## Metadata - Author: [[Raymond Geuss]] - Full Title: A World Without Why - Category: #books ## Highlights - Human life is to a large extent constituted by an attempt to reconcile “needs,” desires, and “normative claims” on an individual and social level in view of our best knowledge about our world. ([Location 76](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=76)) - Dewey, that is, was clearly right to think that traditional philosophy was inherently conservative, having as its goal the project of inventing arguments to support as much of the existing forms of social authority as possible. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=101)) - In the ancient world “freedom” was not construed as incompatible with the recognition of “authority.” Free men and free self-governing communities would obviously orient themselves on the model of famous men of the past and on the opinions and practice of wise contemporaries. Similarly they would recognise the importance of traditions, established practices, and “unwritten laws”;10 in Rome they would have special regard for the auctoritas of the Senate. Finally, if they had any sense, they would attempt to interpret and obey advice, commands, and warnings given by the gods through oracles or via other “signs.” ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=141)) - What sort of human life would it be which failed to assign an important place to respect for, and even a deference to, the judgement and exemplary practice of others? ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=149)) - The “Enlightenment” ideal of an autonomous individual who restricts himself in his acting and judging strictly to that which he understands thoroughly, has rationally well-grounded views about, and has in his control does not describe a possible form of human life. ([Location 167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=167)) - It would not be surprising if the discipline of “philosophy” depended for its continuing vitality on the tension between these different poles—between interest in the structure of the natural world, interest in forms of argumentation, and interest in “what would be for the best”—so that without this tension the practice as we know it could not continue to exist, but would break up into individual parts, each of which would go its own way as a distinct discipline. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=473)) - “Philosophy” could dissolve itself into physics for the study of nature; linguistics, rhetoric, and mathematics for the study of speech, argumentation, and formal systems; and politics, belles lettres, and social psychology for the study of “what would be for the best.” I strongly suspect that a radical dissociation of these interests has already occurred, although many people have not noticed it yet, and the discipline of philosophy in its present configuration is held together only by a combination of historical inertia and a sentimentalized attachment to a mostly illusory image of a glorious past. As a purported single subject, philosophy seems unlikely to last. ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=479)) - If “clarity” is indeed relative to socially enforced forms of speech, then, unless one makes the highly implausible assumption that our society and form of life are completely free and noncoercive, the demand for clarity can be seen as a requirement of conformity to structures of repression. ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=891)) - There are three thoughts here that are distinct but complementary. First of all, the world-language unit is not composed, at any rate not exclusively, of fixed and sharply defined facts that could be the objects of ideally pellucid expression. Much of it is indeterminate in a way that would not admit of absolute clarification. Second, much of our speech is in any case directed not at trying to reflect the natural world or reproduce the social world at all but at trying to change it or them. Third, much of what we take to be clear seems that way only because repressive social forces impose restrictive, determinate forms on our behaviour and on our modes of thinking and imagining. The best modern poetry is responsive to all three of these thoughts. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=945)) - One of the reasons I have always felt great resistance to this Aristotelian line of thought is that it seems to me to add fuel to a view of human life that I find repellent. This is the view that life is either like a race or an ἄγων with clear winners and losers. Or that it is the exercise of a craft with a determinate end, say like the production of shoes, so that univocal success or failure is always discernible. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=1280)) - Narrative should be seen as a way of distancing ourselves from Aristotle, not of rehabilitating him.27 If we at any particular time give our desires some minimal order by reference to some conception of a single overarching good, we also know that those conceptions of a unitary good change during our lives. Any unity of desire is “necessarily” and unavoidably fleeting, transitory, fragile, and imposed on much more chaotic structures that are, however, not just nothing or “empty.” ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=1292)) - There is, at any rate, a whole traditional sequence of philosophers who think of themselves as turning their backs resolutely on the strict Aristotelian distinction between means and ends, actions under the dominance of instrumental rationality and some form of autotelic human activity. I would include in this tradition Hegel, Marx (in some of his moods), Dewey, Trotsky (sometimes), and Adorno (but not Habermas). ([Location 1309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=1309)) - Taking seriously the attempt to abolish the distinction between instrumental and substantive reason, between actions performed merely for the sake of other things and actions performed for their own sake, and finally between means and ends, by transforming society in a way that would make these distinctions really marginal and subordinate would, I think, move one beyond the ethos of the twentieth century. ([Location 1339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=1339)) - In one sense the fully closed, utterly homogeneous society could never be a reality. I use a particular kind of fountain pen produced by the Lamy Company in Heidelberg. Lamy may wish to turn each of its pens into an exact replica of each other, but it is contrary to the nature of reality for that ever to be fully successful. The tendency alone is important even though it will fail. This, however, leaves a small space for human experience and for the constitution of a certain kind of meaning for human life. ([Location 2034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=2034)) - Adorno was pessimistic about the possibility of political action. All action in the modern world is infected with instrumental rationality, and this would include any political action that tried to revolt against the demands of the system of instrumental rationality itself. The only possible meaning you could give your life in the twentieth century that is minimally realistic is to resist the social pressures towards uniformity and homogeneity in all areas, and to struggle against the subordination of human subjectivity and individual life to the demands of the maximisation of return on capital. ([Location 2040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=2040)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Greek has two different words νέμεσις and φϑόνος for a psychic phenomenon in which there is in English (and in Latin) only one word: “[roughly:] envy” (Latin: “invidia”). However, although I can’t give “equivalents” of either of these two terms, I can give a periphrastic explanation: “νέμεσις” is feeling pain at another’s undeserved success; “φϑόνος” is feeling pain at another’s success not because it is undeserved but because the other is your peer.6 ([Location 2140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GI068BQ&location=2140))