Quotes About Universals

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.

When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn't have different artistic styles - but it doesn't follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary, either, or that there are no universal laws.

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

Plato's distinction between lovers of opinion and philosophers is a distinction between those who embrace present particulars just as they self-evidently are and those who instead recognize absent universals as what makes particulars into what they are. The implicit link between philosophy and emancipation is clear here. Emancipation is nothing if not the refusal to rest content with what is merely present.

Universals bring us together not by imposing a common structure on us but by revealing that we share what we don't have and can never have. The fact that no one can have a universal—no one possesses freedom or equality—is the source of their emancipatory quality. Universals are not possessions to have or lose or give away. We don't have to be suspicious of the universals because no one can ever impose them on us, even if someone wanted to.

Universals cannot become particulars and particulars cannot become universals, but universals exist according to degrees and particulars exist according to conditions.

Knowledge is understanding universals; wisdom is the ability to recognize universal from the presented particulars.