Quotes About Philosophy

Nietzsche] refers to two great events which in modern times were made to prevent a radical deepening of human thought: Jesuitism in the 17th century and the democratic enlightenment in the 18th and 19th. But there are two men (in each case one man) who opposed these reactionary things. In the case of Jesuitism, it was Pascal; in the case of the democratic enlightenment, it is Nietzsche.

The soul cannot be immortal if it is composed of many things unless the composition is most perfect. But the soul as we know it from our experience lacks that perfect harmony. In order to find the truth, one would have to recover by reasoning the original or true nature of the soul. This reasoning is not achieved in the Republic . That is to say, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul without having brought to light the nature of the soul.

The crisis of liberalism is a crisis due to the fact that it has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.

We come closer then to doing justice to both aspects of Xenophon's work—Socratic and non-Socratic—and to bringing to light their possible unity, by suggesting that Xenophon may have been one who pursued the Socratic question of the best way of life without ever coming to accept completely the Socratic answer that that way of life is the philosophic one.

Philosophy is knowledge that one does not know; that is to say, it is knowledge of what one does not know, or awareness of the fundamental problems and, therewith, of the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution that are coeval with human thought.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

I]f the poets are perhaps the men who understand best the nature of the passions which the law restrains, they are very far from being merely the servants of the legislators; they are also the men from whom the prudent legislator will learn. The genuine "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" concerns, from the philosopher's point of view, not the worth of poetry as such, but the order of rank of philosophy and poetry.

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. …The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

This is Nietzsche's fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

Strange as it may sound, in this part of the argument it appears to be easier to persuade the multitude to accept the rule of the philosophers than to persuade the philosophers to rule the multitude: the philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities.

Whereas he had originally suggested that the good city will come into being if the philosophers become kings, he finally suggests that the good city will come into being if, when the philosophers have become kings, they expel everyone older than ten from the city, i.e., separate the children completely from their parents and their parents' ways and bring them up in the entirely novel ways of the good city.

Logos without nous: that is in a way what modern science wants to be. Nous without logos is mysticism.

The Republic is based on the assumption that there is a strict parallelism between the city and the soul.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man's end—had become that center or origin.

In this connection it should be mentioned that in describing the regimes, Socrates does not speak of "ideologies" belonging to them; he is concerned with the character of each kind of regime and with the end which it manifestly and explicitly pursues, as well as with the political justification of the end in question in contradistinction to any transpolitical justification stemming from cosmology, theology, metaphysics, philosophy of history, myth, and the like.

Let us remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers were still under a compulsion to prove that it is possible for a large society to be republican or free. Let us also remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers signed themselves "Publius": republicanism points back to classical antiquity and therefore also to classical political philosophy.

Nietzsche is aware that nothing which is not eternal can satisfy a thinking man. In Marx there is not a trace of that, and that is the great superiority of Nietzsche.

Glaukon makes the issue manifest by comparing the perfectly unjust man to the perfect artisan, whereas he conceives of the perfectly just man as a simple man who has no quality other than justice.

Polemarchos no longer maintains that telling the truth is essential to justice. Without knowing it, he thus lays down one of the principles of the Republic. As appears later in the work, in a well-ordered society it is necessary that one tell untruths of a certain kind to children and even to the adult subjects.

Why does the benefactor love the recipient more than the recipient loves the benefactor? Because the benefactor lives in the recipient, the way in which the poet lives in the poem.

In alcuni casi cruciali, però, il disgusto è l'espressione emotiva di una saggezza profonda, cui la ragione non è in grado di dar voce.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the mirror of literature?

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.