Critchley Hsi Quotes

In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ's messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom. ~ Simon Critchley

My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe. ~ Simon Critchley

We must admit that the divine banquet of the brain was, and still is, a feast with dishes that remain elusive in the blending, and with sauces whose ingredients are even now a secret. ~ Macdonald Critchley

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic. ~ Simon Critchley

She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag. ~ Julian Critchley

Death makes cynics of us all ~ Simon Critchley

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. ~ Simon Critchley

Mrs Thatcher requires devotion as well as obedience. ~ Julian Critchley

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program. ~ Simon Critchley

Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious. ~ Simon Critchley

To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were hsi father's, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away. ~ Salman Rushdie

For Habermas, scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, 'the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science'. ~ Simon Critchley

There's a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they're lifted from irony at that point. ~ Simon Critchley

I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case. ~ Simon Critchley

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I was certainly not inclined to decriminalise. However, during my time in the unit, as I saw more and more evidence of 'what works', to quote New Labour's mantra of the time, it became apparent to me that ... enforcement and supply-side interventions were largely pointless. They have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs. ~ Julian Critchley

Shore up the mean with reverence and terror. But never banish terror from the gates of the state. The stronger the fear, the stronger the reverence for the just, the stronger your country's wall and the city's safety. ~ Simon Critchley

Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on. ~ Simon Critchley

There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice - that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc. ~ Simon Critchley

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period. ~ Simon Critchley

Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible. ~ Simon Critchley

If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate. ~ Simon Critchley

The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh. ~ Simon Critchley

The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox. ~ Simon Critchley

The denial of death is self-hatred. ~ Simon Critchley

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness. ~ Simon Critchley

As Margaret Thatcher came up in the world, so the Conservative Party came down. ~ Julian Critchley

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change. ~ Simon Critchley

Philosophy is the art of dying.Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one's mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live. ~ Simon Critchley

For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as "meaning," namely that, given that there is no God, what is the meaning of life? And, given that we live in an unjust world, how are we to bring about justice? ~ Simon Critchley

I've always been very keen on Pascal, and what I'm most keen on in Pascal is his emphasis upon human wretchedness. He has a phrase which goes something like 'Anxiety, boredom and inconstancy, that is the human condition' and I've always been very partial to that. ~ Simon Critchley

My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can't breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction. ~ Simon Critchley

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best. ~ Simon Critchley

Although the advice that you get if you got to see Margaret is 'stand up for yourself, shout back, and argue the toss and then she will respect you', the trouble is that sort of advice to the English middle-class male of a certain age doesn't actually help us very much because we've always been brought up to believe that it's extremely rude to shout back at women. ~ Julian Critchley

In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope. ~ Simon Critchley

So, I am a b*stard, and the English are b*stards. But the really bad news is that you are too. My vision of Europe would be Europe of b*stards for whom the question of legitimacy was a site of endless struggle and contestation ... ~ Simon Critchley

Zeno gave his lectures on the stoa, the covered walkways or porticos that surrounded the Athenian marketplace. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics. He presided over his school for fifty-eight years and the manner of his death at the age of ninety-eight is bizarre. One day, as he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Lying there in pain, he struck the ground with his fist and quoted a line from the Niobe of Timotheus, "I come of my own accord; why then call me?" He died on the spot through holding his breath. ~ Simon Critchley

It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing. ~ Simon Critchley

Never to be outdone, my wife, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence, wrote the following to me: 'Dear Simon, Break a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast. With all my love-hate, Jamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff) ~ Simon Critchley

I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don't see philosophy as an academic enterprise. ~ Simon Critchley

Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded. ~ Hari Kunzru

Like Marxism, Thatcherism is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, is free of doubt; she is the label on the can of worms. ~ Julian Critchley

We live in a world that is dominated by science. And that's not a bad thing - not at all. But one of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. For example, I no longer accept my being in the world practically and then try to describe that or elucidate that; rather, I see the world theoretically as colors and objects and representations which are fed through my retina into the brain. ~ Simon Critchley

Celebrate the past, don't regret it. ~ Andrew Critchley

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth. ~ Simon Critchley

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality. ~ Simon Critchley

Christianity in the West, opens up a perspective of depth into what it means to be a self. And that depth of the self is something that is experienced in the sight of God. So that the great thinkers of self and subjectivity are Paul and Augustine. They look at the self from the perspective of God and they find themselves wretched and interesting. Constituted by conflictual desires. ~ Simon Critchley