Quotations¶
Analogy¶
Battle of Analogies¶
Every "effortless" category assignment is actually a seething subterranean battle of analogies. When the battle is a landslide, there's no evidence. When the battle is close, there is evidence galore.
- Douglas Hofstadter. Analogy as the Core of Cognition (2009).
Art & Science¶
The Two Cultures¶
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.
- C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
Environment¶
Soft Landings¶
To undo the harm we have already done requires a programme whose scale dwarfs the space and military programmes, in cost and size. We live in a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science. [...] We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbo dioxide their plane is adding to the already overburdended air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered decent.
- James Lovelock. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006).
Philosophy & Morality¶
Antithesis¶
Antithesis - He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him. The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers. This is why the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates.
- Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1944).
On the morality of thinking¶
The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor empty, neither atomistic nor consequential. […] Nothing less is asked of the thinker today that he should be at every moment both within things and outside them - Munchhausen pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes to be more than either verification or speculation.
- Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1944).
Philosophy & Science¶
Our Craving for Generality¶
Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstien. The Blue Book (1934).
Writing¶
Memento¶
Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
- Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1945).