Simon Critchley > Quotes

“I have argued that philosophy doesn't begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions.”
― Simon Critchley

“Death makes cynics of us all”
― Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers

“In a seminar at New York University in 1980, Foucault is reported to have said that the difference between late antiquity and early Christianity might be reduced to the following questions: the patrician pagan asks, "Given that I am who I am, whom can I fuck?" That is, given my status in society, who would it be appropriate for me to take as my lover, which girl or boy, woman or man? By contrast, the Christian asks, "Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?" That is, the question of what it means to be human first arises for Christians in the sight of God. ( 239)”
― Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers

“Nietzsche would have put it, we need art in order not to die from the truth.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“The overwhelming experience of tragedy is a disorientation expressed in one bewildered and frequently repeated question: What shall I do?”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“Tragedy is full of ghosts, ancient and modern, and the line separating the living from the dead is continually blurred. This means that in tragedy the dead don’t stay dead and the living are not fully alive. What tragedy renders unstable is the line that separates the living from the dead, enlivening the dead and deadening the living.”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“The denial of death is self-hatred.”
― Simon Critchley

“Zeno gave his lectures on the stoa, the covered walkways or porticos that surrounded the Athenian marketplace. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics. He presided over his school for fifty-eight years and the manner of his death at the age of ninety-eight is bizarre. One day, as he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Lying there in pain, he struck the ground with his fist and quoted a line from the Niobe of Timotheus, “I come of my own accord; why then call me?” He died on the spot through holding his breath.”
― Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers

“For Habermas, scientism means science’s belief in itself: that is, ‘the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science’.”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“How might we respond to the contemporary situation of war? It might seem that the easiest and noblest thing to do is to speak of peace. Yet, as Raymond Williams says in his still hugely relevant book from 1966, Modern Tragedy, “To say peace when there is no peace” is to say nothing.3 To which the obvious response is: say war. But that would be peremptory. The danger of easy pacifism is that it is inert and self-regarding. It is always too pleased with itself. But the alternative is not a justification of war. It is rather the attempt to understand the complex tragic dialectics of political situations, particularly apparently revolutionary ones. Williams goes on to claim, “We expect men brutally exploited and intolerably poor to rest and be patient in their misery, because if they act to end their condition it will involve the rest of us, and threatens our convenience or our lives.”4 Often, we simply want violence and war to go away because it is an inconvenience to us and to our lovely lives. As such, we do not only fail to see our implication in such violence and war, we completely disavow it.”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic.”
― Simon Critchley, The Book Of Dead Philosophers

“We live with – and within – a gap between knowledge and wisdom. It is time philosophers, and everyone else, started to try and think about that gap. Maybe more than our personal peace of mind is at stake.”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“...there is a felt gap here-the gap between knowledge and wisdom- that cannot be closed through empirical enquiry. That is, the question of the meaning of life in not reducible to empirical enquiry. This felt gap between knowkedge and wisdom is the very space of critical reflection. In philosophy, but also more generally in cultural life, we need to clip the wings of both scientism and obscurantism and thereby avoid what is worst in both Continental and analytic philosophy.”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“I think Oscar Wilde is right when he defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power. To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace.”
― Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide

“The problem with the suicidally depressed is that they are too optimistic. Nothing will be saved by taking our own lives, and a belief in suicide as the only way out derives from an arrogant over-estimation of our capacity for salvation through self-destruction. Therefore, why not stay a while and enjoy the tender indifference of the world that holds itself out for our attention and our seemingly infinite capacity for disappointment?”
― Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide

“Never to be outdone, my wife, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence, wrote the following to me: ‘Dear Simon, Break a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast. With all my love-hate, Jamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff)”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“Doubt kindles our suspicious intelligence and at the same time extinguishes our capacity for love.”
― Simon Critchley, Mysticism

“Quien no haya concebido jamás su propia anulación, quien no haya presentido el recurso a la cuerda, a la bala, al veneno o al mar, es un recluso envilecido o un gusano reptante sobre la carroña cósmica.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“Cuando la vida se detenga aquí y nos enfrentemos al interminable, cambiante e indiferente mar pardo y gris, cuando nos abramos ante esa indiferencia, con ternura, sin languidecer, sin compadecernos de nosotros mismos, quejarnos o esperar recompensas o premios rutilantes, entonces quizás nos hayamos convertido, durante ese solo instante, en algo que ha resistido y seguirá haciéndolo, en alguien que puede hallar cierto grado de autosuficiencia: aquí y ahora.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“No puedo luchar más. Sé que te estoy destrozando la vida ... Verás que no siquiera esto puedo escribirlo bien. No puedo leer. Cuanto quiero decirte es que toda la felicidad de mi vida te la debo a ti.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.”
― Simon Critchley

“Una notable ventaja que debemos a la filosofía consiste en el soberano antídoto que nos ofrece contra las supersticiones y la falsa religión. Todos los otros remedios contra esa pestilente enfermedad son en vano o, en cualquier caso, de dudosa utilidad.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“El suicidio, bajo mi punto de vista, no constituye un crimen legal ni moral, y nadie debería considerarlo como tal.”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“Cioran escribe que «sólo se suicidan los optimistas, los optimistas que ya no logran serlo. Los demás, no teniendo ninguna razón para vivir, ¿por qué la tendrían para morir?»”
― Simon Critchley, Suicide

“Once I have forgotten what I appeared to know, then I can desirously love that which I cannot think.”
― Simon Critchley, Mysticism

“My intuition—it is nothing more than that—is that music, common, shared, everyday music, low or high or somewhere in between, is able, at its best, to describe how we feel and to allow us to feel something more.”
― Simon Critchley, Mysticism

“To utter a word and meaning nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher. Berkeley”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“Yet, the fruit of a consideration of tragedy is not a sense of life’s hopelessness or moral resignation, as Schopenhauer thought, but—I think—a deepened sense of the self in its utter dependency on others. It is a question of the self’s vulnerable exposure to apparently”
― Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.”
― Simon Critchley, Mysticism