Citát na dnes

"We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time."

[Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination. New York Review Books, 2008; p. 18]

Dobrý život

RIP Ronald Dworkin. Dobrý život viedol.

This requires a distinction within ethics that is familiar in morals: a distinction between duty and consequence, between the right and the good. We should distinguish between living well and having a good life. These two different achievements are connected and distinguished in this way: living well means striving to create a good life, but only subject to certain constraints essential to human dignity. These two concepts, of living well and of having a good life, are interpretive concepts. Our ethical responsibility includes trying to find appropriate conceptions of both of them.

Each of these fundamental ethical ideals needs the other. We cannot explain the importance of a good life except by noticing how creating a good life contributes to living well. We are self-conscious animals who have drives, instincts, tastes, and preferences. There is no mystery why we should want to satisfy those drives and serve those tastes. But it can seem mysterious why we should want a life that is good in a more critical sense: a life we can take pride in having lived when the drives are slaked or even if they are not. We can explain this ambition only when we recognize that we have a responsibility to live well and believe that living well means creating a life that is not simply pleasurable but good in that critical way.

You might ask: responsibility to whom? It is misleading to answer: responsibility to ourselves. People to whom responsibilities are owed can normally release those who are responsible, but we cannot release ourselves from our responsibility to live well. We must instead acknowledge an idea that I believe we almost all accept in the way we live but that is rarely explicitly formulated or acknowledged. We are charged to live well by the bare fact of our existence as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead. We are charged in the way we are charged by the value of anything entrusted to our care. It is important that we live well; not important just to us or to anyone else, but just important.

-- Ronald Dworkin, What is a Good Life

Citát na dnes

"We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons." 

 -- Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

Citát na dnes

Mrs Hendy: Oh! I never knew that Schopenhauer was a philosopher!
Mr Hendy: Oh, yeah! He's the one that begins with an s [Pause.], like Nietzsche.
Mrs Hendy: Does Nietzsche begin with an S?
Mr Hendy: There's an s in Nietzsche.
Mrs Hendy: Oh, wow! Yes there is. Do all philosophers have an s in them?
Mr Hendy: Yeah, I think most of them do.
Mrs Hendy: Oh. Does that mean Selina Jones is a philosopher?
Mr Hendy: Right, she could be. She sings about the meaning of life.
Mrs Hendy: Yeah, that's right, but I don't think she writes her own material.
Mr Hendy: No. Maybe Schopenhauer writes her material?
Mrs Hendy: No. Burt Bacharach writes it.
Mr Hendy: There's no s in Burt Bacharach.
Mrs Hendy: Or in Hal David.
Mr Hendy: Who's Hal David?
Mrs Hendy: He writes the lyrics, Burt just writes the tunes, only now he's married to Carole Bayer Sager.
[Pause.]
Mr Hendy: Waiter! This conversation isn't very good!

-- Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

Parergon k 'Spoznaj svojho sociopata'

Ešte postreh k môjmu včerajšiemu článku. Ale najprv citát z Kotskovej knihy:

"Bryan Cranston’s character in Breaking Bad, for example, chooses to become a meth producer upon learning that his disappointing life is going to end with a random case of lung cancer. The official explanation is that he wants to “provide for his family,” although obviously his family would never have asked him to become a criminal and his wife (Anna Gunn) is horrified when she finds out. The deeper explanation becomes clear as the story unfolds: he has simply reached a breaking point and his diagnosis provides him with an excuse to assert himself after a lifetime of pathetic submission. These two explanations aren’t contradictory, however, because “being a man”—being proud, making his own way in the world, answering to no one, etc.—is intimately tied up with “providing for his family.” In fact, even after he has already made more money than his family could ever need and even after his wife has threatened him with divorce, a fellow criminal convinces him to stay in the game because “a man provides for his family.” After watching Breaking Bad and hearing Bryan Cranston’s continual evocations of “this family,” it is difficult for me to hear the word “family” without also hearing sinister overtones. Far from undermining sociopathy, then, family ties often prove to be the justification for sociopathic behavior."

Nedávno som opäť začal sledovať Breaking Bad, momentálne som kdesi v tretej sérii a uvažoval som, prečo som BB pred 4 rokmi počas druhej série vlastne prestal sledovať. Myslel som, že ma to nejak prestalo baviť, nakopili sa iné veci a moja pozornosť sa odpútala. Po prečítaní Kotskovej knihy a pri opätovnom pozeraní som asi presne identifikoval nielen presný moment, kde som BB prestal sledovať ale aj presný dôvod. Od začiatku som hlavného hrdinu bral ako kladnú postavu, stotožňoval som sa s jeho údelom, sympatizoval som s jeho konaním. Lenže to začalo byť čoraz ťažšie a zlomový moment prišiel v druhej sérií [SPOILER], keď Walter nepriamo zapríčinil smrť Jesseho priateľky a keď sa dusila vlastnými zvratkami, nepomohol jej, len sa prizeral. Ó, áno, mal slzy v očiach, ale jej smrť mu ušetrila zbytočné komplikácie. Pohodlné a napospol sociopatické. Podvedome mi to bolo nesmierne nepohodlné, ale miesto toho, aby som si plne uvedomil, čo jeho čin znamenal, som sám seba presvedčil, že už ma to až tak nebaví. Teraz, sledujúc seriál nanovo, som sa dokázal viac odosobniť a ešte aj pred prečítaním Kotskovej knihy sledoval dianie s klinickejším odstupom. A je to fascinujúce a mrazivé.

Quote for the day

"Many of the papers in the professional literature are never read, so if one wants to gain something even approximating to a rough version of agreed scientific knowledge from published sources one has first to know what to read and what not to read; this requires social contact with the expert community. Reading the professional literature is a long way from understanding a scientific dispute." 

--  Harry M. Collins & Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise [University of Chicago Press, 2007], p.22

Citát na dnes

"Farskou půdu tvořil pravidelný jehlan s čtvercovou podstavou nesený vazbou bytelných trámů. Hluboké podélné praskliny v trámech Hanse v dětství děsily možností, že se krov zhroutí. Pozdější zjištění, že vlastně každý trám je prasklý, se stalo základem jeho životního postoje, který si po vystřízlivění z touhy po dokonalosti formuloval asi tak, že když už musím být prasklý, měl bych být aspoň prasklý dobře."

-- Ján Balabán, Možná že odcházíme [Host: Brno, 2011], str. 19

Citát na dnes

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal Is Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference," to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 [London: Atlantic Books, 2011], str. 121

Báseň dňa

en face
le pire
jusqu'à ce
qu'il fasse rire


[facing / the worst / laugh / till you burst]

z cyklu mirlitonnades

-- Samuel Beckett, Selected Poems 1930-1989 [ed. David Wheatly; Faber & Faber, London], p.69

Citát dňa

"The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others grew to gigantic proportions, became a javelin lodged deep in his flesh and hurting terribly.
How proudly they had given him this room, how gratefully he had received it. How imprisoned, abandoned and wretched he had felt in it. The loneliness of loneliness."

-- Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key [London: Hesperus Press, 2010], str. 51

Citát dňa

"I am just a vandal without a concept!" -- graffiti na pánskom WC vo Vittule, Budapest.

Citát dňa

The first step, therefore, to higher quality comments is “be more niche.” Discourage your marginal readers with technical language, obscure references, and lengthy posts. Your marginal readers are not of high value anyway, and driving them away is an excellent way to improve the average comment of your inframarginal readers. -- Eli Dourado

Jedna veta

"The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking tape and packed for you special pans around the institutional room: the drop-ceiling, the gray striped mattress and bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other bunkbeds another matte gray that won't return light, the piles of books and compact disks and tapes and tennis gear; your disk of white light trembling like the moon on water as it plays over the identical bureaus, the recessions of closet and room's front door, door's frame's bolections; the cone of light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles of sleeping boys' shadows on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugs' ovals on the hardwood floor, black lines of baseboards' reglets, the cracks in the Venetian blinds that ooze the violet nonlight of a night with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight with your name in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the rheostats, CD, InterLace poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desks' TPs, the face in the floor, posters of pros, the onionskin yellow of the desklamps' shades, the ceiling-panels' patterns of pinholes, the grid of upper bunk's springs, recession of closet and door, boys wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creek's course in the eastward ceiling discernible now, maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didn't no never did see its eyes' pupils set sideways and tapered like a cat's its eyebrows' \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you've been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlight's beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what you'd felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you'd so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn't belong and was evil: Evil."

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest [New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1996], p. 62

"There are few opinions so absurd that you couldn't find at least one person with a PhD somewhere in the world to endorse them for you; [...]"

- Ben Goldacre, Bad Science [London: Fourth Estate, 2009], p. 97

Prepočuté na Pohode 2010

Ak poznáte Overheard in NY, je vám nasledovné asi jasné. Na pochôdzkach po trenčianskom letisku som minulý víkend okrem hudby započul aj všeličo iné. Tu je výber toho, čo som si aj stihol zaznamenať, než ma pamäť zradila.

[Podnapitá] slečna: ... lebo si kurva dlho nemala pivo!

Chlapík v dave naviguje niekoho cez mobil: ... ešte raz musíš dať ruku hore! [pauza] Zrušil ma, kokot.

Slečna: Akurát hrali slovenskú hymnu, keď som bola na záchode.

Mládenec: To si musela odolať nutkaniu postaviť sa.

V rade na sprchy: Jááj, ako dobre, že nie som žena!

Jeho kamarát: No, tá dievčina na konci sa dostane na rad v utorok maximálne.

Podnapitá opozdená puberta o nejakých hosteskách: To sú rite! Krásne rite! Jedna riťkovatejšia ako druhá!

Bystrý mládenec na koncerte Jany Kirschner: [znie časť "Stále ťa mám"] ... veď to je ako zvučka z Baywatchu!

Zmätený navigátor: No a zdvihnem ruku ... pozeraj sa naľavo ... nie tam ... jáj napravo.

Citát na dnes

And as to the faculties of the mind, [...] I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. [...] That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.

-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Citát dňa

"Last, having distributed credit where it is due, I must allocate some blame. The Duke University Press is solely responsible for any errors in spelling, punctuation, etc., which may occur in the book. I have never been any use at all as a proofreader, and the Press should have taken this fact into account in preparing the book for publication."

-- Gordon Tullock. [1966] 2005. The Organization of Inquiry, Preface and Acknowledgements.

Impenetrability indicates profundity

Nadpis je mi momentálne heslom týchto dní. Než ale aby som vás obťažoval svojimi taľafatkami, radšej sa podelím o dlhší citát ztamtiež odkiaľ je aj ono bystré pozorovanie:

The writing of many philosophers, especially but not uniquely in the so-called continental tradition, is full of hard-to-understand passages where difficulty is presented as pertaining not to expression but to content itself, as being not a rhetorical device but a direct and unavoidable aspect of sophisticated thinking.
[...]
Faced with an inordinately recondite statement, readers have the choice between a negative judgment: the author had no good reason to be obscure, and a positive explanation: the author wanted to convey a thought too deep for plain and simple expression. With a prior high confidence in the intellectual worth of the author, negative judgment is almost ruled out and depth can be inferred, even if no satisfactory interpretation of the statement in question is ever arrived at. Prior appreciation of an author justifies a positive construal of difficult passage. So far, so good. Things may go wrong if, in a viciously circular manner, this construal is taken as further justification for the appreciation.

- Dan Sperber, The Guru Effect

Citát na dnes

'I too was a republican in the frothy pride of my youth,' said Stephen [...] 'And had I been out of coats at the time, I should have joined you at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and those other interesting spots. As it was, I cheered the taking of the Bastille. But with age, I have come to think that after all a monarchy is best.'
'When you look about the world, and view the monarchs in it - I do not refer to your own, of course - can you really maintain that the hereditary king cuts a very shining figure?'
'I cannot. Nor is that the point: the person, unless he be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad, is of no importance. It is the living, moving, procreating, sometimes speaking symbol that counts.'
'But surely mere birth without any necessary merit is illogical?'
'Certainly, and that is its great merit. Man is deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. In good utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go crusading, nor does he build cathedrals; still less does he write verse. There are countless pieties without a name that find their focus in a crown. It is all well, I grant you, that the family should have worn it beyond the memory of man; for your recent creations do not answer - they are nothing in comparison of your priest-king, whose merit is irrelevant, whose place cannot be disputed, nor made the subject of a recurring vote.'

- Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War [London: HarperCollins 2003], 123-124.

Citát ako ilustrácia k téze: I [heart] O'Brian. A vôbec, čo čítate blogy, choďte čitať knihy.

represívny sentiment

Abortion defenders must pretend that it is a “tragic” but necessary evil; a redoubt of “choice,” just like any other choice; a sentimental necessity for the victim of rape or the mother whose life is in danger. In short, safe medical abortion, a fundamental social good in any sexually egalitarian society, an invention to be celebrated like the polio vaccine, must disguise itself as everything but what it is—the freedom from involuntary motherhood, owed to any woman young or old, to let her shape a life equal in freedom to those of men.

Same-sex marriage and the minimalist defense of abortion are both tactically sound for now. But the strain one begins to feel in public discussions is that people of good sense are being compromised by sentimental rhetoric originally adopted to convince bigots. Sentimentalization may be effective in a Hallmark regime, but it’s a bummer at home. Around the kitchen table, we ought to speak plainly. The goal of gay marriage, in the pro-marriage position, has to include indifference to marriage as an institution. Marriage must remain abstract—it hardly matters if anyone does it once the original blush is off and the initial rush abates. But the point of abortion rights, in the “pro-choice” position, should truly be abortions. Abortions need to occur concretely, readily, until the day contraception is magically universal and perfect; the idea that they’re inevitably tragic is just false.

Super. Celý článok tu.