Quotes

Scholars in their traditional ivory towers have typically not worried much about their responsibility for the environmental impact of their work.

D. C. Dennett, Freedom evolves, London, 2003, p. 16

In The Law of Peoples, this circular knowledge resurfaces as the ‘political culture’ of a liberal society. But just because such a culture inevitably varies from nation to nation, the route to any simple universalization of the principles of justice is barred. States, not individuals, have to be contracting parties at a global level, since there is no commonality between the political cultures that inspire the citizens of each. More than this: it is precisely the differences between political cultures which explain the socio-economic inequality that divides them. “The causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political culture and in the religious, philosophical and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political institutions.” Prosperous nations owe their success to the diligence fostered by industrious traditions; lacking the same, laggards have only themselves to blame if they are less prosperous. Thus Rawls, while insisting that there is a right to emigration from ‘burdened’ societies, rejects any comparable right to immigration into liberal societies, since that would only reward the feckless, who cannot look after their own property. Such peoples ‘cannot make up for their irresponsibility in caring for their land and its natural resources’, he argues, ‘by migrating into other people’s territory without their consent’.

Decorating the cover of the work that contains these reflections is a blurred representation, swathed in a pale nimbus of gold, of a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The nationalist icon is appropriate. That the United States owes its own existence to the violent dispossession of native peoples on just the grounds—their inability to make ‘responsible’ use of its land or resources—alleged by Rawls for refusal of redistribution of opportunity or wealth beyond its borders today, never seems to have occurred to him. The Founders who presided over these clearances, and those who followed, are accorded a customary reverence in his late writings. Lincoln, however, held a special position in his pantheon, as /The Law of Peoples—/where he is hailed as an exemplar of the ‘wisdom, strength and courage’ of statesmen who, unlike Bismarck, ‘guide their people in turbulent and dangerous times’—makes clear, and colleagues have since testified. The abolition of slavery clearly loomed large in Rawls’s admiration for him. Maryland was one of the slave states that rallied to the North at the outbreak of the Civil War, and it would still have been highly segegrated in Rawls’s youth. But Lincoln, of course, did not fight the Civil War to free slaves, whose emancipation was an instrumental by-blow of the struggle. He waged it to preserve the Union, a standard nationalist objective. The cost in lives of securing the territorial integrity of the nation—600,000 dead—was far higher than all Bismarck’s wars combined. A generation later, emancipation was achieved in Brazil with scarcely any bloodshed. Official histories, rather than philosophers, exist to furnish mystiques of those who forged the nation. Rawls’s style of patriotism sets him apart from Kant. The Law of Peoples, as he explained, is not a cosmopolitan view.

Perry Anderson, Arms and rights: Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an age of war, New Left Review, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 5–40, pp. 13-14

[H]owever attractive, the relevance of the Lockean theory of property to contemporary discussions of distributive justice is as a form of egalitarianism. If this is correct, then defenders of inegalitarian distributions of property may draw support from the Lockean theory only to the extent that they follow Locke in failing to adhere to the logic of its argument.

Gopal Sreenivasan, The limits of lockean rights in property, New York, 1995, p. 7

No se podía hacer otra cosa que abandonarse a la marcha, adaptarse mecánicamente a la velocidad de los autos que lo rodeaban, no pensar. En el Volkswagen del soldado debía estar su chaqueta de cuero. Taunus tenía la novela que él había leído en posprimeros días. Un frasco de lavanda casi vacío en el 2HP de las monjas. Y él tenía ahí, tocándolo a veces con la mano derecha, el osito de felpa que Dauphine le había regalado como mascota. Absurdamente se aferró a la idea de que a las nueve y media se distribuirían los alimentos, habría que visitar a los enfermos, examinar la situación con Taunus y el campesino del Ariane; después sería la noche, sería Dauphine subiendo sigilosamente a su auto, las estrellas o las nubes, la vida. Sí, tenía que ser así, no era posible que eso hubiera terminado para siempre. Tal vez el soldado consiguiera una ración de agua, que había escaseado en las últimas horas; de todos modos se podía contar con Porsche, siempre que se le pagara el precio que pedía. Y en la antena de la radio flotaba locamente la bandera con la cruz roja, y se corría a ochenta kilómetros por hora hacia las luces que crecían poco a poco, sin que ya se supiera bien por qué tanto apuro, por qué esa carrera en la noche entre autos desconocidos donde nadie sabía nada de los otros, donde todo el mundo miraba fijamente hacia adelante, exclusivamente hacia adelante.

Julio Cortázar, Todos los fuegos el fuego, Buenos Aires, 1966

[W]e foresee the history of life divided in three main phases. In the long preparatory phase it was the helpless creature of its environment, and natural selection gradually ground it into human shape. In the second—our own short transitional phase—it reaches out at the immediate environment, shaking, shaping and grinding to suit the form, the requirements, the wishes, and the whims of man. And in the long third phase, it will reach down into the secret places of the great universe of its own nature, and by aid of its ever growing intelligence and cooperation, shape itself into an increasingly sublime creation[.]

Hermann Joseph Muller, Out of the night: A biologist's view of the future, London, 1936, p. 125

[I]t may not be amiss to observe from these definitions of natural and unnatural, that nothing can be more unphilosophical than those systems, which assert, that virtue is the same with what is natural, and vice with what is unnatural. For in the first sense of the word, Nature, as opposed to miracles, both vice and virtue are equally natural; and in the second sense, as oppos’d to what is unusual, perhaps virtue will be found to be the most unnatural. At least it must be own’d, that heroic virtue, being as unusual, is as little natural as the most brutal barbarity. As to the third sense of the word, ’tis certain, that both vice and virtue are equally artificial, and out of nature. For however it may be disputed, whether the notion of a merit or demerit in certain actions be natural or artificial, ’tis evident, that the actions themselves are artificial, and are perform’d with a certain design and intention; otherwise they cou’d never be rank’d under any of these denominations. ‘Tis impossible, therefore, that the character of natural and unnatural can ever, in any sense, mark the boundaries of vice and virtue.

David Hume, A treatise of human nature, Oxford, 1978

and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Ulysses, New York, 1921, p. 767

One would have to do an experiment to prove it, but I would guess that if we took two children of today—let’s say two groups—and exposed one group to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and the other to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, there would be a substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend and deal with such musical experience.

Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy, London, 1978, p. 218

I also tried to condition Electra to dissonant music. Henry Cowell was especially fond of one anecdote, which he recounted in his lectures and seminars. The story went something like this: When Electra would scream for a bottle, I would sit down at the piano and play a Chopin nocturne, completely ignoring her request. I would allow for a pause, and then play Schoenberg’s Opus 33a, which opens with a dodecaphonic succession of three highly dissonant chords. I would then rush in to give Electra her bottle. Her features would relax, her crying would cease, and she would suck contentedly the nutritious formula. This was to establish a conditional reflex in favor of dissonant music.

Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect pitch: a life story, Oxford, 1988, p. 132

Los psicoanalistas se han despreocupado por la verificación del número de curas de los psicoanalizados—ésa es su falencia epistemológica—, pero si se consideran, desde un punto de vista impresionista, los delirios colectivos en que incurrió la clase media argentina en la década del setenta, durante el auge del psicoanálisis, sería una prueba en su contra.

Juan José Sebreli, Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación: seguido de, Buenos Aires, ciudad en crisis, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 212

Too many people merely do what they are told to do.

Ansel Adams, Robert Baker, and Ansel Adams, The camera, Boston, 1980, p. xiii

Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel: Robert Louis Stevenson, Whitefish, Mont, 1895

It most certainly does not follow that to be persona non grata to some people on both sides of a conflict shows you are in the right. That is weak stuff. You need not go far to find counter-examples to the idea. You can, on occasions, infuriate both sides and be wrong. Still, to have some of both sides against you does establish something that is anathema to some on both those sides, which is independence of mind.

CounterPunch, 2005

To take Darwin seriously means, among other things, to place the study of human nature squarely within the context of evolutionary biology—which the social sciences have consistently failed to do.

Loyal Rue, Sociobiology and moral discourse Loyal Rue, Zygon®, vol. 33, no. 4, 1998, pp. 525–533, p. 526

As long as we continue to study and cite Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx—none of whose views of human nature can today be ranked as scientific—it would be perversely backward-looking to refuse even to consider sociobiology and what follows from it.

Peter Singer, Ethics and sociobiology, Philosophy & public affairs, vol. 11, no. 1, 1982, pp. 40–64, pp. 40-64

Alan Turing, , 1952

[E]verywhere what has been fatal to liberalism is its boundless but capricious moderation.

Michael Oakeshott, John Locke, The Cambridge Review, vol. 54, 1932, pp. 73, p. 73

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.

Emma Goldman, Anarchism and other essays, New York, 1917

[L]ong-term happiness, however appealing they may find it, is not really what [humans] are designed to maximize.

Robert Wright, The moral animal: the new science of evolutionary psychology, New York, 1994, p. 191

Edgar Allan Poe, Helen, 1831