A learned reply

“I am often asked the question, ‘Do you believe in the afterlife?’ After mumbling something stupid on a few occasions, I have now learned to reply, ‘Yes, of course I believe in the afterlife. I believe in the life of those that come after, those we love, who are few in number, and those we don’t even know, who are obviously many more, a great many in fact.’ People rarely seem impressed by this answer.

However, why should we assume that the question of the afterlife must always be answered with reference to me? Isn’t just a teensy bit selfish? What is so important about my afterlife? Why can’t I believe in others’ afterlife without believing in my own?”

-Simon Critchley, 2009 (via Flavorwire)

He’s so vain

“It is difficult for a man to speak too long of himself without vanity.”

-David Hume, 1776 (‘My Own Life’ In The Cambridge Companion to David Hume.  David Norton, Ed.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Pg 351)

Sincerely yours…

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit…has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticisim which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are…one response has been…a retreat from the discipline requires required by the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.  Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself…he devotes himself to being true to his own nature…But it is preposterous to imagine we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake.  As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves without knowing them…sincerity itself in bullshit”

-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 64-7)

Self-portraiture

“…if indeed the Savage exists primarily within an implicit correspondence with utopia, the specialist in savagery is in dire straits.  He does no know what to aim at.  His favorite model has disappeared or, when found, refuses to pose as expected.  The fieldworker examines his tools and finds his camera inadequate.  Most importantly, his very field of vision is blurred.  Yet he needs to come back home with a picture.  It’s pouring out there, and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.  In desperation, the baffled anthropologist burns his notes to create a moment of light, moves his face against the flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of himself”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.  Pg 24.)