Las Menias
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)
“Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.”
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 53-54
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Alan Watts 107
British philosopher, writer and speaker 1915–1973Related quotes
Source: Truth and Method (1960), p. 289
Variant translation: In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to history. … The focus of subjectivity is a distorted mirror. Individual self-reflection is merely a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are —much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.
As quoted in Tom Neton, "Hermeneutical Truth and the Structure of Human Experience: Gadamer's Critique of Dilthey" in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (1995) edited by Lawrence Schmidt.
Sermon IV : True Hearing
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)
“Almost always is it a the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.”
Casi siempre es el miedo de ser nosotros lo que nos lleva delante del espejo.
Voces (1943)
Chap. 8 : Change Your Circumstances by Changing Your Attitude
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)
Quoted as the opening passage of "BOOK ONE: The Functions of Language" in Language in Thought and Action (1949) by S. I. Hayakawa, p. 3
Words and Their Meanings (1940)
Context: A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.
This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. "A mere matter of words," we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.
Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.237
Part V, Ch. 3 : 3rd Public Talk Madras 14th January 1968 "The Sacred" http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/awakening-of-intelligence/1968-01-14-jiddu-krishnamurti-awakening-of-intelligence-the-sacred
1970s, The Awakening of Intelligence (1973)