Jean-François Lyotard: Human

Jean-François Lyotard was French philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on human.
Jean-François Lyotard: 52   quotes 4   likes

“Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?”

Jean-François Lyotard

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

Life , Problem , Science , Dependency

“The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought.”

Jean-François Lyotard

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

“While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. … In comparison everything else seems insignificant. Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even passions—everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as a quest, dies out with the sun. … The inevitable explosion to come, the one that’s always forgotten in your intellectual ploys, can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys … futile. … In 4.5 billions years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a “life of the mind.” … Thought borrows a horizon and orientation, the limitless limit and the end without end it assumes, from the corporeal, sensory, emotional and cognitive experience of a quite sophisticated but definitely earthly existence. With the disappearance of the earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. … The death of the sun is a death of mind. … There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives. … The sun, our earth, and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos. … Human death is included in the life of the mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought.”

Jean-François Lyotard

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), pp. 286-289

Life , Death , War , Smile

“It is generally accepted that nature is an indifferent, not deceptive opponent, and it is upon this basis that the distinction is made between the natural and the human sciences.”

Jean-François Lyotard

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.57

Indifference , Science , Nature