Category: Arbitrary

“It may be […] that all enquiry on our part is set so as to exempt certain propositions from doubt, if they are ever formulated. They lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.  … In the end as a fully specialized … intellectual you become tame and accepting of whatever the so-called leaders in the field will allow.  Specialization also kills your sense of excitement and discovery, both of which are irreducibly present in the intellectuals makeup.  In the final analysis, giving up to specialization is, I have always felt, laziness, so you end up doing what others tell you, because that is your specialty after all.”

– Edward Said (1994), Representations of the Intellectual

Let philosophers have their philosophy. Too institutional to me.

Am I not allowed to be nothing?

Then I’ll opt for Heidegger’s thinking.

But like Kant’s unworldliness, thinking alone doesn’t cut it. Not even close.

Call me Ishmael: “I try everything, and I achieve what I can.”

“Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time… In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf