Quotes by Kenneth Smith

From its abstractionist posture, intellectualism typically conveys the impression that it is chiefly or only from passion that rationality can suffer; the folk-wisdom among rationalists is that emotion is the primary pollutant obstructing rational processes. But it is also, and far more pertinently in our age, from apathy that rationality suffers: when people do not care enough to think about received opinions, when they have no inherent drive to dissociate themselves from the dogmas and biases of their age, when their own freedom and the transcendence of the truth mean so little to them that they will not endure the painful task of self-reflection, when the very scale or profundity of problems the modern age has generated invite a defeatist attitude, then indeed it is truer than ever what Kierkegaard wrote a century and a half ago: "What the age needs is passion," not barbaric but sublimated energy. Hegel's truism about history--that "nothing great is ever accomplished without passion"--explains a great deal about our effete culture, our sterile education and stagnant politics. Like Marx and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel wrote out of a prodigious reservoir of passion that did not in the least prevent them from being critical and rational. In our present era--wracked by a morbid boredom and an unshakeable conviction that there is nothing worth learning and preserving--I believe the lesson is clear. Difficult and risky as it may be, heat as well as light is called for.

A human being who shows some singular or distinctive indications of being anomalous, of actually being capable of uncompromising honesty with himself, is worth investigating and listening to or reading or challenging or raising questions with; but in the marketplace of the Many, all the multitudes of signs and treasure-maps will only convince a discerning individual that the X that marks "buried treasure" is the last place in the world to waste one's time digging for buried treasure--cunning and perceptive people who really have treasure buried someplace will convey tacitly to other cunning and perceptive people that the best place to bury treasure is in those places where no naive or simplistic mentality would ever think of looking.

I start off with the obvious, that it makes no sense either to believe or to disbelieve in God until a substantial and intelligent definition or concept should be offered. Belief or disbelief is a secondary consideration, contingent on the intelligibility and cogency of the premise; the primal unintelligence or irrationality of moderns is revealed by their eagerness to leap to a conclusion without ever being curious what the hell the original premise was.

American democracy is a chess-game in which pawns imagine themselves to be free individuals with wills of their own: that delusion is one of the rules of the game, without which the game could not continue. I doubt anyone, no matter how sharp and sharp-tongued, could succeed in getting across to high school students how vital an acute mind is for just keeping a grip on one's life and earnings in our mendacious politics and economics. No wonder our school system is devoutly dedicated to demoralizing and blunting such minds.

To me philosophy like "intelligence" or "wisdom" is definitely a moving target, whose essence keeps metamorphosing as one gains more resources to penetrate it better. It seems only natural to me that Heraclitus would intuitively leave his murky manuscript ON PHYSIS in the temple of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, i.e. the dialectic of living animal instinct with human acuity. Philosophers are after live and very cunning prey, already I began to think of my courses at LSU in terms of safaris and big game hunts, except that more and more they dealt not with ordinary species but with monsters, dragons, still-living dinosaurs of ideologies and orthodoxies.

I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart.

For the vast majority of humans, to be a "self" means nothing other than to carry their own claustral cardboard-box of dysculture and rhetorical controls and verbal-perspectival poverty around over their heads, so they can be out and about "in" the world without actually having to be "in" it in such a way that they suffer the chaos of it and are exposed to the rawness of it. Idiotia wants always one-way perception or information or intelligence about the world, like the sunshaded stand-apart or alienated loner who tries to observe without being seen or the sniper who picks his shots without himself being exposed to fire; idiotia wants to know without being known, to stripmine the world and other people of what is useful to him but utterly without any reciprocity or just exchange. Ego overwhelmingly is just a way of getting through life untouched, unscathed, uneducated, i.e. with one's virginal infantilism intact; that is ego's most profound and pious mission, and the whole meaning of its ensemble of monadic-isolationist purposes; except for a very few anomalies across an entire population, "ego" is just the commonplace expression for idiotia. "Existence" for the vast majority of humans is more truthfully the buffering virtuality and technology of anesthesia or euphoria that shields them from actual and naked "existence," the kind of life that is "truth"-based (analogous to "fact-based accounting procedures," as opposed to unctuous and subjectivist hypotheticalisms).

If you like capitalism, you will positively love depressions, because they are one and the same, like manic-depressives and their cycles, like spouse-abusers and their storms of violence.

The key to all aristeia and wisdom and gnosis is a seed that conformist and mediocritist and democratist Americans haven't got even a scintilla of a prospect of nourishing, and that is sapere aude:  DARE TO BE WISE.  

It is man's intrinsic and irreducible self-responsibility to humanize himself, to exercise his entire range of rational and moral resources to raise his mode of being and seeing and acting above not just that of animals, but also above that of the majority of subhuman (never to be self-realized) humans who will never draw themselves into a self-punishing position of focal self-diagnosis and self-accountability.