David E. Cooper Quotes - Page 2

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• The main objection to the 'scientistic' claim that physics describes the world as it is in itself is that you 'can't weed out' the human contribution. That is, the scientific image of the world, like any other, is indelibly shaped by our interests, practices and prejudices.

  David E. Cooper

  Weed, Practice, World

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There is no reason at all to think that creatures with very different purposes and concerns would arrive at the scientific image, and no reason at all to accuse such creatures of getting the world wrong - a point that both Chuang Tzu and Nietzsche make when comparing human and animal perspectives.

  David E. Cooper

  Thinking, Animal, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I was keen to dispel a familiar misunderstanding: that existentialists somehow relish the alienation of human beings from the world. This may have been Camus's attitude, but it was certainly not that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom tried to show that we can only experience the world in relation to our own projects and purposes. The world is initially one of 'equipment', said Heidegger: it is a world of 'tasks', said Sartre.

  David E. Cooper

  Attitude, Tasks, Purpose

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also exponents of a doctrine of mystery: Being or the 'well-spring' of everything is, for Heidegger, ineffable, just as what Merleau-Ponty called 'Flesh' is for him.

  David E. Cooper

  Spring, Writing, Important

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It's as if, for Schopenhauer and perhaps Kant, the mind is there up and running, equipped with its categories and concepts that it then projects or smears, as it were, over what impinges upon it from the outside. This is not the image you find in, for example, Chuang Tzu: minds and nature are inseparably fused in an ever-changing whole of experience that, so to speak, constantly wells up from an indescribable source in a process that Daoists call 'the way' or 'the course'.

  David E. Cooper

  Running, Mind, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Like Nietzsche, Heidegger also gave up on the prospect that schools and universities would nurture the kind of reflective openness to the way of things that, certainly by the 1940s, he identified with authentic thinking. The authentic person is not the Promethean, iron-willed figure that pops up in Nietzsche, but someone more like the Daoist sages whom Heidegger admired.

  David E. Cooper

  School, Thinking, Iron

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.

  David E. Cooper

  Practice, Finals, Analysis

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't think we should just 'muddle through' and ignore the question of life's meaning. Or better, perhaps, I don't think it is a question that can be ignored once the business of asking about the worth and significance of what one is doing - one's work, one's pleasures, one's ambitions and so on - has got going. You can't at any point stop the urge to ask Tolstoy's questions, '... and then what?', 'What's the point of that?'.

  David E. Cooper

  Ambition, Thinking, Asking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.

  David E. Cooper

  Nihilism, Tables, Kind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The Overman will himself be a nihilist in the (good) sense of rejecting any metaphysical or religious grounding for truth and value, but instead of curling up in despair, or simply going along with the crowd like the 'passive' nihilist, he will recognize himself as the sole source of truths and values to live by.

  David E. Cooper

  Religious, Despair, Crowds

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The demands of the economy, and more recently those of political correctness and the diktat against ever offending anyone, are not conducive to a classroom or university seminar climate in which genuinely free and critical reflection on how to live prospers.

  David E. Cooper

  Reflection, Offending, Political

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In the doctrine of the world and humankind as 'will to power and nothing else', Heidegger identified not an antidote to nihilism, but the completion of it. For what can be more destructive of truth and value than the doctrine that these are simply the impositions on the world of human exercises of power?

  David E. Cooper

  Exercise, Nihilism, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• While I am happy to make the occasional foray into educational philosophy - writing, for example, of the difficulty in the contemporary context for a teacher to be 'truthful' - it is more the personal conduct of a life than social institutions that I am concerned to examine.

  David E. Cooper

  Teacher, Educational, Philosophy

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

  David E. Cooper

  Divorce, Expression, Practice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Chuang Tzu and Heidegger both emphasise the virtue of 'spontaneity' - a sort of mindful responsiveness to things as they are. It's this notion, I suspect, that is the best bet for helping to make some sense of talk about harmony or unity with nature.

  David E. Cooper

  Unity, Helping, Spontaneity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The focus of environmental ethics should indeed be on the virtues and how these inform our relationship to natural environments.

  David E. Cooper

  Focus, Environmental, Ethics

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm very sceptical about the prospects for 'big' environmental causes - 'saving the planet', halving the world's population, ending the exploitation of animals, and so on - but a person can ask him- or herself how he or she personally may exercise compassion or humility towards animals, vegetal life and so on.

  David E. Cooper

  Humility, Exercise, Compassion

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

  David E. Cooper

  Good Life, Garden, Civilization

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.

  David E. Cooper

  Religious, Attitude, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.

  David E. Cooper

  Humility, Practice, Gardening

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

  David E. Cooper

  Garden, Culture, Spheres

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. Whether as a result of simply listening to everyday talk about meaning, or reading books of anthropology, sociology and art history, it dawned on me that there is nothing at all privileged or central about linguistic meaning.

  David E. Cooper

  Art, Reading, Book

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One thing that attracts me in Daoism and Heidegger is a delicate combination of recognizing deep differences between human being and any other kind of being, and a desire, nevertheless, to cultivate an intimacy with animals, trees, mountains and so on.

  David E. Cooper

  Animal, Differences, Tree

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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