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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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Simon Critchley
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: February 27
Philosopher
University Teacher
Herts
Answers
Fact
Finitude
Facts
Fallibility
Human
Vulnerability
Humans
Begin
Life
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Meaning
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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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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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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.
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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 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 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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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.
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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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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.
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Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.
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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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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.
Simon Critchley
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Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
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.
Simon Critchley
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The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
Simon Critchley
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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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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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We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.
Simon Critchley
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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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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.
Simon Critchley