Tag: philosophy

From Exploiting the Young by John R. Lucas:

“The fundamental activity of the university is thinking, but it is only slowly and fitfully that thinking is congealed into publicly accessible thoughts. The intense arguments in the half hour after the seminar and before hall, the afternoon spent with the graduate student, the proof of a lemma vital for a colleague’s theorem thought up over a game of chess in the Mathematical Institute, the unlikely reference vouchsafed during lab tea, the long country walk exploring a new interpretation of an old master—these are pre-eminently the activities of the young, but none register unless in the fullness of time they result in a publication. True, even in old age one seeks to continue in the ways of one’s youth, but as one concentrates on getting one piece of work finished, one has to leave intriguing by-ways unexplored, and resolutely refuse to move on yet to fresh pastures. I am more disciplined, more concentrated in my thinking now than I was when I was young, but for that very reason less wide-ranging, less sparky, less ebullient. I have gained in competence, but lost in fizz.

“Does fizz matter? I think it does. We do not need to have universities in order to encourage people to do well tasks that other people can approve and assess: what is special to universities is that they are places where people are able to think things that others had not thought of before. We damage ourselves if we pressure the young to publish what they hope will be approved-of works in order to get a living wage, we are acting contrary to our most important values if we stick with a pay scale that rewards academics less for doing what is most important than for the later residue of such activities.”

“Either you have not to be serious and seem it, or to be serious and not seem it. Those who combine being serious with seeming serious are insignificant” (p. 5)

“Is it perhaps the case that Rossif filmed animals so well only because he secretly detested them? Everyone hides some measure of cruelty towards their object. There is no point in imputing this cruelty to unconscious motivations or some trite psychology: it is a symbolic rule. Analysis is part of the theatre of cruelty. Destruction is part of the (loving) understanding of the object.” (pps. 9-10)

“I found her so beautiful in black only because I dreamt of her dead. In fact, it was because I dreamt of her as a widow. What I was in love with in her was the allegory of my own death. But I possessed that allegory physically — which is an original form of the work of mourning.” (p. 33)

“Just as haemophiliacs are unable to staunch the flow of blood, so, semiophiliacs that we are, we are unable to staunch the flow of meaning.” (p. 77)

“The ‘therapeutic window’. What a delicious term for the interruption of medical treatment! Might you perhaps hurl yourself into the void through this therapeutic window? How about a hermeneutic window from which to hurl yourself beyond meaning. Or an existential window from which to hurl yourself out of existence and the perpetual reasons for existing.” (p. 95)

“Looking in the mirror, everyone adopts a flattering pose. In front of the cash dispenser screen, everyone takes on an air of death. Such is the terrible reflection of money on a face — or rather the abstraction of money on the absence of face. The faces are those of hostages on television, which light up only when they are released.” (p. 99)

(Page numbers from the Verso 2007 edition)

“In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples…”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience