
Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 20
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 7
Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 20
“Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.”
pg 27
Science in a Free Society (1978)
Context: Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 6
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 16
I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.
Source: The Books in My Life (1998), p. 188
Source: Art As a Social System (2000), p. 145.
“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.