“What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.”

—  Guy Debord, book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. An…" by Guy Debord?
Guy Debord photo
Guy Debord29
French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding mem… 1931–1994

Related quotes

Guy De Maupassant photo

“Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: Complete Works

Marie-Louise von Franz photo

“As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Psyche and Matter (1992), p. 208

Talcott Parsons photo

“The structure of a theoretical system tells us what alternatives are open in the possible answers to a given question. If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 9

“The truth is that once you discover something is false you lose interest in it. Man no longer treasures what he thought was genuine once he discovers it is false. In this way truth is its own solution. Self-knowledge is the discovery of the false. You do not have to find what is true: when the false is discarded truth is there. It always was. Just keep observing the fact and the change will come automatically and will he lasting.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Harold Pinter photo

“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

11
Writing for the Theatre (1962)

Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“… a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

William Shakespeare photo

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Wendell Berry photo

“When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000)
Context: Reductionism (ultimately, the empirical explanability of everything and a cornerstone of science), has uses that are appropriate, and it also can be used inappropriately. It is appropriately used as a way (one way) of understanding what is empirically known or empirically knowable. When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false.

“The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 68.

Related topics