Albert Borgmann > Quotes

“This is the way that I think about my life, and I hope that you'll think of your life too.

You should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in it about which you can say; There is no place I'd rather be, there is no thing I'd rather be doing, there is nobody I'd rather be with, & this I will remember well.”
― Albert Borgmann

“We know from the work of television critics and from the responses of our friends and from our own that there is little pride in the quality of television programs and less in the habit of extensive viewing. The television viewer’s implication in technology typically takes the form of complicity as defined in Chapter 15. We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss of our traditions or alternatives.68 There is a realization that we are letting great things and practices drift into oblivion and that television fails to respond to our best aspirations and fails to engage the fullness of our powers. These impressions generally agree with more systematic findings that show that television is “not rated particularly highly as a general way of spending time, and in fact was evaluated below average compared to other free-time activities.”69”
― Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

“On the basis of this power, a promise of liberation, enrichment, and of conquering the scourges of humanity is issued. The promise leads to the irony of technology when liberation by way of disburdenment yields to disengagement, enrichment by way of diversion is overtaken by distraction, and conquest makes way first to domination and then to loneliness.”
― Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

“Physical engagement is not simply physical contact but the experience of the world through the manifold sensibility of the body. That sensibility is sharpened and strengthened in skill. Skill is intensive and refined world engagement. Skill, in turn, is bound up with social engagement. It molds the person and gives the person character.”
― Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry