En tiempos de auge la conjetura de que la existencia del hombre es una cantidad constante, invariable, puede entristecer o irritar: en tiempos que declinan (como éstos), es la promesa de que ningún oprobio, ninguna calamidad, ningún dictador podrá empobrecernos.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El tiempo circular’, in El Aleph, Buenos Aires, 1949
Alone in my tower at midnight, I remember the woods and downs, the sea and sky, that daylight showed. Now, as I look through each of the four windows, north, south, east and west, I see only myself dimly reflected, or shadowed in monstrous opacity upon the fog. What matter? To-morrow sunrise will give me back the beauty of the outer world as I wake from sleep.
But the mental night that has descended upon me is less brief, and promises no awakening after sleep. Formerly, the cruelty, the meanness, the dusty fretful passion of human life seemed to me a little thing, set, like some resolved discord in music, amid the splendour of the stars and the stately procession of geological ages. What if the universe was to end in universal death? It was none the less unruffled and magnificent. But now all this has shrunk to be no more than my own reflection in the windows of the soul through which I look out upon the night of nothingness. The revolutions of nebulae, the birth and death of stars, are no more than convenient fictions in the trivial work of linking together my own sensations, and perhaps those of other men not much better than myself. No dungeon was ever constructed so dark and narrow as that in which the shadow physics of our time imprisons us, for every prisoner has believed that outside his walls a free world existed; but now the prison has become the whole universe. There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness, anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.
Why live in such a world? Why even die?
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914-1944, London, 1968, pp. 158-159
¿Dónde terminó el anarquismo? Refiriéndose al caso español un autor sostiene que “su movimiento se perdió en la evolución de los tiempos, pero sus problemas de libertad e igualdad quedaron incroporados a la cultura de la sociedad europea, y por tanto, factibles de extenderse al resto del mundo”. El anarquismo argentino también se extravió en el transcurso del siglo XX y, como su homónimo hispano, instaló en la sociedad local problemas de libertad e igualdad. Fue casi la única corriente contestataria que defendió la libertad individual y la igualdad de todos los hombres como valores supremos. Ni el Estado ni el interés partidario o doctrinario debían interponerse entre el individuo y su libertad, y, en este sentido, se diferenció de cualquier grupo o partido de izquierda. Estas ideas eran heredadas del liberalismo, pero a diferencia de aquél, el anarquismo las puso en práctica (o intentó hacerlo) entre los sectores más oprimidos de la sociedad. Tal vez los actuales movimientos de derechos humanos en su defensa de los derechos civiles y, consecuentemente, de las libertades individuales sean herederos del individualismo libertario.
Juan Suriano, Anarquistas: Cultura y política libertaria en Buenos Aires. 1890 – 1910, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 342
A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it –Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?
Ursula Le Guin, ‘The Day before the Revolution’, Galaxy, vol. 8 (August, 1974)
The most ardent antigovernment libertarian tacitly accepts his own dependency on government, even while rhetorically denouncing signs of dependency in others. This double-think is the core of the American libertarian stance. Those who propagate a libertarian philosophy–such as Robert Nozick, Charles Murray, and Richard Epstein–speak fondly of the “minimal state.” But describing a political system that is genuinely capable of representing force and fraud as “minimal” is to suggest, against all historical evidence, that such a system is easy to achieve and maintain.
Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, New York, 1999, p. 64
Surely the partisan of utility cannot be charged with the sins of social contract. A dose of Bentham is the best cure for anyone tempted by the vision of asocial monads giving contractual shape to their natural rights.
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, New Haven, 1980, p. 100
Lo que estamos haciendo en el movimiento es una batalla muy grande contra el furor hegemónico de la mundialización, que se quiere apoderar de valores culturales, y así se quiere apoderar del mundo. Frente a eso nosotros nos hacemos una pregunta: ¿cuáles son los valores verdaderos de una civilización distinta? Y, por el contrario, ¿qué es lo que valora una sociedad globalizacda? Sabemos: el mercado, la rentabilidad, y la persona como un valor de compra y venta. Nosotros tratamos de recuperar y crear otros valores culturales, éticos, otra sabiduría, la creatividad.
MTD de Solano y Colectivo Situaciones, La hipótesis 891: más allá de los piquetes, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 69
The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.
Shirin Ebadi, ‘The Progressive Interview’, The Progressive, vol. 68, no. 9 (September, 2004), p. 37
Existen dos enemigos de la autonomía y la horizontalidad: los grandes números y las grandes distancias.
Ezequiel Adamovsky, Anticapitalismo para principiantes, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 102
Unexpected discoveries are useful for calibrating pre-existing ideas. G. W. F. Hegel has had a very powerful imprint on professional philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a profound influence on the future of the world because Karl Marx took him very seriously (although sympathetic critics have argued that Marx’s arguments would have been more compelling had he never heard of Hegel). In 1799 or 1800 Hegel confidently stated, using presumably the full armamentarium of philosophy available to him, that no new celestial objects could exist within the solar system. One year later, the asteroid Ceres was discovered. Hegel then seems to have returned to pursuits less amenable to disproof.
Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, New York, 1974, p. 235
[S]uffering cries out for its own abolition[.]
Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility, Oxford, 2002, p. 111
[O]ther things being equal it is worse to cause an animal pain than to cause an adult human being pain. An adult human being can, as it were, think his or her way around the pain to what lies beyond it in the future; an animal -like a human baby-cannot do this, so that there is nothing for the animal but the pain itself.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 292-293
If a simplification actually creates fewer problems that it prevents, and makes life better than a truer theory that is more respectful of complexity, subtlety, ambiguity, and indeterminacy, then courage requires that we be fictionalists and admit it.
Peter Suber, ‘Against the Sanctity of Life’
In a nutshell, hunter-gatherers require coercion or persuasion to join the modern world, while peasants typically require coercion to keep them as peasants. It is probable that hunting and gathering is more humanly satisfying that modern life, but since it is not a viable way of supporting the world’s population, the superiority of modern societies over traditional societies seems to be decisive. Given that the realistic choice lies between traditional and modernizing societies, modernization seems clearly the more desirable option.
Bruce Charlton & Peter Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Exeter, 2003, p. 19
If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks.
Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, New York, 2002, pp. 88-89
Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In the upper right hand, as you’ve already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially. But now look at Shiva’s other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that mean? It signifies, ‘Don’t be afraid: it’s All Right’. But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid, when it’s so obvious that they’re all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He’s using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you’ll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature—the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity, Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that’s precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn’t at his trampling right foot that he points his finger; it’s at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he’s in the act of rising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity—it’s the symbol of release, of Moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once—in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light…
Aldous Huxley, Island, New York, 1962, pp. 206-207
[S]omeone who does not see that the remediable suffering of others creates obligations is simply not a moral agent.
John Harris, ‘Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs’, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 29, no. 3 (2003), p. 133
Throghout the modern world, equality is generally prescribed, yet inequality is generally practiced.
James Fishkin, Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Family, New Haven, 1983, p. 47
Como la realidad es siempre compleja, de vez en cuando Félix lee en los periódicos argentinos o españoles algunas crónicas de hechos que parecen destinados a compensar o corregir los errores ético-jurídicos de la Argentina moralizante y de los primeros años del gobierno de Menem. […]
“–¿Vos sos Astiz?
–Sí, ¿y vos quién sos?
–No importa. Vos sos un asesino hijo de puta.”Como si se tratase de un silogismo práctico, un puñetazo en la cara del marino fue la acción con la que culminó la breve confirmación de identidad de este personaje condenado en ausencia a prisión perpetua en Francia por el asesinato de dos monjas francesas y miembro del Servicio de Inteligencia Naval argentino hasta junio de 1997.
Ernesto Garzón Valdés, El velo de la ilusión: apuntes sobre una vida argentina y su realidad política, Buenos Aires, 2000, p. 214
The word “acceptance” is widely used to denote an optimistic attitude toward illness that gets past the initial horror of it and enables you to proceed with life. No matter how philosophical you are, however, pain is never really “acceptable.”
Cheri Register, Living with Chronic Illness, New York, 1987, p. 180
Almost every argument for immigration controls is flawed. Take, for example, the argument that we need to ‘protect out jobs’. Well, why is someone who charges too much for his labour entitled to keep that job and not be out competed? The usual answer is that it is all right to be out competed by a compatriot but not by a foreigner. But this is simply xenophobic (‘communitarian’ would be a more charitable word)[.]
Fernando Tesón, ‘On Trade and Justice’, Theoria, vol. 51, no. 104 (August, 2004), p. 196
It is surprising to see such a warm, mushy idea—brotherly love—grow out of a word as cold and clinical as “utilitarianism.” But it shouldn’t be. Brotherly love is implicit in the standard formulations of utilitarianism—maximum total happiness, the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words: everyone’s happiness counts equally; you are not priviledged, and you shouldn’t act as if you are.
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, New York, 1994, p. 336
“Libertarian” capitalism sacrifices liberty to capitalism, a truth its advocates are able to deny only because they are prepared to abuse the language of freedom.
G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cambridge, 1995, p. 37
The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in doing so they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people; they are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’ The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ‘the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why—against the evidence of history—so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.
George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Movements and Ideas, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 14
Es frecuente entre los historiadores y sociólogos que se ocupan hoy del anarquismo afirmar que éste representa una ideología del pasado. Si con ello se quiere decir simplemente que tal ideología logró su máxima influencia en el pueblo y en el movimiento obrero a fines del siglo XIX y durante la primera década del XX, nada podemos objetar. Pero si ese juicio implica la idea de que el anarquismo es algo muerto y esencialmente inadecuado al mundo del presente, si pretende que él no puede interpretar ni cambiar la sociedad de hoy, creemos que constituye un notorio error. Frente a la grave crisis (teórica y práctica) del marxismo, que se debate entre un stalinismo más o menos vergonzante y una socialdemocracia que suele renegar de su pasado, el anarquismo representa, más bien, la ideología del futuro.
Ángel Cappelletti, La ideología anarquista, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 130-131
Anarquista es el que cree posible vivir sin el principio de autoridad. Hay organismos esencialmente anarquistas, por ejemplo la ciencia moderna, cuyos progresos son enormes desde que se ha sustituido el criterio autoritario por el de la verificación experimental.
Rafael Barrett, Moralidades actuales, Montevideo, 1910
We produce in order to be able to afford certain amenities and comforts as “consumers”. If, however, somebody demanded these same amenities and comforts while he was engaged in “production”, he would be told that this would be uneconomic, that it would be inefficient, and that society could not afford such inefficiency.
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, London, 1974, p. 87
The success of my endeavours was due, I think, to a rule of ‘method’: that we should always try to clarify and strengthen our opponents’ position as much as possible before criticizing him, if we wish our criticism to be worth while.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, 1958, sect. 80, fn. 5
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 291 (February, 1891)
There have been times in my life when I came very near thinking that I could not lose even a single game.
José Raúl Capablanca, My Chess Career, London, 1920