Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, — what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come — 'As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them.'

Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar.

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Thoreau, Walden.

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction.

It is beyond comprehension, in this century which has witnessed holocausts of ethnic, racial, and religious extermination in many parts of our planet, perpetrated by peoples of widely different cultural and political affiliations and beliefs, that educated persons—scholars and popularizers alike—can come forward to argue, as though in complete innocence and ignorance of our recent history, that nothing could be more interesting and worthwhile than to sort out the "racial" or "ethnic" components of our thoroughly mongrelized species so as to ascertain the root identity of each and everyone of us. And where to look for that identity if not in our genes?

Ruth Hubbard, Race and Genes.

Following one's own conviction is, of course, more than giving oneself over to authority; but changing an opinion accepted on authority into an opinion held out of personal conviction, does not necessarily alter the content of the opinion, or replace error with truth.

The only difference between being caught up in a system of opinions and prejudices based on personal conviction, and being caught up in one based on the authority of others, lies in the added conceit that is innate in the former position.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.

As we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the 'stuff' of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any 'objective' basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?

Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox.

Law and Freedom without Violence (Anarchy)
Law and Violence without Freedom (Despotism)
Violence without Freedom and Law (Barbarism)
Violence with Freedom and Law (Republic)

Kant, Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View.

Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays both on the defensive, theism is again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline. This follows from the very meaning of 'atheism.' Only those who used 'atheism' as a term of abuse meant by it the exact opposite of religion. Those who professed themselves to be atheists at a time when religion was still in power tended to identify themselves more deeply with the theistic commandment to love one's neighbor and indeed all created things than most adherents and fellow-travelers of the various denominations. Such selflessness, such a sublimation of self-love into love of others had its origin in Europe in the Judaeo-Christian idea that truth, love and justice were one, an idea which found expression in the teachings of the Messiah. The necessary connection between the theistic tradition and the overcoming of self-seeking becomes very much clearer to a reflective thinker of our time than it was to the critics of religion in bygone days. Besides, what is called 'theism' here has very little in common with the philosophical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which went by that name. That movement was mostly an attempt to reconcile the concept of God with the new science of nature in a plausible manner. The longing for something other than this world, the standing-apart from existing conditions played only a subordinate part in it and mostly no part at all. The meanings of the two concepts do not remain unaffected by history, and their changes are infinitely varied. At a time when both the national socialists and the nationalistic communists despised the Christian faith, a man like Robespierre, the disciple of Rousseau, but not a man like Voltaire, would also have become an atheist and declared nationalism as a religion. Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant, no matter whether they pay lip-service to a religion or whether they can afford to disavow it openly. On the other hand, those who resist the prevailing wind are trying to hold on to what was once the spiritual basis of the civilization to which they still belong. This is hardly what the philosophical 'theists' had in mind: the conception of a divine guarantor of the laws of nature. It is on the contrary the thought of something other than the world, something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom, have no dominion.

Horkheimer, Theism and Atheism.

The concern working people of all countries show for the question of full-employment is understandable ... but spineless! Yes, spineless, because in the industrialised countries of Europe and America industry has reached a stage in its development where we should no longer be struggling to establish our right to a job but demanding access to the necessities of life as of a right: not the pittance of unemployment benefit or soup kitchens and relief when we are out of a job.

The idea that 'he who does not work neither shall he eat' was an approach to life the rough justice of which could be understood at a time in Man's history when mere survival depended on every member of the community doing his share of work. Life was the struggle for physical survival; work the symbol of life. Such is still the situation in great, and densely populated areas of the world, but not in the established industrial nations. Yet with modifications, emulating Orwellian cynicism, the concept that only those who work are entitled to eat has been carried into present society. Production has become an end in itself, unrelated to needs. Workers operate machines which produce goods simply to keep men in employment and the machines turning. Man's ingenuity is taxed to find new uses to which the machines can be put irrespective of whether what they produce is useful, harmful or useless. There are workers who spend a lifetime in the armaments industry producing weapons for their own destruction or which by the time they come off the production line are obsolete and automatically transferred to the scrap heap.

The workers themselves are the last to question the social value of their work. What counts for them is that they have a job which provides them with the money to buy food, shelter and a few frills to hide the emptiness of their lives. Coal miners in this country and Europe are risking their lives digging coal knowing that a part of it is then dumped in quarries because there is no outlet for it. But what does it matter to them so long as they keep their jobs. 20,000 London dockers for whom there is no work nevertheless continue to report twice a day at the docks because by doing so they are entitled to attendance pay. Even that is a job. Millions of people are engaged in work which they despise because they are servile jobs, useless, time-wasting and from which each evening they flee at the double the moment the bell rings, but which, nevertheless, they would shudder at the thought of losing. After all everyone must have a job just as everyone must have had a mother!

Surely the time has come for a new approach to work. We are still thinking in terms of living to work when science and technology have made it more than possible to think in terms of working to live, not only for those of us in the industrialised half of the globe but for the thousand million human beings in the rest of the world crushed and humiliated by appalling man-maintained poverty.

'Full-employment' is the slogan of wage-slaves in an unfree society. It is an insane society which is embarrassed by too many willing and skilled hands, and food and industrial surpluses. In a free society there can be no unwanted surpluses because production will be geared to needs; no unemployed because the more of us there are in the world the lighter will be our task of providing for the needs of everybody.

But one cannot legislate for the free society. It can only be born by the actions of men and women who have understood what freedom is all about and desire it more than anything else that present society and the political wordspinners have to offer by way of consolation prizes in its stead.

Unsigned, 1958.

Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfer and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society.

Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics.

The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology. The pre-dominant contemporary form of sovereignty—if we still want to call it that—is completely embedded within and supported by legal systems and institutions of governance, a republican form characterized not only by the rule of law but also equally by the rule of property. Said differently, the political is not an autonomous domain but one completely immersed in economic and legal structures. There is nothing extraordinary or exceptional about this form of power. Its claim to naturalness, in fact its silent and invisible daily functioning, makes it extremely difficult to recognize, analyze, and challenge. Our first task, then, will be to bring to light the intimate relations between sovereignty, law, and capital.

We need for contemporary political thought an operation something like the one Euhemerus conducted for ancient Greek mythology in the fourth century BC. Euhemerus explained that all of the myths of gods are really just stories of historical human actions that through retelling have been expanded, embellished, and cast up to the heavens. Similarly today the believers imagine a sovereign power that stands above us on the mountaintops, when in fact the dominant forms of power are entirely this-worldly. A new political Euhemerism might help people stop looking for sovereignty in the heavens and recognize the structures of power on earth.

Once we strip away the theological pretenses and apocalyptic visions of contemporary theories of sovereignty, once we bring them down to the social terrain, we need to look more closely at how power functions in society today. In philosophical terms we can think of this shift in perspective as a move from transcendent analysis to transcendental critique. Immanuel Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy puts an end to all the medieval attempts to anchor reason and understanding in transcendent essences and things in themselves. Philosophy must strive instead to reveal the transcendental structures immanent to thought and experience. 'I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.' Kant’s transcendental plane thus occupies a position not wholly in the immediate, immanent facts of experience but not wholly outside them either. This transcendental realm, he explains, is where the conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience reside.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth.

...a reply to the question of what can be accomplished in the sciences by someone who cannot devote his entire life to them. A guest in the home of another, how can he help the owner?

If we think of art in the higher sense, we might wish that only masters would practice it, that its students would receive the strictest prepa­ration, and that amateurs would joyfully approach it in a mood of re­verence. For the work of art should spring from the creative spirit; the artist should call forth content and form from the depths of his own being, and rule his material in a sovereign way; outer influences should give him only what he needs to accomplish his goal.

But the artist has good reason to honor the dilettante, and this is even truer in scientific matters, where the amateur is in a position to produce something both pleasing and useful. Science is far more de­pendent on empirical observation than art, and many people are skilled at such observations. Scientific work is collected from many quarters, and needs many hands and heads. Knowledge can be passed on, these treasures can be inherited, and what is accomplished by one will be used by many. Thus none are forbidden to offer what they can to the sciences. We owe much to accident, practical experience, or the ob­servation of a moment. All sorts of people gifted with good sensory skills — women, children — can offer lively and well-placed observations.

Thus science cannot ask those wishing to do something scientific to devote their entire lives to it and learn all there is to know (quite a bit to ask even of the initiated). If we look through the history of the sci­ences, especially the natural sciences, we will find many accomplishments made by individuals working in some single field, and often by laymen.

Wherever inclination, chance, or opportunity may lead a person, whichever phenomena strike him, engage him, arrest him, occupy him­ — the results will always serve to advance science. For every new rela­tionship that is discovered, every new technique — even the imperfect, even error itself — will prove useful and stimulating; it will not be wasted.

In this sense, then, the author can take some comfort when he looks back on his work, and this observation may give him the courage to do what remains to be done. Not satisfied, but consoled, he commends his past and future accomplishments to the interest of the world and generations to come.

Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia.

Goethe, concluding observation of his scientific studies in Physics.

You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn't catch: there is always far more of that. The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten-pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee. What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot.

Life, as the totality of ends, has a right in opposition to abstract right. If, for example, it can be preserved by stealing a loaf, this certainly constitutes an infringement of someone's property, but it would be wrong to regard such an action as common theft. If someone whose life is in danger were not allowed to take measures to save himself, he would be destined to forfeit all his rights; and since he would be deprived of life, his entire freedom would be negated. There are certainly many prerequisites for the preservation of life, and if we look to the future, we must concern ourselves with such details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now; the future is not absolute, and it remains exposed to contingency. Consequently, only the necessity [Not] of the immediate present can justify a wrong action, because its omission would in turn involve committing a wrong – indeed the ultimate wrong, namely the total negation of the existence of freedom. The beneficium competentiae is of relevance here, because links of kinship and other close relationships entail the right to demand that no one should be sacrificed completely for the sake of right.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

It is not possible to study primitive mankind without being deeply impressed by the sociability it has displayed since its very first steps in life. Traces of human societies are found in the relics of both the oldest and the later stone age; and, when we come to observe the savages whose manners of life are still those of neolithic man, we find them closely bound together by an extremely ancient clan organization which enables them to combine their individually weak forces, to enjoy life in common, and to progress. Man is no exception in nature. He also is subject to the great principle of Mutual Aid which grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life. These were the conclusions arrived at in the previous chapters.

However, as soon as we come to a higher stage of civilization, and refer to history which already has something to say about that stage, we are bewildered by the struggles and conflicts which it reveals. The old bonds seem entirely to be broken. Stems are seen to fight against stems, tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals; and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in times to come.

And yet, as soon as the every-day life of man during the historical period is submitted to a closer analysis—and so it has been, of late, by many patient students of very early institutions—it appears at once under quite a different aspect. Leaving aside the preconceived ideas of most historians and their pronounced predilection for the dramatic aspects of history, we see that the very documents they habitually peruse are such as to exaggerate the part of human life given to struggles and to underrate its peaceful moods. The bright and sunny days are lost sight of in the gales and storms. Even in our own time, the cumbersome records which we prepare for the future historian, in our Press, our law courts, our Government offices, and even in our fiction and poetry, suffer from the same one-sidedness. They hand down to posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience; they hardly take notice of what makes the very essence of our daily life—our social instincts and manners. No wonder, then, if the records of the past were so imperfect. The annalists of old never failed to chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harassed their contemporaries; but they paid no attention whatever to the life of the masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil peacefully while the few indulged in fighting. The epic poems, the inscriptions on monuments, the treaties of peace—nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So that the best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted picture of the times he endeavours to depict; and, to restore the real proportion between conflict and union, we are now bound to enter into a minute analysis of thousands of small facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid - A Factor of Evolution.

There is probably no epoch in the history of mankind that has undergone so much and so many varieties of change as the present time. Two hundred years ago, information could be sent from one city to another no faster than by horse. Today, the information can be sent via telephone, telegraph, radio, or television at the velocity of light. In two hundred years the speed of communication has increased by a factor of thirty million. We believe there will be no corresponding future advance, since messages cannot, we believe, be sent faster than the velocity of light.

Two hundred years ago it took as long to go from Liverpool to London as it now does from the Earth to the Moon. Similar changes have occurred in the energy resources available to our civilization, in the amount of information that is stored and processed, in methods of food production and distribution, in the synthesis of new materials, in the concentration of population from the countryside to the cities, in the vast increase in population, in improved medical practice, and in enormous social upheaval.

Our instincts and emotions are those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of a million years ago. But our society is astonishingly different from that of a million years ago. In times of slow change, the insights and skills learned by one generation are useful, tried, and adaptive, and are gladly received when passed down to the next generation. But in times like today, when the society changes significantly in less than a human lifetime, the parental insights no longer have unquestioned validity for the young. The so-called generation gap is a consequence of the rate of social and technological change.

Even within a human lifetime, the change is so great that many people are alienated from their own society. Margaret Mead has described older people today as involuntary immigrants from the past to the present.

Old economic assumptions, old methods of determining political leaders, old methods of distributing resources, old methods of communicating information from the government to the people–and vice versa–all of these may once have been valid or useful or at least somewhat adaptive, but today may no longer have survival value at all. Old oppressive and chauvinistic attitudes among the races, between the sexes, and between economic groups are being justifiably challenged. The fabric of society throughout the world is ripping.

At the same time, there are vested interests opposed to change. These include individuals in power who have much to gain in the short run by maintaining the old ways, even if their children have much to lose in the long run. They are individuals who are unable in middle years to change the attitudes inculcated in their youth.

The situation is a very difficult one. The rate of change cannot continue indefinitely; as the example of the rate of communication indicates, limits must be reached. We cannot communicate faster than the velocity of light. We cannot have a population larger than Earth's resources and economic distribution facilities can maintain. Whatever the solutions to be achieved, hundreds of years from now the Earth is unlikely still to be experiencing great social stress and change. We will have reached some solution to our present problems. The question is, which solution?

Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection. (Part 1 of 2)

In science a situation as complicated as this is difficult to treat theoretically. We do not understand all the factors that influence our society and, therefore, cannot make reliable predictions on what changes are desirable. There are too many complex interactions. Ecology has been called the subversive science because every time a serious effort to preserve a feature of the environment is made, it runs into enormous numbers of social or economic vested interests. The same is true every time we attempt to make a major change in anything that is wrong; the change runs through society as a whole. It is difficult to isolate small fragments of the society and change them without having profound influences on the rest of society.

When theory is not adequate in science, the only realistic approach is experimental. Experiment is the touchstone of science on which the theories are framed. It is the court of last resort. What is clearly needed are experimental societies!

There is good biological precedent for this idea. In the evolution of life there are innumerable cases when an organism was clearly dominant, highly specialized, perfectly acclimatized to its environment. But the environment changed and the organism died. It is for this reason that nature employs mutations. The vast majority of mutations are deleterious or lethal. The mutated species are less adaptive than the normal types. But one in a thousand or one in ten thousand mutants has a slight advantage over its parents. The mutations breed true, and the mutant organism is now slightly better adapted.

Social mutations, it seems to me, are what we need. Perhaps because of a hoary science-fiction tradition that mutants are ugly and hateful, it might be better to use another term. But social mutation–a variation on a social system which breeds true, which, if it works, is the path to the future–seems to be precisely the right phrase. It would be useful to examine why some of us find the phrase objectionable.

We should be encouraging social, economic, and political experimentation on a massive scale in all countries. Instead, the opposite seems to be occurring. In countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union the official policy is to discourage significant experimentation, because it is, of course, unpopular with the majority. The practical consequence is vigorous popular disapproval of significant variation. Young urban idealists immersed in a drug culture, with dress styles considered bizarre by conventional standards, and with no prior knowledge of agriculture, are unlikely to succeed in establishing Utopian agricultural communities in the American Southwest–even without local harassment. Yet such experimental communities throughout the world have been subjected to hostility and violence by their more conventional neighbors. In some cases the vigilantes are enraged because they themselves have only within the previous generation been accepted into the conventional system.

We should not be surprised, then, if experimental communities fail. Only a small fraction of mutations succeed. But the advantage social mutations have over biological mutations is that individuals learn; the participants in unsuccessful communal experiments are able to assess the reasons for failure and can participate in later experiments that attempt to avoid the causes of initial failure.

There should be not only popular approval for such experiments, but also official governmental support for them. Volunteers for such experiments in Utopia–facing long odds for the benefit of society as a whole–will, I hope, be thought of as men and women of exemplary courage. They are the cutting edge of the future. One day there will arise an experimental community that works much more efficiently than the polyglot, rubbery, hand-patched society we are living in. A viable alternative will then be before us.

Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection. (Part 2 of 2)

It is one of the fundamental impulses of man to be necessitated to assume the existence around him of reasonable beings like himself; but he can only assume their existence under the condition of entering into Society with them, according to the meaning of that word as above explained. The Social Impulse thus belongs to the fundamental impulses of man. It is man’s vocation to live in Society—he must live in Society;—he is no complete man, but contradicts his own being, if he lives in a state of isolation.

You see how important it is not to confound the abstract idea of Society, with that particular empirically conditioned form of Society, which we call the State. Political Society is not a part of the absolute purpose of human life (whatever a great man may have said to the contrary); but it is under certain conditions, a possible means towards the formation of a perfect Society. Like all human institutions, which are merely means to an end, the State constantly tends towards its own annihilation; the ultimate aim of all government is to make government superfluous. That age is of a surety not now present with us,—and I know not how many myriads, or perhaps myriads of myriads of years may elapse before it arrive,—(we have not now to deal with a practical rule of life, but with the vindication of a speculative principle);—that age is not now, but it is certain that in the a priori, fore-ordered course of the human race such a period does exist, when all political combinations shall have become unnecessary. That is the time when, in place of strength or cunning, Reason alone shall be acknowledged as the supreme judge of all;—acknowledged I say, for although men may even then go astray, and by their errors do hurt to their fellow-men, yet they will then be open to conviction of their error, and when convinced of it, will be willing to return and make amends for their fault. Until this age shall arrive, we cannot be true men.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar.

When [mind] labors to extricate itself from the bewilderment [the vague and misleading 'truths'] set up, it falls into fresh contradictions, and may very well burst out with the assertion that the question is settled, that so and so is the truth, and that the other views are sophistries. For 'sophistry' is a slogan used by ordinary common sense against educated reason, just as expression 'visionary dreaming' sums up, once and for all, what philosophy means to those who are ignorant of it.—Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity. For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.

How we behave in the world is profoundly influenced by how we experience the world, which is profoundly influenced by how we perceive the world, which is profoundly influenced by what we believe about the world.

Our collective behavior is killing the planet.

It's not altogether irrelevant, then, to ask what sorts of beliefs (perceptions, experiences) might be leading to these destructive behaviors, and to ask how we can change these beliefs such that we will stop, not further, the murder of the planet.

We have been taught, in ways large and small, religious and secular, that life is based on hierarchies, and that those higher on these hierarchies dominate those lower, either by right or by might. We have been taught that there are myriad literal and metaphorical food chains where the one at the top is the king of the jungle.

But what if the point is not to rule, but to participate? What if life less resembles the board games Risk or Monopoly, and more resembles a symphony? What if the point is not for the violin players to drown out the oboe players (or worse, literally drown them or at least drive them from the orchestra, and take their seats for more violin players to use), but to make music with them? What if the point is for us to attempt to learn our proper role in this symphony, and then play that role?

Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy.