Skip to main content
2 months 6 days ago

Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualization of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes. In other words, by acting as if the use of violence can be a means to achieve a nonviolent end, one imagines that the practice of violence does not in the act posit violence as its own end. The technē is undermined by the praxis, and the use of violence only makes the world into a more violent place, by bringing more violence into the world.

0
0
Source
source
p. 20
4 months 3 weeks ago

since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?

0
0
Source
source
Letters to Atticus, Book II, 1.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

0
0
Source
source
The Wave of the Future
3 months 1 week ago

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Part I.

Nowhere is there more constancy and more unanimity than among the French to subordinate that sex which they pretend to honor so highly.

0
0
Source
source
The Theory of Social Organization
1 month 1 week ago

Through all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal. Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal. To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practise the same trade.

0
0
Source
source
Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 84)
3 months 4 days ago

The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
4 months 2 weeks ago

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Majority of One (1957) by Sydney J. Harris, p. 283
4 months 1 week ago

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains

0
0
Source
source
§ 8.23
3 days ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

0
0
Source
source
Book VIII, Ch. 3

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
5 months 5 days ago

If the ethical, that is, social morality is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.

0
0

Who holds a sword is tempted, who has youth must play,he who does not fear death on earth does not fear God.

0
0
Source
source
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 560
4 months 4 days ago

I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the titmouse dimension.

0
0
Source
source
The Titmouse, st. 5
1 month 1 week ago

In Kleist's essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life. Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.

0
0
Source
source
The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.25-6)
2 months 2 weeks ago

In classroom settings I have often listened to groups of students tell me that racism really no longer shapes the contours of our lives, that there is no such thing as racial difference, that "we are all just people." Then a few minutes later I give them an exercise. I ask if they were about to die and could choose to come back as a white male, a white female, a black female, or a black male, which identity would they choose. Each time I do this exercise, most individuals, irrespective of gender or race invariably choose whiteness, and most often male whiteness. Black females are the least chosen. When I ask students to explain their choice they proceed to do a sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race (with perspectives that take gender and class into consideration).

0
0
Source
source
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
2 months 3 weeks ago

This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.

0
0
5 months ago

Ironic philosophies produce passionate works. Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity! And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life.

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
2 months 3 weeks ago

All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 26:52 (KJV)
2 months 2 days ago

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

0
0
Source
source
p. 98
2 months 1 week ago

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself.

0
0
2 weeks 5 days ago

You have, dearest Serene, things that can protect tranquility, things that restore it, things that resist creeping escapes. Be it known, however, that none of these things is sufficient for those who hold a feeble matter, unless a constant concern surrounds the slipping mind.

0
0

Providence has given the French nation precisely two instruments, two arms, so to speak, with which it stirs up the world - the French language and the spirit of proselytism that forms the essence of the nation's character.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, p. 20
2 months 3 days ago

As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

0
0
Source
source
V
1 week 5 days ago

All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

0
0
Source
source
In Vogue, as quoted by The Reader's Digest, Vols. 30-31 (1937), p. 69
1 month 2 weeks ago

Rousseau's writings are so admirably adapted to touch both these classes that the effect they produced, especially in France, is easily intelligible.

0
0
Source
source
"On The Natural Inequality of Men"
3 months ago

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform - and not hinder - the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 71-72
3 months 1 week ago

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIII.

The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.45
3 months ago

If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

0
0
Source
source
§ 118
4 months 3 days ago

A just system must generate its own support.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, Section 41, p. 261

Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1
4 months 1 week ago

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 27. Of Friendship
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am not concerned that I have no place; I am concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am not known; I seek to be worthy to be known.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
3 months 4 weeks ago

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

0
0
Source
source
p. 56e

How many together with whom I came into the world are already gone out of it.

0
0
Source
source
VI, 56
2 weeks 1 day ago

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

0
0
Source
source
Variant translation: Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
3 months 4 weeks ago

The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin. It is characteristic of the superior man, appearing insipid, yet never to produce satiety; while showing a simple negligence, yet to have his accomplishments recognized; while seemingly plain, yet to be discriminating. He knows how what is distant lies in what is near. He knows where the wind proceeds from. He knows how what is minute becomes manifested. Such a one, we may be sure, will enter into virtue.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

We are organization watchers in our role as citizens. Increasing attention has been fixed in recent years upon the functioning of society's organizations: its large corporations and its governments. Hence this could also be described as a book for Everyman-for it proposes a way of thinking about organizational issues that concern us all.

0
0
Source
source
Simon (1975, p. ix); As cited in Stefano Franchi(2006) "Herbert simon, anti-philosopher." Computing and Philosophy. p. 34.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia