Quotes of the Day 11:20 am
“I was 21 years when I wrote this song
I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long
People say ‘when will you grow up to be a man?’
But all the girls I loved at school are already pushing prams
I loved you then as I love you still
Though I put you on a pedestal they put you on the pill
I don’t feel bad about letting you go
I just feel sad at letting you know
I’m not trying to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl”
- Billy Bragg, A New England
Quotes of the Day 1:21 pm
“People say, ‘It is a terrible thing that Germany is not working’. But i say ‘Really? When Germany is working, six months later it is usually marching down the Champs Elysees’ “
Gerard Baker, a French offical writing in the Finanical Times, 2002
Quotes of the Day 5:59 pm
“If I lived in the neighbourhood in Nozick’s example, morality would not require me to take a turn running the public address system if my neighbours had been playing something terrible on it – tapes of cats being tortured, for example, or operas.”
Daniel McDermott in his article Fair-Play Obligations.
Quotes of the Day 8:07 pm
“We’re all trapped by commitments to something we didn’t choose,
So how the fuck are we meant to get by,
When this world is built for us to lose”
Mind in Pieces by Dirty Money
Quotes of the Day 5:59 pm
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Section III
Quotes of the Day 2:28 pm
“She [G.E.M Anscombe] was also a person of legendary force of character, frightening or charming, apparently according to the luck of the draw. Her world was Manichean, and like others in her Church she was quick to diagnose any hint of dissent as a symptom of darkness and corruption, and therefore to be treated as enmity or heresy. Fortunately, she also relished taking the gloves off, as was apparent from her joyously abusive vocabulary. In the present work, Mill is “stupid”, Sidgwick, “vulgar”, Butler “ignorant”, Hume “sophistical”, Kant “absurd”, and the proponent of “hideous fantasy”, while even her beloved Aristotle is sometimes reduced to “babble”. Lesser thinkers are generously sprayed with the acid of her contempt. Philosophers are a robust lot, but even righteousness can be overdone, and one does not have to be a disciple of Nietzsche or Foucault to begin to wonder a bit about the will to power. Nor are suspicions in that direction stilled by the adoring accolades of many of her students, since those prompt only the thought that the students who survived to give the accolades are just the ones who were overpowered.”
Simon Blackburn, in a review of a collection of G.E.M Ansecombe’s papers. You can read the full review here, which I would recommend because it is not only a paradigm of philosophical elegance and style, but also doubles as a snappy and eye-catching guide to how to think about an awful lot of big philosophical issues, all in just 2000 words.
Quotes of the Day 11:09 pm
We want a band that plays loud and hard every night
That doesn’t care how many people are counted at the door
That would travel one million miles
And ask for nothing more than a plate of food and a place to rest
They’d strike chords that cut like a knife
It would mean so much more than t-shirts or a ticket stub
They’d stop at nothing short of a massacre
Everyone would leave with the memory that there was no place else in the world
And this was where they always belonged
We would dance like no one was watching
With one fist in the air
Our arena just basements
And bookstores across an underground America
With this fire we could light
Just gimme a scene where the music is free
And the beer is not the life of the party
There’s no need to shit talk or impress
‘Cause honesty and emotion are not looked down upon
And every promise that’s made and bragged
Is meant if not kept
We’d do it all because we have to, not because we know why
Beyond a gender, race, and class,
We could find what really holds us back
Let’s make everybody sing
That they are the beginning and ending of everything
That we all are stronger than everything they taught us that we should fear
Against Me! – Reinventing Axle Rose
Quotes of the Day 3:16 pm
“And in fact we do find that the more one devotes one’s cultivated reason to the enjoyment of life and happiness, the further away does one get from true contentment. This is why a certain degree of misology i.e., hatred of reason, arises in many people, including those who have been most tempted by this use of reason, if only they are candid enough to admit it. For, according to their calculation of all the benefits they draw – I will not say from the invention of all the arts of common luxury, but even from the sciences (which in the final analysis seem to them to be only a luxury of the understanding) – they find that instead of gaining in happiness they have only brought more trouble on their heads. They therefore come to envy, rather than to despise, more ordinary people, who are closer to being guided by mere natural instinct and who do not let their reason have much influence on conduct.”
Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
So I think we can take it that Kant got picked on in school for being clever, and never really forgot about it.
Quotes of the Day 2:09 am
Chris Brooke thinks that Hobbes is really funny. Short of injecting your own jokes about there not being any JCBs in the State of Nature, or describing Old Thomas as nasty British and short, I’ve never really seen it myself. On the other hand, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America really is funny:
“Men have lost the common law of manners and they have not yet resolved to do without it; but each strives to form a certain arbitrary and changing rule with the debris of former usages, so that manners have neither the regularity nor the grandeur that they often display among aristocratic peoples, nor the simple and free turn that one sometimes remarks in them in democracy; they are all at once constrained and without constraint”
So here we have Alexis de Tocqueville explaining why democratic peoples will inevitably end up being rude. But then again, the Americans had it down to a find art even in his time…
“Americans, in their relations with foreigners, appear impatient at the least censure, and insatiable for praise. The slimmest eulogy is agreeable to them and the greatest is rarely enough to satisfy them; and if you resist their entreaties, they praise themselves. One would say that, doubting their own merit, they want to have a picture of it before their eyes each instant. Their vanity is not only greedy, it is restive and envious. It grants nothing while demanding constantly. It is entreating and quarrelsome at the same time”.
Both quotes are taken from near the end of Democracy in America, where one really starts to sense that Tocqueville is fed up with Americans, and with democracy in general. I speculate that by Volume II Part 4 Tocqueville wasn’t merely considering the possibility of democracy turning to absolute despotism, he was absolutely dreading it because he fully expected it. And not least because for him there just was no escape (equality of conditions is, after all, ordained by providence itself).
But that is part of what makes Tocqueville so interesting for me. He arrives at so many similar conclusions to Mill, but he gets there by such different means. I know that Mill read Tocqueville, and that ultimately they have some outstanding differences, roughly: Mill thinks that individualism is great because it encourages experiments in living, the collision of ideas and opinions, and ultimately self-consciously achieved maximum human flourishing. Tocqueville thinks it leads to isolationism, petty-mindedness, concern only with small selfish projects, and ultimately an end to grand passions and the end of the ages of great virtues and great heroes. He tolerates it on a sort of utilitarian calculation: this way fewer people lead utterly horrible lives even though far fewer people will lead truly glorious lives (here there is an interesting similarity with Nietzsche, although not an enduring one for obvious reasons). Mill thinks individualism is in itself something fantastic.
So although old John Stuart is still my Number One Historical Liberal Political Thinker, Alexis isn’t far off, because part of me – the Nietzschean part – is really attracted to his dark, pessimistic take on human beings. I’ve got to say that if you asked me who would come runner-up to Mill out of Locke and Tocqueville, I’d be really hard-pressed to pick. The trouble is that both Democracy in America, and, say, The Second Treatise on Government are not only fantastic pieces of political philosophy, they are also fantastically well-written pieces of literature. And that is something I think is often forgotten or under-appreciated about these two works in particular, although the same tends to be true of classic political works generally (excluding, perhaps, Aristotle’s Politics, and possibly Weber’s writings because while they are fantastic they are deliberately as dry and analytic as possible, which of course has its own separate and impressive virtues).
Incidentally this is why I suspect that Rawls’ A Theory of Justice might not stand the test of time. For on the one hand, what the bloody hell do you do after you’ve read it? It simply leaves you with absolutely no guidance as to how to conduct your own political life knowing that the Original Position and its theoretical outcomes won’t ever be entered into, let alone be taken seriously by any actual real-world political actors. And that seems to be true for you either as citizen or legislator. Whatismore, i don’t think that A Theory of Justice qualifies in any sense as great literature. It’s certainly great political and moral philosophy even for all its well-known flaws. But great literature it certainly is not.
Quotes of the Day 8:43 pm
“Conversely, if you are talking about how far removed the king is from the tyrant, in terms of true pleasure, you will find, when you complete the multiplication, that his life is nine – and twenty – and seven hundred-fold more pleasurable, and that a tyrant is more wretched by the same amount”
- That’s Plato in the Republic showing us that the just man’s life is 729 times more pleasurable than the unjust.
Of course, some miserable buggers just have to be rude and disagree:
“Some maintain, on the contrary, that we are happy when we are broken on the wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes, provided that we are good. Whether they mean to or not, these people are talking nonesense.”
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
