Raymond Geuss Quotes

So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of “arguments,” most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether.

Last words and last thoughts are not invariably those most replete with human wisdom. If this seems to be the case, it is because unmemorable ones are not remembered.

The academic reflection of the massive social and economic changes that took place between 1970 and 1981 could be seen in the gradual marginalization of serious social theory and political philosophy, and particularly of “leftist” thought. The usual story that is told about the history of “political philosophy” since World War II holds that political philosophy was “dead” until it was revived by Rawls, whose Theory of Justice appeared in 1971. This seems to me seriously misleading. Rather than the publication of Theory of Justice being a renewal of political philosophy, it seems to me more fruitful to see it as part of a failure of nerve, and a turning away from the real world of institutions, politics and history toward the never-never land of purely normative theory.

One of the things I have always most admired about Alasdair MacIntyre's work is the particular kind of intellectual courage it exhibits. This virtue manifests itself in a number of ways, including a willingness to adress large philosophical questions head-on and to give straightforward answers to them. This is a form of courage, rather than merely of some other more etiolated cognitive excellence, because giving relatively bald and unvarnished answers to big questions makes it difficult to avoid facing up to the implications of what one says for action, and the action involved might be of a kind that requires exhausting, deeply disruptive, and potentially radical changes in the way one lives.