Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869)
Source: Violence and the Labor Movement (1914), p. 92
Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869)
"Some Reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time." in The American Scholar (Autumn 1945); also quoted in Paul Robeson : The Whole World in His Hands (1981) by Susan Robeson, p. 150
Context: It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare's Othello — painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its overtones of a clash of cultures, of the partial acceptance of and consequent effect upon one of a minority group. Against this background, the jealousy of the protagonist becomes more credible, the blows to his pride more understandable, the final collapse of his personal, individual world more inevitable. But beyond the personal tragedy, the terrible agony of Othello, the irretrievability of his world, the complete destruction of all his trusted and sacred values — all these suggest the shattering of a universe.
“The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.
On Barack Obama during an interview with WJLA. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/donald-trump-obama-election-2016/ (August 2, 2016)
2010s, 2016, August
Variant: President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!
2010s, 2011, Are we alone in the universe? (2011)
Part 2, Section 2
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 3: Of morals
Source: On the Pragmatics of Communication, 1998, p. 21
“Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.”
More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality (1993)
