Explanatory Essay Quotes

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

To the secular arm, therefore, be delivered any and every book which, catering for the youngsters, throttles the life of the old folktales with coils of explanatory notes, and heaps on their maimed corpses the dead weight of biographical appendices. Nevertheless, that which delighted our childhood may instruct our manhood; and notes, appendices, and all the gear of didactic exposition, have their place elsewhere in helping the student, anxious to reach the seed of fact which is covered by the pulp of fiction. For, to effect this is to make approach to man's thoughts and conceptions of himself and his surroundings, to his way of looking at things and to explanation of his conduct both in work and play. Hence the folk-tale and the game are alike pressed into the service of study of the human mind. Turn where we may, the pastimes of children are seen to mimic the serious pursuits of men.

The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory.The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

The 1742 essays ‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’, taken together, demanded to be read as, in effect, Hume's explanation of why he did not think of himself as able to continue with moral philosophy's traditional project of emotional therapy and improvement of character, and why, as moral philosopher, he concerned himself with the purely explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judgement. Hume liked to portray himself an anatomist of the moral life – and as an anatomist also of politics. He made a much more serious attempt than was common at the time to rise above factionalism and to discuss politics with genuine impartiality, in the interests of understanding the deeper forces threatening the much-vaunted constitutional settlement of 1688. And in his writings on commerce, there were none of the usual pleas of books on trade for this or that piece of legislative reform, in the interests of this or that part of the mercantile or manufacturing community. The ‘chief business’ of both philosophers and politicians, Hume wrote in ‘Of Commerce’, was ‘to regard the

Particularly in physics, science’s fifty-year drift into the unscientific has recently reached a surreal apogee. String theory is widely considered ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to cosmology yet it has not made a single testable prediction about the universe. Ever. This has led some string theorists to suggest that if a theory is ‘elegant’ and ‘explanatory’ enough, it need not be tested experimentally! To put it another way, scientists’ science no longer needs to be scientific but you should still listen to them when they tell you what is true and what is not. And these are the guys telling us magic is irrational?

In the apparent periphery of a footnote, Gender Trouble cites from the second paragraph of this passage Freud's assertion, "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (GT 163, n. 43). But then, in a substitution crucially significant to her conceptualization of the body as the psychic projection of a surface, Butler replaces the referent "it" in the subsequent part of the cited sentence, which in Freud clearly refers back to the ego as bodily ego ("The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it . . . ) , with the word (square bracketed, demoted-in my citation of Butler's note-to parenthetical) "body." Butler's recitation of the passage reads: "Freud continues the above sentence: '(the body) is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface' " (GT 163 n. 43; my emphasis). Butler's reading of Freud's assertion thus figures the body as interchangeable with the ego. That is, the body appears not only as a surface entity but as itself the psychic projection of a surface. Yet that it is precisely Freud's concern at this point in his essay to articulate the bodily origins of the ego, the conception of the ego as product of the body not the body as product of the ego, is underscored by the explanatory footnote added by his editor James Strachey that appeared first in the 1927 English translation of this text immediately following the above passage-a note authorized by Freud. The note reads: "I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body."30 Butler's reading therefore inverts the note's representation of the body as productive of the psyche ("the ego is derived from bodily sensations") and, through that square-bracketed substitution, conversely images the body as a psychic effect. The body itself becomes commensurable with the psychic projection of the body. Whereas Freud's original assertion maintains a distinction between the body's real surface and the body image as a mental projection of this surface (a distinction between corporeal referent and psychic signified), Butler's recitation collapses bodily surface into the psychic projection of the body, conflates corporeal materiality with imaginary projection. In so doing, it lets slip any notion of the body as a discernible referential category.