20 ideas
| 13560 | A wise man is not subservient to anything [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: I do not call any man wise who is subservient to anything. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §11) | |
| A reaction: At the very least, a wise man should be subservient to a wiser man. |
| 20455 | Philosophy really got started as the rival mode of discourse to tragedy [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: The pre-Socratics are interesting, but philosophy really begins in drama; it's a competitive discourse to tragedy. Which is why Plato's 'Republic' excludes the poets: they're the competition; gotta get rid of them. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 6) | |
| A reaction: That's an interesting and novel perspective. So what was the 'discourse' of tragedy saying, and why did that provoke the new rival? Was it too fatalistic? |
| 20446 | Philosophy begins in disappointment, notably in religion and politics [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: I claim that philosophy begins in disappointment, and there are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: You are only disappointed by reality if you expected something better. To be disappointed by the failures of religion strikes me as rather old-fashioned, which Critchley sort of admits. Given the size and tumult of modern states, politics isn't promising. |
| 20449 | Science gives us an excessively theoretical view of life [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: One of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: Critchley is defending phenomenology, but this also supports its cousin, existentialism. I keep meeting bright elderly men who have immersed themselves in the study of science, and they seem very remote from the humanist culture I love. |
| 20448 | Phenomenology uncovers and redescribes the pre-theoretical layer of life [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: Phenomenology is a philosophical method that tries to uncover the pre-theoretical layer of human experience and redescribe it. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: I would be delighted if someone could tell me what this means in practice. I have the impression of lots of talk about phenomenology, but not much doing of it. Clearly I must enquire further. |
| 20454 | Wallace Stevens is the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in English [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: Wallace Stevens is the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in the English language - full stop - in my humble opinion. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 6) | |
| A reaction: I include this because I tend to agree, and love Stevens. Hear recordings of him reading. I once mentioned Stevens in a conversation with Ted Hughes, and he just shrugged and said Stevens 'wasn't much of a poet'. Wrong. |
| 20456 | Interesting art is always organised around ethical demands [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: I don't think that art can be unethical. I think that interesting art is always ethical. It is organised around ethical demands. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 8) | |
| A reaction: It is a struggle to make this fit instrumental music. Critchley likes punk rock, so he might not see the problem. How to compare Bachian, Mozart, Beethovenian and Debussyian ethics? Not impossible. |
| 20447 | The problems is not justifying ethics, but motivating it. Why should a self seek its good? [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: The issue is not so much justification as motivation, that in virtue of which the self can be motivated to act on some conception of the good. ...How does a self bind itself to whatever it determines as its good? | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: That is a bold and interesting idea about the starting point for ethics. It is always a problem for Aristotle, that he can offer no motivation for the quest for virtue. Contractarians start from existing motivations, but that isn't impressive. |
| 13558 | The supreme good is harmony of spirit [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: The highest good is harmony of spirit. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §08) | |
| A reaction: This idea is straight from Plato's Republic. |
| 13559 | I seek virtue, because it is its own reward [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: You ask what I seek from virtue? Virtue herself. For she has nothing better, she is herself her own reward. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §09) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is the source of the popular saying that 'virtue is its own reward'. The trouble is that this doesn't seem a very persuasive thing to say to a sceptic who doubts whether being virtuous is worth the trouble. |
| 13561 | Virtue is always moderate, so excess need not be feared [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: In the case of virtue excess should not be feared, since in virtue resides moderation. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §13) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that all of the virtues are unified in the one achievement of the virtuous state. It leaves the notion of 'virtue' a bit thin in content, though. |
| 13562 | It is shameful to not even recognise your own slaves [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Why, to your shame, are you so careless that you do not know your handful of slaves by sight? | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §17) |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 13564 | There is far more scope for virtue if you are wealthy; poverty only allows endurance [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: What doubt can there be that the wise man has greater scope for displaying his powers if he is rich than if he is poor, since in the case of poverty only one kind of virtue exists - refusal to be bowed down and crushed. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §22) | |
| A reaction: It is against this view that I see Jesus proposing poverty as central to virtue. But then he has the surprising view (to Seneca) that humility is a virtue. What Nietzsche calls the slaves' inversion of values. |
| 13563 | Why does your wife wear in her ears the income of a wealthy house? [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Why does your wife wear in her ears the income of a wealthy house? | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §17) |
| 13565 | If wealth was a good, it would make men good [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Wealth is not a good; for it it was, it would make men good. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §24) | |
| A reaction: An immediately attractive argument, but should we assume that anything which is good will enhance our personal goodness? If goodness is a habit, then continual pursuit of wealth is the test case to examine. Seneca is right! |
| 20452 | Anarchism used to be libertarian (especially for sexuality), but now concerns responsibility [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: Anarchism in the 1960s was libertarian and organised around issues of sexual liberation. That moment has passed. People are and should be organising around responsibility. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 3) | |
| A reaction: So there are two types of anarchism, focused on freedom or on responsibility. An organisation like Greenpeace might represent the latter. |
| 20450 | The state, law, bureaucracy and capital are limitations on life, so I prefer federalist anarchism [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: I begin with the ontological premise that the state is a limitation on human existence. I am against the state, law, bureaucracy, and capital. I see anarchism as the only desirable way of organising, politically. ...Its political form is federalist. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 3) | |
| A reaction: Hm. Some sympathy, but caution. All systems, even federalist anarchism, are limitations on our lives, so which limitations do we prefer? The law aspires to a calm egalitarian neutrality, which seems promising to me. |
| 20451 | Belief that humans are wicked leads to authoritarian politics [Critchley] |
| Full Idea: If you think human beings are wicked, you turn to an authoritarian conception of politics, the Hobbesian-Machiavellian-Straussian lie. | |
| From: Simon Critchley (Impossible Objects: interviews [2012], 3) | |
| A reaction: Right-wingers also tend to believe in free will, so they can blame and punish. Good people are more inspired by a great leader than bad people are? (Later, Critchley says authoritarians usually believe in original sin). |
| 13557 | Unfortunately the majority do not tend to favour what is best [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Human concerns are not so happily arranged that the majority favours the better things. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (On the Happy Life [c.60], §02) | |
| A reaction: On the whole Seneca is unimpressed by democracy, as people are rushed into decisions by the crowd, and live to regret them. |