Category: Thought

I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew they were exceedingly poor, and I had been accustomed to regard their poverty as the necessary consequence of their being non-slaveholders. I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north, I expected to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and uncultivated population, living in the most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of the ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern slaveholders. Such being my conjectures, any one acquainted with the appearance of New Bedford may very readily infer how palpably I must have seen my mistake.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Isaiah Berlin, As quoted in Communications and History: Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125.

Principles aren’t found, don’t invent themselves; they protect themselves, they spread; and there are few more difficult operations in the world than to maintain the notion — at once clear, yet absorbed within the system — of a universal principle.

Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus: The Crowned Anarchist (1934).

For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him … another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.

Philip K. Dick, VALIS (1981).

In short, insofar as we seek knowledge, we should retain an open mind and thus we should never shield ourselves from abhorrent beliefs. We can avoid being bewitched by abhorrent beliefs (or alluring beliefs) by subjecting all available theories to criticism.

Danny Frederick, “We Should Not Shield Ourselves from Abhorrent Beliefs,” Against the Philosophical Tide: Essays in Popperian Critical Rationalism (2020).

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance — these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.