The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy--yet beli...eves this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say tha...t evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kep...t ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective scepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common- sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of enquiry, from philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profi...t, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love has meaning only insofar as it includes the idea of its continuance. Even what we rather glibly call a love affair, if it com...es to an end, may continue as a memory that is pleasing in our lives; we can renew the sense of privilege and reward of having been allowed such intimacy and sharing. But Lust dies at the next dawn, and when it returns in the evening, to search where it may, it is with its own past erased. Love wants to enjoy in other ways the human being whom it has enjoyed in bed; it looks forward to having breakfast. But in the morning Lust is always furtive. It dresses as mechanically as it undressed and heads straight for the door, to return to its own solitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since... we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The matrix is God?" "In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate ... to say that the matrix has a God, since... this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix." "If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent." "Exactly.... Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great Christian drama of the Passion cannot be tragic because the perfection of Jesus eliminates hybris or any shortcoming, ne...ither pity nor terror in Aristotle's sense is possible because of our inability to identify our own flawed human nature with the image of perfect goodness suffering absolute injustice, and the final victory is always certain. Drama with a human protagonist, insofar as it is Christian, cannot be tragic, since the issue has been settled once and for all by the victory of Jesus in His Incarnation, and His Atonement makes all subsequent private atonement unnecessary for the Christian, who needs only some combination of Faith and Grace to participate in the antecedent act. Dante properly recognized this in identifying his great poetic drama as a divine comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yes, but what are all these guises, aspects presentations? Only manifestations of what we all are at different times, according to... how these needs are pulled out of us. I write in these bald words the deepest lessons of my life, the truest substance of what I have learned. I am not only a Chronicler of Zone Three, or only partially, for I also share in Al*Ith's condition of being ruler insofar as I can write of her, describe her. I am woman with her (though I am a man) as I write of her femaleness--and Dabeeb's. I am Ben Ata when I summon him into my mind and try to make him real. I am ... what I am at the moment I am that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »