Philosophy

"341. The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you : 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine. ' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for no thing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"

"In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy."

"Supreme star of being! Tablet of eternal forms! You come towards me? — Why hasn't anyone beheld Your mute beauty — Why doesn't it escape my gaze?Sign of necessity! Tablet of eternal forms! — But of course you know it: What everyone hates, What I alone love, That you are eternal! That you are necessary! My love is ever ignited Only through necessity.Sign of necessity! Supreme star of being! — That no desire attains, That no No desecrates, Eternal Yes of being, Eternally I am your Yes: For I love you, O eternity! — —"

"208. [...] If one now goes on to consider that, not only a book, but every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen, one comes to recognize the existence of an actual immortality, that of motion: what has once moved is enclosed and eternalized in the total union of all being like an insect in amber."

"In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into."

"Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever."

"Time Prophet: Time begins, and then time ends, and then time begins once again It is happening now, it has happened before, it will surely happen again."

"To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists. The growth of philosophy is the story of man's spiritual life."

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

"Must not what ever can already have passed this way before? Must not what ever can happen, already have happened, been done, passed by before? And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must this gateway too not already – have been here? And are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come? Therefore – itself as well? For,whatever can run, even in this long lane outward–must run it once more! – And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must not all of us have been here before? –And return and run in that other lane, outward, before us, in this long, eerie lane – must we not return eternally? –”"

"Even if there were exceedingly few things in a finite space in an infinite time, they would not have to repeat in the same configurations. Suppose there were three wheels of equal size, rotating on the same axis, one point marked on the circumference of each wheel, and these three points lined up in one straight line. If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and if the speed of the third wheel was 1/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur."

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again."

"I do not believe the fashionable dogma. Here is my argument to show that group selection is important. Imagine Alice and Bob to be two dodoes on the island of Mauritius before the arrival of human predators. Alice has superior individual fitness and has produced many grandchildren. Bob is individually unfit and unfertile. Then the predators arrive with their guns and massacre the progeny indiscriminately. The fitness of Alice and Bob is reduced to zero because their species made a bad choice long ago, putting on weight and forgetting how to fly. I do not take the Prisoner’s Dilemma seriously as a model of evolution of cooperation, because I consider it likely that groups lacking cooperation are like dodoes, losing the battle for survival collectively rather than individually."

"Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away. Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it."

"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are."

"The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works."

"The traditional, scientific method for studying such systems is known as reductionism. Reductionism sees the parts as paramount and seeks to identify the parts, understand the parts and work up from an understanding of the parts to an understanding of the whole. The problem with this is that the whole often seems to take on a form that is not recognizable from the parts. The whole emerges from the interactions between the parts, which affect each other through complex networks of relationships. Once it has emerged, it is the whole that seems to give meaning to the parts and their interactions. A living organism gives meaning to the heart, liver and lungs; a family to the roles of husband, wife, son, daughter"

"When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in a certain proportion, and an electric spark is passed through them, they disappear, and a quantity of water, equal in weight to the sum of their weights, appears in their place. There is not the slightest parity between the passive and active powers of the water and those of the oxygen and hydrogen which have given rise to it... Nevertheless we call these, and many other strange phænomena, the properties of the water, and we do not hesitate to believe that, in some way or another, they result from the properties of the component elements of the water. We do not assume that a something called "aquosity" entered into and took possession of the oxide of hydrogen as soon as it was formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their places in the facets of the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the hoar-frost... What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it? What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"?"

"Reports of the death of reductionism are greatly exaggerated. It is so ingrained in our thinking that if one day some magical force should make us all forget it, we would promptly have to reinvent it. The real worry is not with reductionism, which, as a paradigm and tool, is rather useful. It is necessary, but no longer sufficient. But, weighing up better ideas, it became a burden."

"The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clear-cut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole."

"There have been a number of attempts to show that reductionism cannot work. They usually take the form of a rather formal definition, followed by an argument that reductionism of this type cannot be true. What is ignored is that reductionism is not the rigid process of explaining one fixed set of ideas in terms of another fixed set of ideas at a lower level, but a dynamic interactive process that modifies the concept at both levels as knowledge developments. After all, "reductionism" is the main theoretical method that has driven the development of physics, chemistry, and . It is largely responsible for the spectacular developments of modern science. It is the only sensible way to proceed until and unless we are confronted with strong experimental evidence that demands we modify our attitude. General philosophical arguments against reductionism will not do."

"The two-person iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the E. coli of the social sciences, allowing a very large variety of studies to be undertaken in a common framework."

"I will argue that group selection is important, contrary to the prevailing dogma among biologists. If group selection is important, Prisoner's Dilemma is not a good model for evolution. It is still an amusing toy for mathematicians and game-theorists to play with."

"Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, post-structuralism,difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence."

"Post-Structuralism is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning."

"Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath."

"We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end."

"During the 1960s, Barth and Foucault were already placing a question-mark against the figure of the author, and urging us to study discourses rather than individual authors and texts. During the 1970s Derrida became celebrated for raising radical doubts about our capacity to offer interpretations of texts at all. He popularised a tendency to emphasise ambiguity, lack of closure, the impossibility of ever ascribing intentions to authors with any degree of assurance. For a time this approach enjoyed an immense vogue, especially in the United States. I should add that, while these movements gave rise to sometimes bitter debates, I myself sympathised to a considerable degree with much of what these post-structuralists wanted to say."

"Post-structuralism takes as its theoretical object “structuralism,” whereas postmodernism takes as its theoretical object “modernism.” Post-structuralism can be characterized as a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, and a kind of writing. Yet the term should not be used to convey a sense of homogeneity, singularity and unity. More generally, it is a label used in the English-speaking academic community to describe a distinctively philosophical response to the structuralism."

"The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism."

"Systems art shares its roots with 'post-structuralism'; the critical discourse from the arts that can account for both 'open' system of structural relations and 'death of the author'; where the 'reader' is credited with an active part in emergent, multiple and evolving interpretations of a cultural artefact."

"What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one again and again detects how innocent they are – how often and how easily they fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness – but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they – these speak of ‘inspiration’): while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an ‘inspiration’, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event – they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize ‘truths’ – and very far from possessing the courage of the conscience which admits this fact to itself, very far from possessing the good taste of the courage which publishes this fact, whether to warn a foe or a friend or out of high spirits and in order to mock itself. The tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of old Kant as he lures us along the dialectical bypaths which lead, more correctly, mislead, to his ‘categorical imperative’ – this spectacle makes us smile, we who are fastidious and find no little amusement in observing the subtle tricks of old moralists and moral-preachers. Not to speak of that hocus-pocus of mathematical form in which, as if in iron, Spinoza encased and masked his philosophy – ‘the love of his wisdom’, to render that word fairly and squarely – so as to strike terror into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athene – how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick recluse betrays!"

"After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution. The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."

"It turns out that Jesus does not fit the Kantian mold. He is not interested in commending his ethic as though it were for everybody. He is not interested in asking whether everybody can do what he teaches, or whether they will do it, or what would happen if they all did. He just does not ask those questions."

"Part of my education was the silence of my parents during the trials of 1935. You must always protest against dictatorship. It is what Immanuel Kant called the categorical imperative."

"What would happen if everyone did it? If everyone gave their wealth away what would we do for capital? If everyone loved their enemies who would ward off the Communists? This argument could be met on other levels, but here our only point is to observe that such reasoning would have been preposterous in the early church and remains ludicrous whenever committed Christians accept realistically their minority status. Far more fitting than "What if everybody did it" would be its inverse, "What if nobody else acted like a Christian, but we did?""

"Greatness loves itself, and all healthy instincts decline to flagellate themselves daily with the whip of altruism. What is great must will to do more than its mere duty ; it must give, make others happy, and, be it at the cost of itself, its own wellbeing, its own money or life, it must will to pour forth its blessing over others, to the extent even of self-sacrifice—but not, as Christianity demands, from unegoistic motives; the impulse must come from a sense of pleasure, from overflowing energy, from need of bloodletting, so as to unburden the full heart. All acts then derived from conscience and duty, or done with a wry countenance out of obedience to the Categorical Imperative, seem to the great man, from his point of view, through this very fact contemptible, even as he has an unsurmountable prejudice against men and nations who are always prating of those words, conscience and duty."

"There is ... only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

"The subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centers on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, — the predicative “is” implies an “ought.” … Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be."

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being."

"“Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash."

"Ich soll niemals anders verfahren als so, dass ich auch wollen könne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden."

"Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative."

"Opinion is steadily inclining towards making the division of labor an imperative rule of conduct, to present it as a duty. ... We no longer think that the exclusive duty of man is to realize in himself the qualities of man in general; but we believe he must have those pertaining to his function. ... The categorical imperative of the moral conscience is assuming the following form: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function."

"There are moments in life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

"Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. ... To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption."

"Suppose I am considering going to a movie. In the States this now costs approximately $10 (depending on where in the country it is). By the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative I have to consider whether the maxim of spending the money on the movie could be willed by anyone, and in particular by someone whose current role in the situation is as a child in, say, Zambia, who might be receiving the $10, which would be enough to keep her alive for a week."

"A child learning his [her] mother tongue is learning how to name; he [she] is building up a meaning potential in respect of a limited number of social functions. These functions [instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, and imaginative] constitute the semiotic environment of a very small child, and may be thought of as universals of human culture"

"Plato held that the deceptions of sense justified scepticism of all sense-knowledge... Aristotle, more correctly, taught that error did not arise from the senses being false media, but from the wrong interpretations we put on their testimony. Manifold deceptions may thence arise; but each sense speaks truly so far as it speaks at all. It is from sense we gain the knowledge of particulars. It is from Induction we gain the knowledge of universals. Agreeing with Plato that Science is only concerned with universals, he affirmed that these could only be reached through Experience. This is the corner stone of the experience-philosophy or "Empiricism," so often urged as a reproach against Aristotle."

"Plato's discovery went as follows."