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Chris Lavergne

4,208 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,208 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“'Humanism,' a term first coined in 1808 to identify this Renaissance trend, refers not to some sort of humanitarian impulse, but to the solipsism and self-absorption characterizing the era’s religion, art, and science.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
Tagged: Capitalism, Humanism
“Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with ‘the consolidation of the vernaculars’ and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody’s point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to “spell out” the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Perspectivism, Point of View
“In losing his identity, and having no perspective of his own, Pip can see that all the meanings in the world are meanings taken from one perspective or another. He can see the selfishness involved in thinking of these meanings as ultimate or final precisely because he can see that ultimately each is a perspectival rendering of something that has no deeper truth. This becomes clear in the fascinating chapter on the doubloon.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Perspectivism
“Don’t try to see what all the colors look like when they’re added up. Instead, try to get into as many (revealing) moods as possible, as many ways of responding to the sacred as you can— and this life of serial resonances with the sacred is ultimately a kind of contentedness, happiness, even joy.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Color, Truth, Openness
“Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters and of how to act. The chances are strongly against this, however. There are always powerful conservative forces in the culture that tend to destroy the new understanding or to take it over and mobilize it for the current order. If the new world fails, therefore, it is necessarily measured by the current understanding, and against this norm it can look ridiculous.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Revolution
“Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Homer, Theology
“The frames of thought in which the observations are set are often of more significance than the observations themselves.”
— Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
“A liberal education today must include reflection on the significance of writing and print, situating these media and all their works in their historically patterned sequences. When we speak of a sequence of media, we do not mean that new media of communications annihilate their antecedents. When men learned to write, they continued to talk. When they learned letterpress printing, they continued both to talk and write: Since they have invented radio and television, they have continued to talk and write and print. But the advent of newer media alters the meaning and relevance of the older. Media overlap, or, as Marshall McLuhan has put it, move through one another as do galaxies of stars, each maintaining its own basic integrity but also bearing the marks of the encounter ever after.”
— Walter Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
Tagged: Communications, Liberal Education, Pattern Recognition As An Academic Discipline
“We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Photography, Walter Ong
“Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that is, in a lie and a falsehood? Perhaps the ghost was no ghost. Perhaps its truth, like the theater itself, was a lie.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Truth