Cogito Quotes
Quotes tagged as "cogito"
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“Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work 鈥� of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the 鈥淲hat am I?鈥� Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.”
― Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
― Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 鈥榠maginary鈥� level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being 鈥� a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say 鈥楾omorrow I will mow the lawn,鈥� the 鈥業鈥� which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the 鈥業鈥� which does the pronouncing. The former 鈥業鈥� is known to linguistic theory as the 鈥榮ubject of the enunciation鈥�, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter 鈥業鈥�, the one who speaks the sentence, is the 鈥榮ubject of the enunciating鈥�, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two 鈥業鈥檚鈥� seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The 鈥榮ubject of the enunciating鈥�, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun 鈥業鈥� stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot 鈥榤ean鈥� and 鈥榖e鈥� simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes鈥檚 鈥業 think, therefore I am鈥� as: 鈥業 am not where I think, and I think where I am not.”
― Literary Theory: An Introduction
― Literary Theory: An Introduction

“This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the moral progress of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian terms: "Fall" is the very renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is experience as imposed on me from the outside, i.e., the finitude in which I search for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent knows that the child鈥檚 provocations, wild and "transgressive" as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to draw a line which means "This far and no further!", thus enabling the child to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for hysteric鈥檚 provocations?) This, precisely, is what the analyst refuses to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic 鈥� paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very absence of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult 鈥� its implication is precisely that there is nobody outside, no external agent of "natural authority", who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural "unruliness." Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant鈥檚 true aim is rather to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened "mature" human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.”
― Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism
― Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism

“Descartes, reasoning unconsciously according to the prejudices of the old metaphysics, and seeking an unshakable foundation for philosophy, an aliquid inconcussum, as it was said, imagined that he had found it in the self, and posited this principle: I think, therefore I am; Cogito, ergo sum. Descartes did not realize that his base, supposedly immobile, was mobility itself. Cogito, I think鈥攖hese words express movement; and the conclusion, according to the original sense of the verb to be, sum, 蔚喂谓伪喂, ou 讞讬讞, (ha茂ah), is still movement. He should have said: Moveor, ergo fio, I move, therefore I become!”
― The Philosophy of Progress
― The Philosophy of Progress
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