What is your favorite quote and why?
"Two things always fill me with wonder: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."--Immanuel Kant (that quotation gets various translated, but the gist remains the same)
Well, I don't know. Isn't it obvious why I like that one so much? It's not only the moral law but the faculties that have given us the power of making and following moral law. The consciousness, the language, and okayyyyy the compassion. Whatever. You feely types.
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."--Martin Heidegger
I have found this absolutely to be true. And right now I'm reading a Don DeLillo book (Falling Man) and I wonder, as I have before reading his books, if he is aware that he is essentially Heideggerian, or if it's just coincidence. White Noise is almost as Heideggerian as Being and Time. Only without the jargon and confusing capitalizations.
Eh, every time one of these questions comes up about favorite quotations, I'm always there with the dour Germans. I don't know what gets into me. But Don DeLillo isn't German!
How about this one, then:
"You may not be strong, you may not be smart, but you sure are a hairy little monkey."--some sitcom a long time ago.
And finally I leave with one I have seen so many times but have only just learned to appreciate in the past few years: AMOR FATI.
People get a lot of weird ideas about the study of philosophy, the most irritating of which is that philosophy is very simple and anyone could do it (uh huh, sure, go read Sources of the Self, and then we'll talk, ok? No, really, go read it. It's one of the most important books that came out in the 20th century. I'll wait). But one of the most constant is that philosophy majors are let in on the secret to the Meaning of Life at some point in the game, probably just before graduating. Whenever some nincompoop has come up and asked me what this big secret is, I have usually hemmed and hawed. Heidegger is fucking hard to explain in the 30 second American attention span.
But more and more I am finding the links between disparate philosophies and religions, finding more connections than points of dispute. I don't really do political philosophy, admittedly, and I long ago gave myself over to Continental (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon--silly crackers) thought. There is much that can be said about it--there is a lot of ontological frottage in there--but if you put the Heidegger quote together with the notion of loving your fate, I think that's all there really is. I think that's the meaning of life, right there. It's the key to beauty, to ethics, to happiness, to truth such as it is.
There. I've just shared with you all the meaning of life.
Sadly, it seems to be difficult for weak and filthy humans to do. Work on it, people.
P.S. Do not go look "frottage" up in the dictionary, ok?
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