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

Simon Critchley

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Simon Critchley
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: February 27
Philosopher
University Teacher
Herts
Justice
Disappointment
Given
Begins
Live
Experiences
Would
Meaning
Think
Level
Thinking
Levels
Life
Philosophy
Namely
World
Bring
Unjust

More quotes by Simon Critchley

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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.
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There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls the common good. This is hardly news.
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Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
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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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The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
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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.
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It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.
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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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The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.
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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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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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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.
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
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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.
Simon Critchley
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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