“Soon we may well reach the point where one can’t give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around: work was afflicted with a bad conscience. A person of good family concealed the fact that he worked if need compelled him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible: “doing” was itself contemptible.”
― The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
― The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― Alarms and Discursions
― Alarms and Discursions
“The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”
― Critique of Pure Reason
― Critique of Pure Reason
“Philosophy does not stand outside the world any more than man's brain is outside him because it is not in his stomach; but philosophy, to be sure, is in the world with its brain before it stands on the earth with its feet, while many other human spheres have long been rooted in the earth and pluck the fruits of the world long before they realize that the 'head' also belongs to this world or that this world is the world of the head.”
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Toby’s 2024 Year in Books
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