“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.”
― Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984
― Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984
“What difference does it make that pedestrian touch carries the weight of the body rather than the weight of the object?”
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“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
― The Testaments
― The Testaments
“But if perception is thus a function of movement, then what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move. Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing.”
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“Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.”
― The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
― The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
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