Academics From Belgium

"The main task of mankind was accomplished by Muslims. The greatest philosopher, al-Farabi, was a Muslim; the greatest mathematicians, Abu Kamil and Ibrahim ibn Sinan, Were Muslims; the greatest geographer and encyclopaedist, al-Mas'udi, was a Muslim; the greatest historian, aI-Tabari, was still a Muslim."

"We can imagine that the Academy, which could be attended only by men of leisure, was a cradle of discontent. The author of the Laws was a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd and above all their demagogues; his prejudices had crystallized and he had become an old doctrinaire, unable to see anything but the reflections of his own personality and to hear anything but the echoes of his own thoughts. The worst of it was that he, a noble Athenian, admired the very Spartans who had defeated and humiliated his fatherland. Plato was witnessing a social revolution (even as we are) and he could not bear it at all. His main concern was: how could one stop it."

"The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful or useless, welcome or unwelcome."

"There are two kinds of people in the world, whom we might dub the jobholders and the enthusiasts. ...The majority of the kings and emperors were jobholders and so were many of the popes. ...Most of the creators in the field of art and religion, and many of them in the field of science, were enthusiasts. Now economic conditions may deeply affect the jobs and the jobholders, but they make little impression on the enthusiasts. ...the jobholders ...keep things going with enough continuity and smoothness; they are the builders of usages and customs, the defenders of morality and justice. ...the enthusiasts ...are the main instruments of change and progress; they are the real creators and troublemakers. The enthusiasts are the salt of the earth, but man cannot live by salt alone."

"Some men are abstract-minded, and they naturally think first of unity and God, of wholeness, of infinity and other such concepts, while the minds of other men are concrete and they cogitate about health and disease, profit and loss. They invent gadgets and remedies; they are less interested in knowing anything than in applying whatever knowledge... to practical problems... The first are called dreamers; the second kind are recognized as practical and useful. History has often proved the shortsightedness of the practical men and vindicated the "lazy" dreamers; it has also proved that the dreamers are often mistaken."

"The historical order is very interesting, but accidental and capricious; if we would to understand the growth of knowledge, we cannot be satisfied with accidents, we must explain how knowledge was gradually built up."

"Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical."

"My main interest... is the love of truth, whether pleasant or not. Truth is self-sufficient, and there is nothing to which it can be subordinated without loss. When truth is made subservient to anything else, however great (say religion), it becomes impure and sordid."

"Our own culture, of Greek and Hebraic origin, is the one that interests us the most... We do not say that it is the best culture, but simply that it is ours. To claim that it of necessity superior would be wrong and evil. That attitude is the main source of international trouble in the world. ...Each nation prefers its own usages."

"My gratitude to them [my first teachers] grows as I myself grow older."

"Some forty years of experience in my field as a scholar and as a teacher have given me great confidence mixed with greater humility."

"Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. ...It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it."

"From the humanistic point of view every human achievement is unforgettable and immortal in its essence, even if it is replaced by a "better" one."

"Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations."

"It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival."

"Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself."

"The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level."

"As I grew older my lectures became simpler; I tried to say fewer things and to say them better, with more humanity. This book continues in a different way the same evolution, but it is not yet as simple as I would have liked to have made it."

"The scientific books written in Arabic during the Middle Ages were, for a few centuries, the main vehicle of the living science."

"Arabic science was the fruit of Semitic genius fertilized by the Iranian genius."

"The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence."

"… science is the most revolutionary force in the world."

"Scientific achievements seem evanescent, because the very progress of science causes their supersedure; yet some of them are of so fundamental a nature that they are immortal in a deeper way."

"The rationalism of the creative minds was tempered by abundant fantasies, and the supreme beauty of the monuments was probably spoiled by the circumambient vanities and ugliness; in a few cases the Greeks came as close to perfection as it was possible to do, yet they were human and imperfect."

"Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude."

"J'ai osé beaucoup, mais la prochaine fois, vous verrez, j'oserai plus encore..."

"These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge."

"We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think." [Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.]"

"Our science arrived at maturity the day that Western man began to see that he would never understand himself as long as there was a single race or people on the surface of the earth that he treated as an object. Only then could anthropology declare itself in its true colours: as an enterprise reviewing and atoning for the Renaissance, in order to spread humanism to all humanity."

"The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.]"

"Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village ...."

"In a period of growing anxieties regarding the globalization of a postcolonial world and the transformation of the moral order, Lévi-Strauss offered the reassuring image of a reclusive scholar occasionally leaving his study to deliver profound reflections on exotic beliefs and practices that elevated the debate on contemporary issues to the level of the history of humankind, with a zest of wistful conservatism. It was what the public, in France, expected from anthropology."

""The power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control." I wrote these words in 1978 at the end of an essay called "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Patriarchy as the "model" for other forms of domination-this idea was not original with me. It has been put forward insistently by white Western feminists, and in 1972 I had quoted from Lévi-Strauss: I would go so far as to say that even before slavery or class domination existed, men built an approach to women that would serve one day to introduce differences among us all."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future."

"Obituary, Daily Telegraph (4 November 2009)"

"The true meaning of myth, Lévi-Strauss held, lay below the narrative surface, and was to be detected by considering the changes apparent in different versions of the same legend. In his own metaphor, he studied the relationship between various narratives rather as a musician would seek to weave together different instrumental parts to form a symphony."

"I would go as far as to say (as my anger comes back) that any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."

"Apart from the advantages accruing from praying ardently to Marx, a facility for startling and often entertaining play upon words, suitable for a salon, account no doubt for much of Lévi-Strauss’s celebrity although […] equally effective in this respect must be his highly original technique of persuasion (reminiscent of a sorcerer’s spell casing) based on threatening people with mathematics: muttering darkly about algebraic matrices and transformations without revealing their exact nature."

"I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible—complete closeness is obviously impossible—the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past."

"People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn on our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which ‘primitive’ peoples don’t have because they don’t need them."

"I may be subjected to the criticism of being called ‘scientistic’ or a kind of blind believer in science who holds that science is able to solve absolutely all problems. Well, I certainly don’t believe that, because I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved."

"Nature has only a limited number of procedures at her disposal and that the kinds of procedure which Nature uses at one level of reality are bound to reappear at different levels."

"I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance."

"Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished."

"Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it."

"Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation."

"If we judge the achievements of other social groups in relation to the kind of objectives we set ourselves, we have at times to acknowledge their superiority; but in doing so we acquire the right to judge them, and hence to condemn all their other objectives which do not coincide with those we approve of. We implicitly acknowledge that our society with its customs and norms enjoys a privileged position, since an observer belonging to another social group would pass different verdicts on the same examples. This being so, how can the study of anthropology claim to be scientific? To reestablish an objective approach, we must abstain from making judgments of this kind. We must accept the fact that each society has made a certain choice, within the range of existing human possibilities, and that the various choices cannot be compared with each other: they are all equally valid. But in this case a new problem arises; while in the first instance we were in danger of falling into obscurantism, in the form of a blind refusal of everything foreign to us, we now run the risk of accepting a kind of eclecticism which would prevent us denouncing any feature of a given culture — not even cruelty, injustice and poverty, against which the very society suffering these ills may be protesting. And since these abuses also exist in our society, what right have we to combat them at home, if we accept them as inevitable when they occur elsewhere?"

"The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory."

"The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living."