“It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes.”

Ideology and Utopia (1929)
Context: It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically.

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 "It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to…" by Karl Mannheim?
Karl Mannheim photo
Karl Mannheim 28
Hungarian sociologist 1893–1947

Related quotes

John Robert Seeley photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Max Frisch photo
Niels Bohr photo

“I am absolutely prepared to talk about the spiritual life of an electronic computer: to state that it is reflecting or is in a bad mood… The question whether the machine really feels or ponders, or whether it merely looks as though it did, is of course absolutely meaningingless.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

As quoted in a letter written from J. Kalckar to John A. Wheeler dated June 10, 1977, which appears in Wheeler's "Law Without Law," pg 207.

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Karl Mannheim photo
Rudolf Rocker photo

“True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these. Without this preliminary any higher intellectual aspirations are quite out of the question.”

Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 5 "The Methods of Anarcho-Syndicalism"
Context: True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these. Without this preliminary any higher intellectual aspirations are quite out of the question. Men who are constantly threatened by direst misery can hardly have much understanding of the higher cultural values. Only after the workers, by decades of struggle, had conquered for themselves a better standard of living could there be any talk of intellectual and cultural development among them. But it is just these aspirations of the workers which the employers view with deepest distrust. For capitalists as a class, the well-known saying of the Spanish minister, Juan Bravo Murillo, still holds good today:"We need no men who can think among the workers; what we need is beasts of toil."

“By using the word "dialogue" I hope to be able to believe that the other has something worthwhile to say. Engaging in dialogue does not mean renouncing our own ideas and traditions but rather, renouncing the claim that they alone are valid or absolute.”

Paul Donoghue (1949) Roman Catholic bishop

Source: New Year, New Resolution https://www.cookislandsnews.com/opinion/editorials/new-year-new-resolution/ (7 January 2022)

Joshua Fernandez photo
Joseph Joubert photo

Related topics