To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.
Interpretation
Philosophy requires awareness and critical thinking; blindly accepting ideas leads to ignorance.
In this quote, Louis Althusser emphasizes the importance of conscious thought in philosophical inquiry. He warns against the dangers of naively accepting ideas without critical examination, suggesting that true understanding involves both awareness and the courage to confront challenging truths, much like the inability to directly look at the sun without impairing oneβs vision.
In practice
In a philosophical debate, one might use this quote to underline the necessity of questioning assumptions.
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
It is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts.
Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
What about the rest of your life?" She shrugged. "What about it?" "Aren't you worried about, like, forever?" "Forever is composed of nows," she says.
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