“No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd,”
Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 217-18; : Partly cited in: John Barton, " Pragmatism, systems thinking and system dynamics http://courses.daiict.ac.in/pluginfile.php/19296/mod_resource/content/1/Pragmatism%20and%20systems%20Thinking.pdf." 19th International System Dynamics Conference, Wellington, New Zealand. AusAID, 1999.
Context: Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James's prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James s now famous little essay on " The Will to Believe " the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.
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Edgar A. Singer, Jr. 10
American philosopher 1873–1954Related quotes
“I do feel one learns more from one's failures than from one's successes”
Sunday Times interview (1983)
1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
from his responding at the 1951 MoMA symposium, in which several artists were asked to respond to the prompt 'What Abstract Art Means to Me'
1950s
War Loses Its Romance (1887), as quoted at the Veterans Memorial at the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method;”
The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 20 (See also: Algorithms).
Leviathan (1651)
Context: The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method; in that they begin not their Ratiocination from Definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words: as if they could cast account, without knowing the value of the numerall words, one, two, and three.
“For the first time in my life I find myself with more than one answer to the same question.”
Source: Deathworld (1960), p. 113
Context: "What about it, Meta?" he snapped. "No doubts? Do you think that destruction is the only way to end this war?"
"I don't know," she said. "I can't be sure. For the first time in my life I find myself with more than one answer to the same question."
"Congratulations," he said. "It's a sign of growing up."
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
Source: Howl and Other Poems