Mechanistic View Quotes

“I'm a machine, like you. Like all of you. Blood-lust and rage are my character. Why does the lion not wisely settle down and be a horse? In any case, I too am learning, ordeal by ordeal, my indignity. It's all I have, my only weapon for smashing through these stiff coffin-walls of the world. So I dance in the moonlight, make foul jokes, or labor to shake the foundations of night with my heaped-up howls of rage. Something is bound to come of all this. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“It is also throught this art that we, as human beings, and more broadly as a culture and society, can relate differently to death. Within a mechanistic and biological-reductionistic view of man, suffering, decay, and death can only be meaningless; they cannot be seen as something that has something to say and teach us as human beings. This is perhaps the biggest problem with the Great Mechanistic Narrative: The ultimate master of the sublunary -death- has not been given an acceptable part in it.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to sense one's own experience and to put it into words and to express it in relation to another is what constitutes the core of our existence as human beings.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to empathize also plays a role in relation to our own body. Our bodies are in essence foreign to ourselves. It responds to all kinds of stimuli -food, other people, all kinds of situations- and they do so autonomously, without our knowledge of volition. We can learn to feel our body throughout our lives, for example through certain movement-based arts or meditation, by attentively observing the effects of all kinds of factors (nutrition, exercise, etc) on our body, possibly by repeatedly putting our physical experiences into words during psychoanalytic therapy. Whoever listens to his body and learns to understand its language holds the key to health. The feeling with one's own body is more important than any medicine and also more important than any "objective" rational knowledge, of for instance, healthy food.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism