Monthly Archives: December 2003

Franz Grillparzer

[“]Meine Wohnung reicht nur bis zu dem Striche”, sagte der Alte, wobei er auf die Kreidelinie in der Mitte des Zimmers zeigte. “Dort drüben wohnen zwei Handwerksgesellen.” – “Und respektieren diese Ihre Bezeichnung?” – “Sie nicht, aber ich”, sagte er. “Nur die Türe ist gemeinschaftlich.” – “Und werden Sie nicht gestört von Ihrer Nachbarschaft?” – “Kaum”, meinte er. “Sie kommen des Nachts spät nach Hause, und wenn sie mich da auch ein wenig im Bette aufschrecken, so ist dafür die Lust des Wiedereinschlafens um so größer.”

Franz Grillparzer, Die arme Spielmann, 1848

Karl Popper

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. But considered from a logical point of view, the situation is never such that it compels us to stop at this particular basic statement rather than at that, or else give up the test altogether. For any basic statement can again in its turn be subjected to test, using as a touchstone any of the basic statements which can be deduced from it with the help of some theory, either the one under test, or another. This procedure has no natural end. Thus if the test is to lead us anywhere, nothing remains but to stop at some point or other and say that we are satisfied, for the time being.

It is fairly easy to see that we arrive in this way at a procedure according to which we stop only at a kind of statement that is especially easy to test. For it means that we are stopping at statements about whose acceptance or rejection the various investigators are likely to reach agreement. And if they do not agree, they will simply continue with the tests, or else start them all over again. If this too lead to no result, then we might say that the statements in question were not inter-subjectively testable, or that we were not, after all dealing with observable events. If some day it should no longer be possible for scientific observers to reach agreement about basic statements this would amount to a failure of language as a means of universal communication. It would amount to a new ‘Babel of Tongues’: scientific discovery would be reduced to absurdity. In this new Babel, the soaring edifice of science would soon lie in ruins.

Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, 1959, p. 104

Colin McGinn

[M]orality is an inevitable corollary of evolutionarily useful intelligence: in becoming rational animals human beings, eo ipso, became creatures endowed with moral sense. It is important to this explanation that practical rationality be inseparable from susceptibility to moral requirements; for if it were possible to possess the one faculty without the other, then evolution could afford to dispense with morality while retaining reason. But I think that the Kantian thesis is right that rationality implies moral sense. If they are thus inseparable, then the price of eliminating morality from a species would be the elimination of (advanced) rationality from it; and, given the advantages of the latter, the price is too great.

Colin McGinn, ‘Evolution, Animals and the Basis of Morality’, Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 1 (1979), p. 93

Luis Scalise

En el ’84 me tocaba jugar con él [Miguel Najdorf] en Mar del Plata y estaba preocupado.

—Esta noche juego con el Viejo ¿qué hago?—le comenté a Szmetan.

—Si aguantás hasta la quinta hora podés zafar.

Efectivamente en la quinta hora él se equivocó y fue tablas. Desde afuera Szmetan me señaló que el Viejo tenía la partida ganada. Se la mostré.

—A ver cómo es—lme preguntó.

Cuando la vio me dijo:

—Yo sabía que vos eras un chambón.

Ese día cumplía 74 años y Clarín le mandó a Mar del Plata una torta que era un tablero de ajedrez hecho en chocolate blanco y marrón con las piezas blancas y negras dispuestas en la posición de la Variante Najdorf. Vino el intendente, Ángel Roig, y se ubicó al lado de él junto a la torta. Yo estaba sentado en la otra punta y el Viejo le explicaba la partida. A cada rato gritaba:

—Scalise ¿no es cierto que te ganaba?

—Sí, don Miguel.

—Mire, le voy a mostrar—le dijo al intendente. Agarró las piezas de la torta y puso la posición en el tablero. Pero se quedó con un montón de chocolate en la mano y no podía mover. Entonces se metió el chocolate en la boca, y le dijo “mire, mire” mientras el chocolate le chorreaba por la cara, Rita se acercaba con una servilleta para limpiarlo y él la echaba, “salí”. El intendente estaba mudo y sin saber qué hacer. Miró la torta y con una cucharita empezó a comerla.

Luis Scalise, in Liliana Najdorf, NAJDORF x najdorf, Buenos Aires, 1999, pp. 197-198

David Edwards

If the propaganda model suggests that modern society will be flooded by a version of reality closely conforming to the requirements of state and corporate interests, then it is essentially suggesting that modern society will be flooded by a necessarily irrational version of reality. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that modern society takes a hostile position to the very existence of truth itself; if inconvenient ideas are dismissed as ridiculous, or ignored through an absence of comment, then so too will the search for truth itself. Today all truth is deemed to be relative. Any discussion of truth is made out to be a metaphysical concern, and the conventional wisdom is that anyone talking in terms of wanting to discover the truth is somewhat unsophisticated. This modern relativism is based on the extraordinary notion that all truth is somehow a matter of opinion and that it is not possible to determine, for example, what is good and bad for people, because everyone is different. Again, this involves a fantastic distortion of the scientific method (which accepts the impossibility of absolute certainty, but operates on the assumption that a good hypothesis is often adequate to the task).

David Edwards, Burning All Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom, Boston, 1996, p. 55

Bertrand Russell

I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters.

Bertrand Russell, ‘Nobel Lecture’, Decenber 11, 1950

G. E. Moore

My dear sirs, what we want to know from you as ethical teachers, is not how people use a word; it is not even, what kind of actions they approve, which the use of this word ‘good’ may certainly imply: what we want to know is simply what is good.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, chap. 1, sect. 11

Alfred Hitchcock

To put a situation into a film simply because you yourself can vouch for its authenticity, either because you’ve experienced it or because you’ve hear of it, simply isn’t good enough. You may feel sure of yourself because you can always say, “This is true, I’ve seen it.” You can argue as much as you like, but the public or critics still won’t accept it. So we have to go along with the idea that truth is stranger than fiction.

Alfred Hitchcock, in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, New York, 1985, p. 203

Everett Mattlin

According to this theory, sleep was probably “invented” some two hundred million years ago when sea creatures crawled up on the shore. Land dwellers developed the habit of sleeping as a safety measure. During the day they had to be alert and ready to run away from danger. At night they couldn’t be seen, but they could be heard, so the best thing to do was to stay still and quiet and out of the way. The rest would help them to run faster and farther the next day, and while they were resting they also ensured their inconspicuousness by staying asleep.

Everett Mattlin, Sleep Less, Live More, New York, 1979, p. 67-68

Manfred Kuehn

Maxims do not merely express what kind of a person one is; they constitute that person, in some sense. They constitute the person as character. In other words, to have a certain set of maxims and to have character (or to be a person) is one and the same thing. This is perhaps the most important point of Kant’s anthropological discussion of maxims. Maxims are character-constituting principles. They make us who we are, and without them we are, at least according to Kant, nobody.

Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge, 2001, p. 146

George Bernard Shaw

Man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature, also called Providence, holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, London, 1945, preface

Xul Solar

Me oprimen vagas asfixias de deseos, como nieblas enemigas que rivalizan, mortíferas; en medio de mi agitación mi espíritu revolotea por los espacios buscando ayuda para hacerme huir, no sé hacia donde. Desgranarse de olas oigo entre el pedal del mar y siento brisas refrescantes; pero se desvanecen las flotas nocturnas de barcas peregrinas al llamarlas; cabalgatas de adustos gigantes pasan silenciosas por los lejanos desiertos del aire ocultando la color-ceñida luna, pero su alma inferior no me comprende; fantasmas, cosas veladas llenan la atmósfera y ágiles movimientos oídos me atraen fatalmente, mientras como serpientes las nieblas se disipan. Visiones claras en la noche, rítmicos suspiros musicales de la selva florida, variados arrullos de aguas que van danzando y el aliento-perfume de la primavera adolescente que juega y me rodea como llamas deliciosas, en fiebre delirante me anonadan, oh!, y en un grupo movido de doncellas delicadas y magníficas sirenas!

Pero sus danzas y cercanas palabras no entiendo, con la más bella junto a mí, y el cansador deleite me adormece dolorosamente, ocultando las nieblas tristes el cuadro, digno de eternizarse en su juvenil vida.

—Oh! qué manos, qué llamadas, me llevarán al aire puro, al sol radioso y al satisfecho mediodía? En esta lucha angustiosa me haré veterano; con mis manos, mis ojos y oídos divinos, con mi ardiente é hirviente cerebro encontraré el camino, si no lo hay, si no hay país sin angustia para mí, todo yo, dentro de mis pensamientos, para mis hermanos, me haré un mundo!

Xul Solar, ‘Noche’, Buenos Aires, 1910

Genaro Carrió

[La] tendencia a vestir los enunciados emotivos con el ropaje de los enunciados referenciales es endémica en los trabajos de filosofía, sociología y teoría jurídica. Tal como este tipo de literatura tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con definiciones, así también tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con juicios de valor.

Genaro Carrió, ‘Lenguaje, interpretación y desacuerdos en el terreno del derecho’, in Notas sobre derecho y lenguaje, Buenos Aires, 1965, cap. 3, notas y comentarios, sect. 11

Jane Austen

[S]he found—what has been sometimes found before—that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire did not, in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, chap. 42

Robert Fisk

There was always, in the past, a limit to […] hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer’s address. Or if not, they would be so ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling me the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.

Robert Fisk, ‘Why Does John Malkovich Want to Kill Me?’, in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (eds.), The Politics of Anti-Semitism, Oakland, 2003, p. 59

Martín Esslin

MartinWalking through any town or village in Britain on a summer evening when the windows are open one can see the bluish sheen of the television screen in almost any house. It is therefore easily possible, if o n e knows which programmes are at that moment being broadcast o n the three available channels, to know what are the only three possible contents at that moment occupy- ing the minds of the people inside the houses in that street. In times past an- other person’s thoughts were one of the greatest of mysteries. Today, during television peak hours in one of the more highly developed countries, the contents of a very high proportion of other people’s minds have become highly predictable.

Indeed, if we regard the continuous stream of thought and emotion which constitutes a human being’s conscious mental processes as the most private sphere of his individuality, we might express the effect of this mass communications medium by saying that for a given number of hours a day—in the United Kingdom between two and two and a half hours—twentieth- century man switches his mind from private to collective consciousness. It is a staggering and, in the literal sense of the word, awful thought.

Martin Esslin, ‘Television: Mass Demand and Quality’, Impact of Science on Society, vol. 20, no. 3 (1970), pp. 207–218

David Edwards

[C]ertainly [people do not opt out of the system] because they’re smarter than other people. Maybe it’s courage, being willing to face the possibility that your life so far has been a waste of time. Maybe it’s faith in the idea that truth—however frightening it might seem—will always bring benefits.

David Edwards, ‘Nothing To Lose But Our Illusions’, The Sun, June 2000

Frederick Douglass

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, ‘The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies’, Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, New Haven, 1985

Robert Paul Wolff

In politics, as in life generally, men frequently forfeit their autonomy. There are a number of causes for this fact, and also a number of arguments which have been offered to justify it. Most men, as we have already noted, feel so strongly the force of tradition or bureaucracy that they accept unthinkingly the claims to authority which are made by their nominal rulers. It is the rare individual in the history of the race who rises even to the level of questioning the right of his masters to command and the duty of himself and his fellows to obey.

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, New York, 1970, p. 16