“Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man.”
On My Philosopy (1941)
Context: My path was not the normal one of professors of philosophy. I did not intend to become a doctor of philosophy by studying philosophy (I am in fact a doctor of medicine) nor did I by any means, intend originally to qualify for a professorship by a dissertation on philosophy. To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. Since my schooldays, however, I was guided by philosophical questions. Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man. Yet a certain awe kept me from making it my profession.
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Karl Jaspers 44
German psychiatrist and philosopher 1883–1969Related quotes
“The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”
Though this has been quoted extensively as if it were a statement of Wittgenstein, it was apparently first published in A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking, p. 175, where it is presented in quotation marks and thus easily interpreted to be a quotation, but could conceivably be Hawking paraphrasing or giving his own particular summation of Wittgenstein's ideas, as there seem to be no published sources of such a statement prior to this one. The full remark by Hawking reads:
: Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
Disputed
“Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.”
Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
1900s
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution
“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”
On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic (December 1965)
As quoted in John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, John Lewis Bradley, Ian Ousby (1987). “The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton”, p.175, Cambridge University Press
Part IV, Chapter I
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 65–66