which the critical question is: "Where does the compass-needle of your mind and will point?" This is tested above all by our reactions when it costs or threatens to cost something to be a Christian. One should be glad if it does, rather than complain! If we will not let it cost anything; if we succumb to the threat of "losing our life", then our religion is indistinguishable from pure worldliness."

"Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life."

"Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat's movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car's stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say 'linguistic', if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional meaning to be included in language."

"There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually - sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex - chastity - is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives."

"It is plain that the present system of intensive farming cannot be defended. … Let us then be vegetarians, at least. For those who have recognized flesh-eating for what it is, the merest addiction, and one, as Shelley saw, to ‘kindle all putrid humours in (our) frame’ … for such moralists the step is easy. It is not necessary, rather it is incompetent, to kill and torture animals to eat."

"Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."

"[T]he famous John Wickliffe, the Morning-Star of the Reformation."

"Why else was this Nation chos'n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam'd and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ. And had it not bin the obstinat perversnes of our Prelats against the divine and admirable spirit of Wicklef, to suppresse him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerom no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had bin ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had bin compleatly ours."

"By that which hath beene spoken...concerning the visibilitie of the Church, like Dagon before the Arke, fals downe to the ground, and Wickliffe remaines in this point, as in al the former, a resolved true, Cathotholike, English Protestant."

"In the nineteenth century, Wyclif was honoured not only in the vanguard of the reformers, but also as a pioneer of English literature. ... Today the great majority of those who are in a position to judge believes that Wyclif had no more personal hand in the Wyclif bible than King James had in the King James bible. Equally, those who have studied most closely the surviving Wycliffite tracts hesitate to attribute any of them to the reformer himself. Indeed, they doubt whether anything in English survives from his hand save a few fragments."

"[T]his is out of all doubt, that at what time all the world was in most desperate and vile estate, and the lamentable ignorance and darkness of God's truth had overshadowed the whole earth, this man stepped forth like a valiant champion, unto whom that may justly be applied which is spoken in the book called Ecclesiasticus, of one Simon, the son of Onias: "Even as the morning star being in the midst of a cloud, and as the moon being full in her course, and as the bright beams of the sun; so doth he shine and glister in the temple and Church of God.""

"I intend neither to deny, dissemble, defend, or excuse any of his faults. ... Yea; should I be over-officious to retain myself, to plead for Wicliffs faults, that glorious Saint would sooner chide then thank me, unwilling that in favour of him, truth should suffer prejudice. He was a man, and so subject to errour, living in a dark Age, more obnoxious to stumble vex'd with opposition, which makes men reel into violence, and therefore it is unreasonable, that the constitution and temper of his positive opinions, should be guessed by his Polemical Heat, when he was chafed in disputation. But besides all these, envy hath falsly fathered many foul aspertions upon him."

"Scholastic in form, Wyclif's writings are modern in spirit. His De Officio Regis is the absolute assertion of the Divine Right of the king to disendow the Church."

"Better to be always in a minority of one with God — branded as madman, incendiary, fanatic, heretic, infidel — frowned upon by "the powers that be," and mobbed by the populace — or consigned ignominiously to the gallows, like him whose "soul is marching on," though his "body lies mouldering in the grave," or burnt to ashes at the stake like Wickliffe, or nailed to the cross like him who "gave himself for the world," — in defence of the RIGHT, than like Herod, having the shouts of a multitude crying, "It is the voice of a god, and not of a man!""

"John Wicliff; whom we hesitate not to admire as one of the greatest ornaments of his country; and as one of those prodigies, whom providence raises up, and directs as its instruments to enlighten man kind. His amazing penetration; his rational manner of thinking; and the noble freedom of his spirit, are equally the objects of our admiration. Wicliff was in religion, what Bacon was afterwards in science; the great detecter of those arts and glosses, which the barbarism of ages had drawn together to obscure the mind of man. To this intuitive genius Christendom was unquestionably more obliged than to any name in the list of reformers. He explored the regions of darkness, and let in not a feeble and glimmering ray; but such an effulgence of light, as was never afterwards obscured. He not only loosened prejudices; but advanced such clear incontestable truths, as, having once obtained footing, still kept their ground, and even in an age of reformation wanted little amendment."

"[T]here is none that hath behaved himselfe more religiously, valiantlie, learnedlie, and constantlie, then this stout Champion, reverend Doctor, & worthie preacher of Gods word Iohn Wickliffe."

"I acknowledge that the sacrament of the altar is very God's body in form of bread, but it is in another manner God's body than it is in heaven."

"Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome."

"John Wycliffe, Englishman, the greatest theologian of his time, held alone for many years the magisterial chair (as it is called) in teaching and disputing at Oxford. Apart from the truly apostolic life which he led, he far excelled all his fellows in England by his ability, eloquence, and erudition. ... He was roused by the spirit of the eternal father to stand for His truth in the midst of the darkness of impious locusts, as the magnanimous warrior of Jesus Christ, and he became the most invincible organ of his day against Antichrists. He was indeed the most strong Elias of his times to reform all distortions. He was one and the first after the loosing of Satan to bring the light of truth in that age of darkness, and who dared before the whole synagogue of the devil to confess Christ, and to reveal the abominable turpitude of the great Antichrist. For he shone like the morning star in the midst of a cloud, and remained for many days as the faithful witness in the church. As the radiant sun he shone in the temple of God, and like incense burning in the fire. He was always of the most irreproachable faith, and most absolute attachment to the truth."

"I believe that in the end the truth will conquer."

"This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People."

"Crown and cloth maken no priest, nor emperor's bishop with his words, but power that crist giveth; and thus by life have been priests known."

"There was good reason for the silence of the Holy Spirit as to how, when, in what form Christ ordained the apostles, the reason being to show the indifferency of all forms of words."

"By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so much value as the things which are included under these two heads."