Taste – Truth
TASTE
De gustibus… but there has to be arguing about taste. For one thing because every discussion comes under that head, and dispute is the stuff of life. The only reason why a man develops his personality and makes the most of his gifts is that he wants to defend his personal ideas and impose them on others. That there is is no ‘comparing’ tastes is undeniable. However, they are not incommunicable – quite the contrary. And perhaps the seemingly most futile disputes about them are based on a deep sense of the mutability of taste, the fragility of personalities and their changefulness. And on the possibility of exchanges. [Paul Valéry]
In Western Culture, where it remains marginal, the dandy attitude has the character of an exaggeration. In one form, the older one, the aesthete is a wilful exclusionist of taste, holding attitudes that make it possible to like, to be comfortable with, to give one’s assent to the smallest number of things, reducing things to the smallest expression of them. (When taste distributes its pluses and minuses, it favours diminutive adjectives, such as – for praise – happy, amusing, charming, agreeable, suitable). Elegance equals the largest amount of refusal. As language, this attitude finds its consummate expression in the rueful quip, the disdainful one-liner. In the other form, the aesthete sustains standards that make it possible to be pleased with the largest number of things; annexing new, unconventional, even illicit sources of pleasure. The literary device that best projects this attitude is the list – the whimsical aesthete polyphony that juxtaposes things and experiences of a starkly different, often incongruous nature, turning them all, by this technique, into artefacts, aesthetic objects. Here elegance equals the wittiest acceptances. The aesthete’s posture alternates between never being satisfied and always finding a way of being satisfied, being pleased with virtually everything. [Susan Sontag]
Exuberance is better than taste. [Gustave Flaubert]
[Wordsworth felt only contempt for those] who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac, or sherry.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argue about – you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]
I have insufficient leisure to have taste as well [?]
TECHNOLOGY
People should be ashamed to use the wonders of science and technology if they don’t know any more about it than a cow knows about the botany of the grass it relishes in eating. [Albert Einstein]
For it is inherent to technology… that it should go wild. [David E. Cooper]
As often happens with innovations, irrelevant aspects of associated fields carried over; actors would stand behind the microphone in full costume (in England announcers wore full evening dress). Years later there would be a spate of shows featuring ventriloquists. [David Revill on early radio]
We do not understand the wireless, the gramophone or the electric light bulb any more than the first man understood sunrise, shooting stars, rainbows or lightning… we have entrusted a body of engineer-preachers with the mission of exploring and interpreting these secrets, and we trust them even though they are not (and cannot be) accountable to anyone. [Pierre Bost]
I have my own nomination for an “idea that, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity”: Banning technological progress in the name of humility. [Ronald Bailey]
New technologies… tend to be initially applied in the most obvious and literal ways. [John Walker]
You know what your trouble is?… You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. [William Gibson]
The street tends to find its own uses for technology. [William Gibson]
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. [Carl Sagan]
A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind. [Henry Ward Beecher]
Yet it seems to me an intellectual accomplishment of the most awe-inspiring sort that in the few centuries since Galileo invented the telescope we learned so much about the planets merely by studying their faint shimmering light reaching us across the vastness of space. And it is a technological marvel of the space age that we now study pieces of the Moon in our laboratories or direct our remote-controlled robots sitting on ground millions of miles away to hammer at a Martian rock. [Clark R. Chapman]
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. [William S. Burroughs]
Men have become the tools of their tools. [Henry David Thoreau]
There’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the mind that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them. [C. L. Moore]
Man’s nature is ‘good,’ for he is forgetful, idle, credulous, and superficial.
All these epithets designate the various aptitudes of our ’souls’ for letting their impressions and even their powers run to waste.
Fortunate facilities! We humans would be a truly fearsome race were we endowed with an infallible memory, activity always on the stretch, perpetual presence of mind, and a critical acumen always up in arms.
But surely a terrible future is in store, since all the malignant ‘virtues’ named above, which make life hard on life, will soon be magnified and dominate the world increasingly – but not under a human form. The machine, with its demands, will subject even the most light-hearted, most elusive, to its disciplines. It records and it foresees; it regulates and hardens. And it steps up inordinately the powers of self-preservation and prevision inherent in all living beings, whose irregular duration, uncertain memories, vague futures, unpredictable tomorrows it tends to alter, transposing them into a sort of never-changing present, like the steady performance of a motor that has reached its normal speed. [Paul Valéry]
… the amazing technological developments which make all prediction impossible in all fields are bound to exert an increasing effect on the destinies of Art, by creating unheard-of new methods of employing the sensibility. Already the inventions of photography and cinematography are transforming our notion of the plastic arts. It is by no means impossible that the extremely minute analysis of sensations which certain means of observation or recording (such as the cathode-ray oscilloscope) seem to foreshadow, will lead to methods of playing on the senses compared to which even music, even electronic music, will seem mechanically complicated and obsolete in its aims. The most astonishing relations will perhaps be established between the ‘photon’ and the ‘nerve cell.’
Yet certain indications may justify the fear that the increase in intensity and precision, and the state of permanent disorder engendered in man’s thoughts and perceptions by the stupendous novelties that have transformed his life, may gradually dull his sensibility and make his intelligence less supple than it was. [Paul Valéry]
When I was in Detroit recently, I was told by a guy in the UAW about GM’s all-new automated plant, which had to be shut down and abandoned because the robots, probably thinking about the Dance of Death in the Middle Ages, have suddenly mutinied and gone to frenzy. In this plant, the robots in the painting division have forgotten all about the cars and compulsively paint themselves over and over; in the welding division, the robots are caught up in a frenzy welding themselves and each other; and on the assembly lines, all the robotic machines have begun ripping the doors off all the passing cars. Not an equivalence any longer between automation and rationalisation, but postmodern corporations now as Bataillean scenes of cancellation, catastrophe and exterminism.
It’s the very same in the paper mill towns of Canada. In my hometown – Red Rock, a pulp and paper mill town on the northern shore of Lake Superior – I was told recently by my brother, a machinist, about how, when the paper machines were attached to computers for programming, suddenly and unpredictably the computers, probably under the influence of French poststructuralists, would order the paper machines to speed up to hyper-acceleration, to that ecstatic point of collapse and immolation where the machines would suddenly go flatline and spiral massive twenty-ton rolls of paper hundreds of feet in the air. [Arthur Kroker]
The only negativity in communication or information is constituted in accidents, breakdowns, defaults, noise, fading, parasites, jamming, terrorism, catastrophe and viruses. And this negativity is neither logical, nor historical, but heterogeneous and aleatory. [Jean Baudrillard]
Technology, when misused, poisons air, soil, water and lives. But a world without technology would be prey to something worse: the impersonal ruthlessness of the natural order, in which the health of a species depends on relentless sacrifice of the weak. [Freeman J. Dyson]
If it works, it’s out of date. [Stafford Beer]
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. [Marshall McLuhan]
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Arthur C.Clarke]
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. [J.G. Ballard]
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. [J.B.S. Haldane]
Why are so many people annoyed at the thought that human brains are nothing more than ‘mere machines’? It seems to me that we have a problem with the word ‘machine,’ because we’ve grown up to believe that machines can behave only in lifeless, mechanical ways. This view is obsolete, because the ways we use the word ‘machine’ are out of date. For centuries words like ‘machine’ and ‘mechanical’ were used for describing relatively simple devices like pulleys, levers, locomotives, and typewriters. The word ‘computer’ too inherits from the past that sense of pettiness that comes from doing dull arithmetic by many small and boring steps. Because of this, our previous experience can sometimes be a handicap. Our preconceptions of what machines can do date from what happened when we assembled systems from only a few hundreds or thousands of parts. And that did not prepare us to think about brainlike assemblies of billions of parts. Although we are already building machines with many millions of parts, we continue to think as though nothing has changed. We must learn to change how we think about phenomena that work on those larger scales. [Marvin Minsky]
Collaboration with machines! What is the difference between manipulation of the machine and collaboration with it? I have sometimes experienced a state of dynamic tension rising in me out of what would seem to be a state of mutual responsiveness between the machine and myself. Such a state could require hours of concentrated preparatory exploration, coaxing of machines, connecting, so to say, one’s own sensibilities, one’s own nerve endings to the totality of the tuned-up controls. And, suddenly, a window would open into a vast field of possibilities; the time limits would vanish, and the machines would seem to become humanized components of the interactive network now consisting of oneself and the machine, still obedient but full of suggestions to the master controls of the imagination. Everything seemed possible; one leaned on the horizon and pushed it away and forward until utter exhaustion would set in and, one by one, the nerve endings ceased to connect, the possibilities contracted, and an automatic reversal to routine solutions was a sure danger signal to quit. An affectionate pat on a control here and there was not to be resisted. Switches and lights off! If there is an unfinished bit of conversation between you and the machine, either take note of all the controls or leave them until tomorrow. Recapturing the exact circumstances of such periods as just described is not easy. Tomorrow it may seem all cold steel, copper and coloured plastic. The coaxing may have to start all over again. [Vladimir Ussachevsky]
What should we expect of these arts? Shouldn’t we expect dance today to concern itself with movement in all its forms, including the kinetic quality of football or stock-car races? Music to explore the psycho-physiological potentials of sound, the peculiar rhetoric of machines, the anxieties produced by low-frequency vibrations in sync with one’s own nervous system? Poetry to fulfil Stein’s semantic implications to reawaken the sound and sight of a word and their relation to its meaning, to gloriously destroy the context, adjectival, and syntactical inhibitions that make all poetry verbiage? And theatre (!) we might expect to become a catholic, experimental aesthetic extended to functional existence. Here the psychedelic experience is an example, but ultimately, because of its artificiality, a crutch. More, the obligation – the morality, if you wish – of all the arts today is to intensify, to alter, perceptual awareness and, hence, consciousness. Awareness and consciousness of what? Of the real material world. Of all the things we see and hear and taste and touch. [Joe Byrd]
As Aaron Scharf has shown (in Art and Photography), underlying the extraordinary flowering of aesthetic diversity among the visual arts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a newnesss of vision, of ways of seeing the world, which has a great deal to do with the discoveries of photography. Not so much in the trivial sense of the camera’s becoming the artist’s sketchbook, as in it extending the artist’s range and scale of vision beyond the ordinary limits of unaided human discrimination. The scientific vision of Eadward Muybridge’s pioneering photographic images of human beings and animals in motion has provided artists from the time of Degas and Rodin to Francis Bacon today with an inspirational store of templates from nature of an accuracy and momentary precision inaccessible to the unaided eye. Often it is the immediacy of the image which is its most poetic feature: at the same time instantaneous and dynamic, balanced and unbalanced, suspended and in transition. In addition to discriminating in time, the camera can also respond to nuances of tone beneath the threshold of ordinary sight. It was thanks to Daguerre’s remarkable invention that Turner was able to see the image of the sky over Paris as a visible substance modulated in light, and which stimulated him to make the quantum leap from being an eighteenth-century painter of new classic landscapes to becoming a transcendental visionary proclaiming the elemental forces of wind and sky.
Technology extends human perceptions, and to communicate the idea of extended perception is frequently as important, and sometimes more important, than the representation of a recognisable object in the field of vision. As Klee said, art does not render the visible, rather it makes visible. Technology reveals new images which are not only exciting in themselves but as intuitions of new perceptual powers. Both Kandinsky’s early watercolour improvisations and Malevich’s suprematist drawings not only convey images of changed perspectives – in the former case, of the world as seen through a microscope, in the latter as seen by aerial photography – but in addition, these almost disarmingly casual, even accidental images are charged with a feeling of a profoundly and permanently altered consciousness. Instead of holding up a mirror to nature, the new art fashions a lens through which nature can be viewed from radially different perspectives.
In a similar way, the miniature compositions produced around 1910 by Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ravel and others also suggest a radical shift of aural perception provoked by acoustic recording…
It was an intuition transcending the limitations of the medium, and yet conditioned by them. In the early years of the twentieth century, phonograph recording was one of the wonders of the age. The sound was typically feeble, noisy and short-lived: even so, it inspired a music of economy of gesture and refined intimacy of expression. The substantial emotional charge, however, lay elsewhere, in the idea that this most ephemeral experience of human expression could be stored and reproduced exactly and at any desired time. That simple idea had enormous implications for the direction of musical development, and for classico-romantic symphonic values. Suddenly formal criteria long regarded as absolute, such as repetition and recapitulation, question and answer, and the logical continuity of first-movement form, could be seen as symptomatic of all-too-human limitations of aural perception and recall.
Recording sowed the idea of a renewed intimacy and subtlety of expression. Repeated hearings of a recording implied a concentration of utterance which no longer needed repeats at crucial intervals, or to unfold in a logical way at the pace of the slowest member of the audience. It both made a virtue of economy and, through published examples of the voices of famous celebrities and ’sound pictures’ combining music and naturalistic sound effects, inspired new artistic freedoms to imitate the atonal melodic cadence of natural speech, and to combine music and noise as equal elements in a new form of aural art. [Robin Maconie]
TELEVISION
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of colour. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! – that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms – nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? [Joyce Carol Oates]
TV is chewing gum for the eyes. [Frank Lloyd Wright]
You have debased [my] child… You have made him a laughing-stock of intelligence… a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere. [Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube, to the National Association of Broadcasters]
I can’t even recall seeing an accurate and comprehensible description on television of how television works. [Carl Sagan]
Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want. [Clive Barnes]
… if television is a medium, it is not, mainly, one in the form of a (possibly bad) communications conduit between the elite and the masses, not a one-way line for sending (control) messages from point A to B. If TV has become or is a medium, it is so in the form of an adhesive, a binding agent that holds a culture together… what ‘we’ are as a culture is not just put across or communicated on the TV, but that we are in part produced by it. In other words, TV is a basic dimension of what and ‘who’ we are, a basic aspect of our identity. It embodies, shapes, constitutes, and transmits (‘postmodern’) cultural values, and becomes one of the glues that bind a culture together… As an adhesive, though, television is not about something outside of itself; what television is about is transmission and reception, but what this process of transmission is or is about is ‘itself’ (which can never sever itself from the untelevised)…
Traditional metaphysical viewings, which present TV as a network of nothing more than appearances – which present TV as not real – generate hierarchically organized discourse, which are hazardous because they reduce television to the status of mere image, a tin echo of the True Form of Being (‘Plato commented to reporters today in Athens’), a deviation from a Reality that is rendered fundamental. The first danger here is the reliance on a conception of reality as self-identical, self-present, and ultimately self-evident. The second danger – the danger that follows an affirmation of this privileged Reality – is the refusal to recognize television’s productive capacities. That is, the danger is in underestimating the powerful way in which the televised informs and contributes to the untelevised (to what the untelevised is). Of course there is a ‘reality’, but television is certainly a significant and determinative part of what it is these days: TV makes and does not just reflect reality (and the material of its production is no more false than any other aspect of this culture). At the moment of truth, the traditional metaphysical viewing of television will necessarily miss the power of this point, and will thus miss the power of television (reducing it, possibly, to laziness, ignorance, or even stupidity on the part of the viewers).
But an equally hazardous viewing is the committedly nihilistic, polar mate to the traditional one; this is the sort sketched out by Baudrillard. Here, all distinctions vanish into the tube, and television ‘is’ reality, or equivalent to reality, since equivalencies, commutations, and simulacra are all that is left on this planet, according to the axioms of this discourse. This species of postmodernism – which translates some astute sociological observations into outlandish philosophical claims – is dangerous primarily because a lot of people are taking it seriously, buying into this conflation of differences. It might be easy and perhaps appropriately cynical to say that there is no danger in this diversion, since it is only harmless intellectuals and academics who pay this mode any mind. However, this theory is reactionary all the way around; if it fits just a bit too comfortably into the milieu it seeks to describe or even criticize; if only harmless intellectuals engage in the discourse of ‘hyperreality’, this engagement renders them harmless, glued, as they may be, to the tube. [Barry Seitz]
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, be able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. [E.B. White]
… a sequence of tenuously linked exclamation points. [Todd Gitlin]
I think it’s terribly important to watch TV. I think there’s a sort of minimum number of hours of TV you ought to watch every day, and unless you’re watching 3 or 4 hours a day you’re just closing your eyes to… creation of reality that TV achieves. [J.G. Ballard]
Its TV that you walk around in. [William Kowinski on the shopping mall]
Television has reduced our political culture to a succession of gestures, postures, automatic faces… Our candidates will continue to flash by between commercials, seeming to inhabit no real space, offering nothing but a short performance; and so we’ll watch as we watch everything, not bothering to participate, because participation won’t be needed. The show, we’ll figure numbly, must go on. [Mark Crispin Miller]
… the media can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous, absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it. They have no choice. They’re hamstrung by their own needs, to the extent they’re like a puppet in the face of such events. [Mark Pauline]
From its cultural beginnings in the late 1940s, television has been accused more often – and from more ideological perspectives – of causing cultural and political decadence than has any other communications medium. Whatever it broadcasts is apt to be interpreted as antithetical to high culture. It appears to be a sort of anti-classical apparatus for automatic barbarization. [Patrick Brantlinger]
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. [Jean Baudrillard]
In the twenty-first century, whoever controls the screen controls consciousness, information and thought. [Timothy Leary]
THEORY
A theory that seems to explain everything really explains nothing. [Karl Popper]
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong. [Saul Kripke]
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. [Konrad Lorenz]
… faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof. [J.K. Galbraith]
Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete. [Isaac Asimov]
Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. [Claude Bernard]
Many confuse hypothesis and theory. An hypothesis is a possible explanation; a theory, the correct one. [Martin H. Fischer]
It is the nature of an hypothesis when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment, and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read or understand. [Laurence Sterne]
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it; i.e., that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it. This demand seems odd because it is useless simply to look at something. Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorize every time we look carefully at the world. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
If you spend any time spinning hypotheses, checking to see whether they make sense, whether they conform to what else we know, thinking of tests you can pose to substantiate or deflate your hypotheses, you will find yourself doing science. And as you come to practice this habit of thought more and more you will get better and better at it. To penetrate into the heart of the thing — even a
little thing, a blade of grass, as Walt Whitman said – is to experience a kind of exhilaration that, it may be, only human beings of all the beings on this planet can feel. We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. [Carl Sagan]
The Requisites of a good Hypothesis are: That it be Intelligible. That it neither Assume nor Suppose anything Impossible, unintelligible, or demonstrably False. That it be consistent with itself. That it be fit and sufficient to Explicate the Phaenomena, especially the chief. That it be, at least, consistent with the rest of the Phaenomena it particularly relates to, and…not contradict any other known Phaenomena of nature… [Robert Boyle]
Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough. [Claude Bernard]
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. [Stephen Jay Gould]
No matter how compelling or elegant it is, a theory of physics must be subjected to experimental verification or it differs little from medieval theology. [Sheldon L. Glashow]
A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant. [Manfred Eigen]
A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did the work. [Harlow Shapley]
The fact that theories are not subject to absolute and final proof has led to a serious vulgar misapprehension. Theory is contrasted with fact as if the two had no relationship or were antitheses: “Evolution is only a theory, not a fact.” Of course, theories are not facts. They are generalizations
about facts and explanations of facts, based on and tested by facts. As such they may be just as certain – merit just as much confidence – as what are popularly termed “facts.” Belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is the confident application of a generalization. The theory that life has evolved is founded on much more evidence than supports the generalization that the sun rises every day. In
the vernacular, we are justified in calling both “facts. [George Gaylord Simpson]
Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. [Isaac Asimov]
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. [Richard Feynman]
Sometimes [the word theory] is used for a hypothesis, sometimes for a confirmed hypothesis; sometimes for a train of thought; sometimes for a wild guess at some fact, or for a reasoned claim of what some fact is – or even for a philosophical speculation. [John O. Wisdom]
There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed. [A.J. Ayer]
I value one experiment higher than a thousand opinions born of the imagination. [Mikhail Lomonosov]
Human beings are organisms capable of manipulating internal representations of the world by means of concrete operations and can transcend the bounds of their biologically given perceptions. They can liberate themselves and construct a view of reality that conflicts with intuition, yet gives a true, more encompassing view. [Max Delbrück]
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. [Karl Popper]
Theorists almost always become too fond of their own ideas, often simply by living with them too long. It is difficult to believe that one’s cherished theory, which really works rather nicely in some respects, may be completely false. [Francis Crick]
If all you have are observations, that’s botany. If all you have is theory, that’s philosophy. [Michael S. Turner]
A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience.… A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science. [Francisco J. Ayala]
A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street. [David Hilbert]
We must avoid here two complementary errors: on the one hand that the world has a unique, intrinsic, pre-existing structure awaiting our grasp; and on the other hand that the world is in utter chaos. The first error is that of the student who marvelled at how the astronomers could find out the true names of the distant constellations. The second error is that of Lewis Carroll’s Walrus who grouped shoes with ships and sealing wax, and cabbages with kings… [Reuben Abel]
Our theories are very esoteric – necessarily so, because we are forced to develop these theories using a language, the language of mathematics, that has not become part of the general equipment of the educated public. Physicists generally do not like the fact that our theories arc so esoteric. On the other hand, I have occasionally heard artists talk proudly about their work being accessible only to a
band of cognoscenti and justify this attitude by quoting the example of physical theories like general relativity that also can be understood only by initiates. Artists like physicists may not always be able to make themselves understood by the general public, but esotericism for its own sake is just silly. [Steven Weinberg]
… a comment on the word “theory,” which lends itself to popular misconceptions. “That’s your theory” is a popular sneer. Or “That’s only a theory.” Our fault for sloppy use. The quantum theory and the Newtonian theory are well-established, well-verified components of our world view. They are not in doubt. It’s a matter of derivation. Once upon a time it was Newton’s (as yet unverified) “theory.” Then it was verified, but the name stuck. “Newton’s theory” it will always be. On the other hand, superstrings and GUTs are speculative efforts to extend current understanding, building on what we know. [Leon Lederman]
Men who are capable of modifying their first beliefs are very rare. This ability was one of the reasons for the success of Claude Bernard and Pasteur. Out of a very vivid imagination they forged new hypotheses all the time but abandoned them with equal ease as soon as experience contradicted them. [Adolf von Baeyer]
If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an “oomph,” this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the centre. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, “Well, that is the funny behaviour of the oomph. [Richard Feynman]
The everyday usage of “theory” is for an idea whose outcome is as yet undetermined, a conjecture, or for an idea contrary to evidence. But scientists use the word in exactly the opposite sense. [In science] “theory”… refers only to a collection of hypotheses and predictions that is amenable to experimental test, preferably one that has been successfully tested. It has everything to do with the facts. [George Sudarshan]
No theory, however attractive, merits scientific consideration unless it sticks out its neck sufficiently to be disproved by experiment or observation. [Hermann Bondi]
Working with theories is not like skeet shooting, where theories are lofted up and bang, they are shot down with a falsification bullet, and that’s the end of that theory. Theories are more like graduate students – once admitted you try hard to avoid flunking them out, it being much better for them and for the world if they can become long-term contributors to society. [A. Newell]
Accidental discoveries of which popular histories of science make mention never happen except to those who have previously devoted a great deal of thought to the matter. Observation unilluminated by theoretic reason is sterile… Wisdom does not come to those who gape at nature with an empty head. Fruitful observation depends not as Bacon thought upon the absence of bias or anticipatory ideas, but rather on a logical multiplication of them so that having many possibilities in mind we are better prepared to direct our attention to what others have never thought of as within the field of possibility. [Morris Cohen]
The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it grows more and more dear to him… There springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory… [T.C. Chamberlin]
The man who is content to make records or to collect skins and eggs will, unless he spends years of his life in a systematic analysis of his own and others’ facts, not get anything from his labours — save the very real pleasure of making the observations. But he who takes the trouble to think out new problems and new lines of attack upon the old will have the same pleasure, and in addition the joy of intellectual discovery. [Julian Huxley]
It has often been said that, to make discoveries, one must be ignorant. This opinion, mistaken in itself, nevertheless conceals a truth. It means that it is better to know nothing than to keep in mind fi xed ideas based on theories whose
confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them. [Claude Bernard]
THERAPY
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. [Sigmund Freud]
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offences committed against them. [Thomas Szasz]
Any man who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined. [Samuel Goldwyn]
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution. [G.K. Chesterton]
… the aim of most psychoanalysis is as conservative as it ever was. It is to help the identified patient or patients to gain the ability to achieve and maintain a ‘right’ relationship with a partner. From this achievement a sense of well-being is expected to emerge… This ego-centred psychology is essentially adaptive, providing the means by which an individual may learn to make peace with society through the process of learning to relate peaceably with another human being. If one’s essential personality does not quite conform to the requirements of the society in which he lives, then the prescription has often been that he go through a ‘reconstructive analysis’ or, if time is too short, a ‘behaviour modification.’ The troubled psyche is treated as a maladjusted organism that needs to be persuaded or shocked into a normality acceptable to the world. [June Singer]
Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the analysts already know what’s in it – they should, because they put it all in beforehand. [Saul Bellow]
… a reorganisation of the universe of the patient in terms of psychoanalytic interpretations. [Claude Lévi-Strauss]
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification…
The decision to seek medical consultation is a request for interpretation… Patient and doctor together reconstruct the meaning of events in a shared mythopoesis… Once things fall in place; once experience and interpretation appear to coincide; once the patient has a coherent ‘explanation’ which leaves him no longer feeling the victim of the inexplicable and the uncontrollable the symptoms are, usually, exorcized. [Leon Eisenberg]
[Flaubert] once wrote a remarkable sentence: ‘You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths’ – les memes profondeurs terribles et ennuyeuses. What could be a better formula for the whole world of psychoanalysis, in which one makes terrifying discoveries yet which always come to the same thing. [Jean-Paul Sartre]
Pains and disease of the mind are cured only by forgetfulness – reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again. [Erasmus Darwin]
THOUGHT
But thoughts come not when we want them, but when they want to. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
I have made myself acquainted with the actual data of a theoretical or practical affair; now after a few days, without my having thought of it again, the result as to how the matter stands or what is to be done about it will often occur to me quite automatically and be clear in my mind. Here the operation whereby this was brought about remains just as hidden from me as does that of a calculating machine; it has been simply an unconscious rumination. In the same way, when I have recently written something on a subject, but have then dismissed the matter from my mind, an additional note sometimes occurs to me when I ma not thinking about it at all. In like manner, I can for days search in my memory for a name that has escaped me; and then when I am not thinking about it at all, it suddenly occurs to me, as though it had been whispered in my ear. In fact, our best, most terse, and most profound thoughts suddenly occur in consciousness like an inspiration and often at once in the form of a striking and significant sentence. But they are obviously the results of long and unconscious meditation and of countless apercus that often lie in the distant past and are individually forgotten. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
When people cease to complain, they cease to think. [Napoleon]
No one thinks unless a complex makes him. [W.H. Auden]
We only think when we are prevented from feeling or acting as we should like. Perfect satisfaction would be complete unconsciousness. Most people, however, fit into society too neatly for the stimulus to arise except in a crisis such as falling in love or losing their money. [W.H. Auden]
Clear thinking often leads to doing nothing. [Paul Valéry]
The thinking mind is brutal. [Paul Valéry]
Two kinds of mind: those that settles in wounds and those that settle in houses. [Elias Canetti]
Perhaps we are incapable of rationality. Perhaps all thought is a set of impulses generated by one emotion, monitored by another, ratified by a third. [Jack Vance]
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. [Albert Camus]
Teach thy tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ and thou shalt progress. [Moses Maimonides]
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were Lord of the Universe. [Bertrand Russell]
No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. [John Stuart Mill]
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. [Peter Medawar]
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. [Aristotle]
‘Thinkers’ are people who re-think; who think that what was thought before was never thought enough.
They hark back to a problem or a phrase – return to it again and again, almost in the way a man returns to his office or to his favourite bar. This compulsion to find every solution unsatisfactory is very human and there are men whose lives and happiness are bound up with it.
And so these men have instinctively created all the insoluble questions, questions for ‘thinkers’ only… [Paul Valéry]
Some people take no mental exercise except jumping to conclusions. [Geoffrey Madan]
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. [Aldous Huxley]
Have the courage to say: “I do not know. [Louis Agassiz]
There is not, and never has been, a human being who was capable of thinking straight, except by checking his thoughts against objective experience. [Fred Hoyle]
Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
Thinking for its own sake, as in music! When I have no special problem to occupy my mind, I love to reconstruct proofs of mathematical and physical theorems that have long been known to me. There is no goal in this, merely an opportunity to indulge in the pleasant occupation of thinking. [Albert Einstein]
I am going to have a sign put up all over my plant, reading ‘There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.’ [Thomas Edison]
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. [E.M. Cioran]
Everything clever has been thought of before. We must try to think again. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. [Eric Hoffer]
Part of thinking is its cruelty, aside from its contents. It is the process itself that is cruel, the process of detachment from everything else, the ripping, the wrenching, the sharpness of cutting. [Elias Canetti]
Thinking is sometimes easy, often difficult but at the same time thrilling. But when it’s most important it’s just disagreeable, that is when it threatens to rob one of one’s pet notions & to leave one all bewildered & with a feeling of worthlessness. In these cases I & others shrink from thinking or can only get ourselves to think after a long sort of struggle. I believe that you too know of this situation & I wish you lots of courage! though I haven’t got it myself. We are all sick people. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
To think? To think means… losing the thread. [Paul Valéry]
We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens. To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it I think. To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement. [Georg Lichtenberg]
The material existence of the thinker, when not assured by a private income, is one long series of social subterfuges, stratagems, unclear situations, dallyings with the task of earning a living, professions partially pursued and grudgingly endured. [Paul Valéry]
One must make two parts in one’s life: live like a bourgeois and think like a God. The satisfactions of the body and of the mind have nothing in common. [Gustave Flaubert]
My desire was for life as simple, and for thought as complex, as possible. [Paul Valéry]
A man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote enquiries. [Samuel Johnson]
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission. Your own mind has the power to transmute every external phenomenon to its own purposes. [Arnold Bennett]
TRANSSEXUALITY
I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a girl…
… my inner uncertainty could be represented in swirls and clouds of colour, a haze inside me. I did not know exactly where it was – in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my blood. Nor did I know whether to be ashamed of it, proud of it, grateful for it, resentful. Sometimes I thought I would be happier without it, sometimes I felt it must be essential to my being…
I have tried to analyse my own childish emotion, and to discover what I meant, when I declared myself to be a girl in a boy’s body. What was my reasoning? Where was my evidence? Did I simply think that I should behave like a girl? Did I think people should treat me as one? Had I decided that I would rather grow up to be a woman than a man?…
As I grew older, my conflict became more explicit to me, and I began to feel that I was living a falsehood. I was in masquerade, my female reality, which I had no words to define, clothed in a male pretence… I felt that in wishing so fervently, and so ceaselessly, to be transplanted into a girl’s body, I was aiming only at a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation…
I increasingly felt myself an imposter among my friends, and winced, silently but in pain, when people in their ignorant kindness expected me to be as the others… I wondered sometimes if it were all a punishment. Could I perhaps have done something fearful in a previous incarnation, to be condemned in this way? Or would I be compensated in an existence to come, by rebirth as Sonja Henie or Deanna Durbin?
It has occurred to me that perhaps mine was a perfectly normal condition, and that evry boy wished to become a girl. It seemed a logical enough aspiration if Woman was so elevated and admirable a being…
Some of the nameless craving that haunted me still was a desire for an earthier involvement in life. I felt that the grand constants of the human cycle, birth to death, were somehow shut off from me, so that I had no part in them, and could look at them only from a distance, or through glass. The lives of other people seemed more real because they were closer to those great fundamentals, and formed a homely entity with them…
How could I be sure of my predicament? If I thought I felt like a woman, how could I know what a woman felt?
… no true transsexual had yet been persuaded, bullied, drugged, analysed, shamed, ridiculed or electrically shocked into an acceptance of his physique…
Perhaps I depended upon that very clash between sex and gender, so that to tamper with it would be gambling with my very personality? Perhaps it was a condition of my gifts? Perhaps… to change myself would be to abort the truth…
Each year my longing to live as a woman grew more urgent, as my male body seemed to grow harder around me. It was like being encased in some preserving substance, another layer added each birthday…
I did not know what best to do, I was tormented by an ever increasing sense of isolation from the world and from myself, and I was plunged into periods of despair. Now for the first time, perhaps, my anxieties developed into a trace of paranoia. I loathed not merely the notion of my maleness, and the evidence of my manhood. I resented my very connection with the male sex, and hated to be thought… a member of it. Since I still looked to all appearances very much a man, this meant that all day long I was jarred by reminders of my condition…
… there are aspects of being a woman that I shall never experience – girlhood, menstruation, childbirth, an unequivocal female sexualness. [Jan Morris]
I’d have opened a knitting shop in Carlisle and been a part of life. {Quentin Crisp, if he had been born a woman]
I think the most graphic way I can describe how I felt wrong as a man was that every morning when I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a stranger. I got a shock that the kind of body which reflected itself back at me was not conforming to my inner concept of myself. [‘Dora’]
If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Julliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. [Frederik Pohl in the story Day Million set in the far future]
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.
I am not the first to link Frankenstein’s monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” in which she characterises transsexuals as the agents of a “necrophiliac invasion” of female space. Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative influence, is less direct when she says that “the problem opof transsexuality would be best served by morally mandating it out of existence,” but in this statement she nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein’s feelings toward the monster: “Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach me with your creation.” It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that Frankenstein’s monster is his own dark, romantic double, the aline Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave”. Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem?
The attribution of monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic of most lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality, displaying in unnerving detail the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with transgenderism. Because transsexuality more than any other transgender practice or identity represents the prospect of destabilising the foundational presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends, people who have invested their aspirations for social justice in identitarian movements say things about us out of sheer panic that ,if said of other minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags…
I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words “dyke”, “fag”, “queer”, “slut” and “whore” have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue sexual pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like “creature”, “monster” , and “unnatural” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered, By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it”, being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities. “Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn”. It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. [Susan Stryker]
The same is of course true of transsexuality; its elevation to the status of universal signifier (“we are all transsexuals”) subverts established distinctions between male and female, normal and deviant, real and fake, but at the risk of homogenising differences that matter politically: the differences between women and men, the difference between those who occasionally play with the trope of transsexuality and those others for whom it is a matter of life and death.” [Rita Felski]
Every time I tell someone I am transsexual, I have a turbulent series of emotions. At first, I am afraid that whomever I’m telling will have a negative response, that they will somehow be repelled and become hostile or in some way reject me… But then, if I’ve been given a positive response, I being to spill it all with myopic enthusiasm, answering every question, which always encourages another. People are naturally curious, and some have a real need to know. By revealing myself, I have consensually invited their voyeurism; they can’t help but watch as I make a spectacle of myself… In the end, when I have spilled my buts or exhausted their interest, I begin to retreat a little. A greyness falls over me, and I realise that I feel unsafe. I feel naked. Self-doubt starts to poke holes in my ego, and I begin to think I have exploited myself: I am ashamed of my exhibitionism. I promose myself not to tell anyone ever again. [Loren Cameron]
TRAVEL
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it. [Thomas Beecham]
I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. [Paul Theroux]
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. [Paul Theroux]
TRUTH
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it. [Louis Agassiz]
Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth. [John Milton]
It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard. [Georg Lichtenberg]
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. [John Locke]
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. [Allan Bloom]
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. [Edmund Way Teale]
New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths. [George Bernard Shaw]
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. [Isaiah Berlin]
The exact opposite of what is generally believed is often the truth. [Jean De La Bruyere]
The truth to a scientist is not the vague metaphysical concept about which philosophers talk and write so much and know so little. To him truth is that body of statements and conclusions about any set of features and phenomena in nature which represent most accurately all the best observations he can make and which conform most closely to all findings in adjacent or related phases and fields of investigations. He may and does often wonder what the so-called ultimate truth may be, but he does not worry about it. He knows that a priori pure thinking will never reveal it so far as knowledge of the physical universe is concerned, and that observation and deduction alone in the manner of science will ever do it. [Oliver Justin Lee]
Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so. [J.B.S. Haldane]
We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. [Henri Poincaré]
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. [Leo Tolstoy]
Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers. [John Churton Collins]
The greatest and noblest pleasure we have in this world is to discover new truths, and the next is to shake off old prejudices… A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society. [Frederick the Great]
The truth can be a terrible thing, sometimes too terrible to live with. [Gitta Sereny]
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond. [Hegel]
Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth. [Benjamin Disraeli]
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. [H. L. Mencken]
It is usually a good strategy to ask whether a general claim about truth or meaning applies to itself. [Thomas Nagel]
