Kurt Goldstein Quotes

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

Einstein’s and Gödel’s metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality—existing independent of our thinking of it—or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs.

Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

inside out, with all the Sturm und

Fear sharpens the senses. Anxiety paralyzes them. —KURT GOLDSTEIN, The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology (1939)

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no non-shifting foundation on which any system rests. [...] Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds[.]

The psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets.” “The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between whole numbers. From the square root of −1, to Georg Cantor’s revelation of infinite domains infinitely more infinite than other infinite domains, to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, mathematics has constantly displaced the borders between the conceivable and the inconceivable, and Pythagoras would be in for some long hours of awesome mind-blowing.