From Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Once upon a time, we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Later we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God. Later, a love of ourselves. We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything.
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The point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities. That goal requires peace, wealth, and freedom.
From The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life
[In America,] history is replaced by movies, education is replaced with entertainment ... Entertainment has now replaced education as the basic process of socialization.
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Disneyism is the world's cleverest and most successful new religion.... Attacks ... are, like the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians against the railroads, just simply not powerful enough to stop the electronic spread of Disneyism, Hollywood movies and TV programs, rock and roll, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds.
[From A Hot-Eyed Moderate]
We are as much rule- as tool-making creatures because few of our behavior patterns are handed to us in our genes.
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The human appetite for justice is so often thwarted in life that one of the chief activities of fantasy is to punish or reward those people who deserve but seem to receive neither in life. We are so frustrated by not only the lack of plot but also by lunatic accident that we invent heaven and hell to correct the meaninglessness and error in this world.
From Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico
Each new proposal from the United States suffers from historical amnesia; each hesitant and suspicious response from Mexico suffers from historical paralysis.
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Almost every U.S. expression of opinion is seen as interference. A lose/lose situation: ignoring Mexico is seen as a slight, and concern for Mexico is seen as interference.
From Angels Fear: Towards An Epistemology Of The Sacred
Syllogism of metaphor:
Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.
From On Power and Ideology
The true domino theory is the threat of the good example: that a tiny and impoverished country with minuscule resources might succeed in social and economic development outside the framework of U.S. control.
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If anything is freely discussed [in American media], it is probably unimportant.
From “The Concept of a Meta-Font” in Visible Language, Vol. XVI, #1 Winter 1982
We know from experience that we understand an idea much better after we have succeeded in teaching it to someone else; and the advent of computers has brought the realization that even more is true: The best way to understand something is to know it so well that you can teach it to a computer. Machines provide the ultimate test, since they do not tolerate “hand-waving” and they have no “common sense” to fill the gaps and vagaries in what we do almost unconsciously....
People often find that the knowledge gained while writing computer programs is far more valuable than the computer's eventual output.
I wrote this down (in 1981) as “From a Rorty rebuttal”
The fallacious inference from 'better for mastering' to 'more objective' is just a quirky, though central, feature of Western metaphysical tradition....
Liking Bohr and disliking Skinner ... [is just] expressing a preference for predicting rocks over doing anything else with them and for doing other things with people over predicting their behavior. Yes, Skinner is dotty, but physicists are equally dotty to think they view nature naked, unveiled by human concerns.
From The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, ... when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.
From Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (paraphrased)
Personhood is a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.
Knowledge of what pain is like or what red is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in the community. Thus babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with “having feelings” rather than (like machines or spiders) “merely responding to stimuli.”
To say that babies know what heat is like, but not what the motion of molecules is like is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not the latter. To say that a gadget that says “red” appropriately doesn't know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget....
Attribution of pre-linguistic awareness is merely a courtesy extended to potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language. Moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better-looking sorts of animals are not based on their possessions of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around....
Rationality about denying civil rights to morons or fetuses or aboriginal tribes or blacks or Martians or trees is a myth. The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely.
