15 quotes
Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
In dialectic the student … will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Man … feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Until the world perceives that “good” cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and “bad” because it is another’s, there is no prospect of realizing community.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
If we share to a large extent in the mutuality of spirit which makes meaning possible, we are receptive to true meanings; if we do not, we may accept wrong or perverted ones.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: “This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”
Language is Sermonic (1970)
It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things “things.” It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
There is a sentimental poetry, and it will have to be exposed (not censored. certainly; for to omit criticism of it would deprive us of our fairest chance to combat the sentimental rhetoric of the student’s environment).
Language is Sermonic (1970)
The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs.
Language is Sermonic (1970)