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There are lots of stories about how philosophy begins. Some people claim it begins in wonder some people claim it begins in worry. I claim it begins in disappointment.

Simon Critchley

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Simon Critchley
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: February 27
Philosopher
University Teacher
Herts
Wonder
Stories
Claim
People
Disappointment
Lots
Begins
Claims
Philosophy
Worry

More quotes by Simon Critchley

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The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.
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The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
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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.
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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.
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That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.
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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.
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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.
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I think governments are quietly terrified. There's massive unemployment, a recession they don't know how to deal with, and the measures they've taken are not working yet, and maybe they're not going to work. There's a prospect of significant social disorder.
Simon Critchley
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Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
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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.
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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
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Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
Simon Critchley
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Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.
Simon Critchley
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It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.
Simon Critchley
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Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and also by nonhuman beings.
Simon Critchley
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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
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So yes, I'm trying to think about the connections between politics and poetry. There's an awful lot you could say here.Poetics is a form of poesis, a form of production-construction, but there might be ways of conceiving of that in a much more interesting manner. That's what I'm thinking about at the moment.
Simon Critchley
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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
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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
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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