Adversaria (27)
‘Of course one must not tax an archaic god with the requirements of modern ethics’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 9)
‘Although the disruptive students turned out to be very useful pedagogically—and analytically—for their willingness to express what others might only think about fat people, I still wondered: Why did the course make students so mad? Why do fat people make (nonfat) people so mad?’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 22%)
‘This incapacity to tell the difference between the power of words and the force of argument (prevalent, then as now, in Paris) contributed to the sceptical disorientation which existed in Descartes’s time’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 27)
Man’s life is a dream, spiritualist philosophers tell us, and if they were entirely logical they would add: history, too, is a dream. Of course, taken in an absolute sense, both of these comparisons is equally absurd; however, one cannot but admit that there are in history sinkholes, as it were, which make human thought stop not without perplexity. It is as if the stream of life ceases its natural course and forms a whirlpool, which spins, sprays, and gets covered with turbid foam, through which it is impossible to make out either clear typical features or even any specific phenomena. Confused and senseless events follow one another disconnectedly, and people apparently do not pursue any other goals than the safeguarding of the present day. They alternate between trembling and triumph…
‘It is hardly surprising that Descartes’s account is unclear at this point, since he is engaged in an impossible task’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 284)
‘The food economy, that is, mirrors the larger economy: it is full of contradictions, some of which are literally embodied’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 74%)
‘For it is easy to observe in those we call “pedants” that philosophy makes them less capable of reasoning than they would be if they had never learnt it’ —Descartes (‘Preface’ to the Principles of Philosophy, trans. Cottingham et al., p. 188)