philosophers-from-ireland

"In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime's work."

"We were created to be creators."

"It is ironic that so often we continue to live like paupers though our inheritance of spirit is so vast."

"One of the great modern philosophers of beauty, Immanuel Kant, spoke of the joy we take in the Beautiful as 'disinterested delight'. The animation of the Beautiful is so immediate and fulfilling that we simply enjoy it for itself; it never occurs to us to ask what purpose it serves."

"The struggle is lost ... once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building. ... If we revolt against capitalism, it is not because we want a different system of power, it is because we want a society in which power relations are dissolved. You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost."

"When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginnings is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO. The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition negativity, struggle."

"It is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO. The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason."

"We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class, against being classified."

"Struggle against capitalism must be also struggle against the 'we' who are not only against but also in capitalism. To criticise is to recognise that we are a divided self. To criticise society is to criticise our own complicity in the reproduction of that society."

"The horrors of the world continue. That is why it is necessary to do what is considered scientifically taboo: to scream like a child, to life the scream from all its structural explanations, to say 'We don't care what the psychiatrist says, we don't care if our subjectivity is a social construct: this is our scream, this is our pain, these are our tears. We will not let our rage be diluted into reality: it is reality that must yield to our scream. Call us childish or adolescent if you like, but this is our starting point: we scream."

"Capital acquires a dynamic of its own and the leading members of society are quite simply its most loyal servants, its most servile courtiers."

"'Why so negative?' says the spider to the fly. 'Be objective, forget your prejudices'. But there is no way the fly can be objective, however much she may want to be: 'to look at the web objectively, from the outside - what a dream', muses the fly, 'what an empty, deceptive dream'. ... Any study of the web that does not start from the fly's entrapment in it is quite simply untrue."

"The world cannot be changed through the state. Both theoretical reflection and a whole century of bad experience tell us so."

"The stock market rises every time there is an increase in unemployment. Students are imprisoned for struggling for free education while those who are actively responsible for the misery of millions are heaped with honours and given titles of distinction: General, Secretary of Defense, President. The list goes on and on. It is impossible to read a newspaper without feeling rage, without feeling pain You can think of your own examples. Our anger changes each day, as outrage piles upon outrage."

"The most sensible thing seems to be to forget our negativity, to discard it as a fantasy of youth. And yet the world gets worse, the inequalities become more strident, the self-destruction of humanity seems to come closer. So perhaps we should not abandon our negativity but, on the contrary, try to theorise the world from the perspective of the scream."

"If domination is always a process of armed robbery, the peculiarity of capitalism is that the person with the arms stands apart from the person doing the robbery, merely supervising that the robbery conforms with the law."

"Feeling that the world is wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put in its place. Nor does is necessarily mean a romantic, some-day-my-prince-will-come idea that, although things are wrong now, one day we shall come to a true world, a promised land, a happy ending. We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong."

"Power, for those without the means of commanding others, is frustration. The existence of power-to as power-over means that the vast majority of doers are converted into the done-to, their activity transformed into passivity, their subjectivity into objectivity."

"Under capitalism, subjectivity can only exist antagonistically, in opposition to its own objectification. To treat the subject as already emancipated, as most mainstream theory does, is to endorse the present objectification of the subject as subjectivity, as freedom."

"Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle."

"Chapter Three, "Beyond Power""

"There is no room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that: academic study provides us with a language and a way of thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express our scream. The scream, if it appears at all, appears as something to be explained, not as something to be articulated. The scream, from being the subject of our questions about society, becomes the object of analysis."

"The collectivity is divided into two classes of people: those who, by virtue of their ownership of the means of doing, command others to do, and those who, by virtue of the fact that they are deprived of access to the means of doing, do what the others tell them to do."

"Capitalist power … is like one of those horrific modern bullets which do not simply pierce the flesh of the victim but explode inside her into a thousand different fragments. … The concept of fetishism is concerned with the explosion of power inside us, not as something that is distinct from the separation of doing and done (as in the concepts of 'ideology' and 'hegemony'), but as something that is integral to that separation. That separation does not just divide capitalists from workers, but explodes inside us, shaping every aspect of what we do and what we think, transforming every breath of our lives into a moment of class struggle."

"In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity."

"We who scream exist ecstatically. We stand out beyond ourselves, we exist in two dimensions. The scream implies a tension between that which exists and that which might conceivably exist, between the indicative (that which is) and the subjunctive (that which might be)."

"Our anger is directed not just against particular happenings but against a more general wrongness, a feeling that the world is askew, that the world is in some way untrue... We know that it is true, but feel that it is the truth of an untrue world."

"...Millions throughout the world have given up the dream of a radically different type of society. There is no doubt that the fall of the Soviet Union and the failure of national liberation movements throughout the world have brought disillusionment to millions of people. The notion of revolution was so strongly identified with gaining control of the state that the failure of those attempts to change the world through gaining control of the state has led very many people to the conclusion that revolution is impossible. There is a toning down of expectations. For many, hope has evaporated from their lives, giving way to bitter, cynical reconciliation with reality. It will not be possible to create the free and just society we hoped for, but we can always vote for centre or left-of-centre party, knowing quite well that way we will have some sort of outlet for our frustrations."

"Marshall, remembering his mixed parentage, used to say 'Francis is a charming fellow, but you must be careful with Ysidro!'""

"By the early 1880s it is clear his competence had expanded to the full spectrum of the mathematical sciences: Fourier's theory of heat, Poisson's mechanics, Cournot, Gossen, Jevons and Walras on mathematical economics, Airy, Thomson and Tait, and Clerk Maxwell on physics, and, above all, Laplace on the theory of probability."

"Edgeworth lacked the force that produces impressive treatises and assembles adherents; amiable and generous, he never asserted himself in any claims of his own, he was over-sensitive on the one hand, overmodest on the other; he was content to take a backseat behind Marshall whom he exalted into Achilles; hesitating in conversation, absent-minded to a pathological degree, the worst speaker and lecturer imaginable, he was personally ineffective -- unleadedy is, I think, the word."

"Revelation was not a necessitating motive of assent, but a means of information. We should not confound the way whereby we come to the knowledge of a thing with the grounds we have to believe it."

"They are not the articles of the East or West, Orthodox or Arian, Protestant or Papist, considered as such, that I trouble myself about, but those of Jesus Christ and his Apostles."

"Not only a few men, but oftentimes whole societies, whilst they consider things but very superficially, set such a value upon certain sounds, as if they were the real essence of all religion. ... And yet, as I hinted now, they either signify nothing, or have been invented by some leading men to make plain things obscure."

"Since Religion is calculated for reasonable Creatures, 'tis Conviction and not Authority that should bear Weight with them."

"I hold nothing as an article of my Religion, but what the highest evidence forced me to embrace."

"Such is the deplorable condition of our age, that a man dares not openly and directly own what he thinks of divine matters, though it be never so true and beneficial, if it but very slightly differs from what is received by any party, or that is established by law."

"Nay, it has come to this, that Truth meets no where with stronger opposition, than from many of those that raise the loudest cry about it, and would be taken for no less than the only dispensers of the favors and oracles of Heaven. If any has the firmness to touch the minutest thing that brings them Gain or Credit, he's presently pursued with the hue and cry of Heresy."

"The best method, I think, of communicating to others the Truth, is that by which a Man has learnt it himself."

"As for acquiescing in what a man understands not, or cannot reconcile to his reason, they know best the fruits of it that practice it. For my part, I'm a stranger to it, and cannot reconcile myself to such a principle. On the contrary, I am pretty sure he pretends in vain to convince the judgment, who explains not the nature of the thing. A man may give his verbal assent to he knows not what, out of fear, superstition, indifference, interest, and the like feeble and unfair motives: but as long as he conceives not what he believes, he cannot sincerely acquiesce in it, and remains deprived of all solid satisfaction. ... But he that comprehends a thing, is as sure of it as if he were himself the author."

"I hope to make it appear, that the use of reason in religion is not so dangerous as commonly represented."

"That the sacred name of religion which sounds nothing but sanctity, peace and integrity should be so universally abused to patronize ambition, impiety and contention! And that what is our highest interest perfectly to understand, should (for reasons afterward to be laid open) both be maintained to be obscure, and very industriously made so!"

"If we make a just computation, and take in the primitive martyrs with the Prophets and Apostles themselves, the professed defenders of Truth, only for Truth's sake, will be found to be a small handful with respect to the numerous partisans of error."

"We have now arrived within introductory range of that very meek-spirited creature known to modern science as the "Observer". It is a permanent obstacle in the path of our search for external reality that we can never entirely get rid of this individual. Picture the universe how we may, the picture remains of our making."

"Now, when we say of any occurrence that it is 'physical', we mean thereby that it is potentially describable in physical terms. (Otherwise the expression would be wholly meaningless.) So it is perfectly correct, to state that, in every happening with which our sensory nerves are associated, we find, after we have abstracted therefrom every known or imaginable physical component, certain categorically nonphysical residua."

"It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the 'man-in-the-street'. Basic ideas which have become enshrined in popular language cannot be wholly foolish or unwarranted. For that sort of canonization must mean, at least, that the notions in question have stood the test of numerous centuries and have been accorded unhesitating acceptance wherever speech has made its way."

"Reasoning is a retrospective business—the judging of a present situation in the light of past experience."

"But the facts are unquestioned. The aeroplane does do these things, and if the theory does not give warranty for the practice, then it is the theory which is wrong."

"We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before we can hope to advance to a broader understanding."

"Boyle's early endorsement of philosophical openness was soon compromised by, as he put it, the sordid requirements of trading with those who "need to make pecuniary advantage" of secret knowledge. By 1674 Boyle made no scruples about his distaste for necessary philosophical dealings with the artisan and trading classes."