10 quotes
Philosophy is a concentrated deployment of the transgressing facilities of the mind.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We can, we must, jumble up the categories of reform and revolution, preferring change that, though perforce piecemeal, may, in its cumulative effect, become revolutionary.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We cannot form and enhance personality without encouraging strong impulse and strong vision in the individual. Such impulse and such vision must seek a collective voice and a social expression.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
Philosophy is neither a discipline among others nor the master discipline. It is the imagination at war, exploring what the established methods and discourses do not allow to be thought and said.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by mystery and overshadowed by chance.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We shall melt down, under the heat of repeated pressure and challenge, all fixed orders of social division and hierarchy, and prevent them from working as the inescapable grid within which our practical and passionate relations to one another must develop.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
A radicalized pragmatism is the operational ideology of the shortening of the distance between context-preserving and context-transforming activities. It is thus a program of permanent revolution—however, a program so conceived that the word “revolution” is robbed of all romantic otherworldliness and reconciled to the everydayness of life as it is.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
I ask myself in this bookː on what assumptions about the world and the mind, the self and society, do these beliefs—mere translations and developments of a creed that has already taken over the world and set it on fire—continue to make sense? Within what larger combination of ideas can we ground, develop, and correct them?
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
By marrying experiment to speculation, we put ourselves in a dimmer version of the circumstance of the Creator. We remake nature or we imagine it remade. By this expedient we free ourselves, if only partly and tentatively, from suspicion of our beliefs, and we live once again, unafraid, in the light of the actual.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)