“Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—“There are only facts”—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. “Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings(“Perspectivism”). It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”
— Nietzsche, The Will To Power (via anthropologeist)
(Source: introskeptic, via anthropologeist)
8:51 pm 161 notes
“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”
— Michel de Montaigne, Of the inconsistency of our actions (via heteroglossia)
(Source: frenchtwist, via heteroglossia)
1:46 pm 209 notes
“For his part Kant certainly made efforts - as indeed did all Descartes’s successors who wrestled with the problem - to overcome this crude form of reification to be found at the very origins of idealism. But I should like to say that even the towering edifice of Kant’s theory of cognition has not succeeded in banishing the spectre of reification. The reason for this is that in Kantian philosophy the world, reality as a whole, is turned into a product, in fact, the product of
labour, of effort. Thinking as a spontaneous activity - that is what we do; but it is actually nothing other than labour. The distinction between thinking and receptivity, sense impressions, is precisely that we do something, we activate ourselves. Because analysis shifts the entire weight of the dynamic, the dynamic character of reality, onto the side of the subject, our world becomes increasingly the product of labour; we might say, it becomes congealed labour. And the livelier the subject becomes, the deader the world becomes. We might talk here of the ‘commodity character’ of the world whose rigidity and inflexibility keeps increasing thanks to this process. Thus we have two concepts, namely, subjectivization, the dissolving of the world into the activity of the subject, on the one hand, and the reification, objectification of the world as something contrasted with the subject, on the other. It appears to me - and this is intimately bound up with the phenomenon of reification - that these two concepts have grown in magnitude and have become quite unstoppable. Moreover, what this growth of subjectivism and reification expresses is the essential antinomy of bourgeois society in general. According to this antinomy the rationality of the world has continued to advance; human beings have increasingly made the world in their own image, and the world has become progressively theirs. At the same time, however, the world has increasingly become a world that dominates them. It is a world in which they are heteronomous beings and with which they find it ever harder to cope. It has reached the point where ultimately they feel as impotent as we thinking people are in the face of a world which dominates us not just us, but even all the thoughts that we are capable of mustering by way of opposition.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (via heteroglossia)
(Source: agapinbeing, via heteroglossia)
1:45 pm 19 notes
“[C]ontrary to what phenomenology—which is always a phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”
— Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (via heteroglossia)
1:15 pm 57 notes
“
When one considers how vast and how close to us is the problem of existence—this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence of ours—so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when one sees how all [people], with few and rare exceptions, have no clear consciousness of the problem, [..] and live on, taking no thought but for the passing day and the hardly longer span of their own personal future, either expressly discarding the problem or else over-ready to come to terms with it by adopting some system of popular metaphysics and letting it satisfy them; [..] man may be said to be a thinking being only in a very remote sense, and henceforth feel no special surprise at any trait of human thoughtlessness or folly.
If Nature had meant man to think, she would not have given him ears.
”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Thinking for Oneself (via heteroglossia)
(Source: rimb-ode, via heteroglossia)
12:50 pm 34 notes
