"One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life."
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), French philosopher, author. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, bk. 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me . . ." (1952; tr. 1963).
"There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."
E. M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian-born French philosopher. The New Gods, "Strangled Thoughts," sct. 1 (first published 1969; tr. 1974).
"I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches."
Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Czech author, critic. Immortality, pt. 4, ch. 11 (1991).
"If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us."
Ralph J. Cudworth (1617-88), English theologian, philosopher. Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, bk. 4, ch. 1, sct. 3 (1731).
"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Representative Men, "Napoleon, the Man of the World" (1850).
"Every Age has its own peculiar faith. . . . Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory."
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), Italian nationalist leader. Faith and the Future, sct. 6 (1835; tr. in Essays by Joseph Mazzini, ed. by Bolton King, 1894).
"The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. . . . One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure."
Elias Canetti (1905-94), Austrian novelist, philosopher. Crowds And Power, "The Case of Schreber: II" (1960; tr. 1962).
"Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies- and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern."
James Thurber (1894-1961), U.S. humorist, illustrator. Collecting Himself, "Thinking Ourselves Into Trouble," pt. 1 (1989; first published 1939).
"It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better."
Perry Miller (1905-63), U.S. historian. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, ch. 1 (1939).
"In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed."
Serge Daney1944-92), French film critic. "Falling out of Love" (repr. in Sight and Sound, London, July 1992).
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K. Dick (1928-82), U.S. science fiction writer. Definition given in 1972. Quoted by Dick in: I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," Introduction (1986).
To grasp what intelligence is we should first study the sort of people we call intelligent.
It seems proper, then, to an intelligent person to be able to deliberate finely about what is good and beneficial for himself, not about some restricted area-e.g. about what promotes health or strength-but about what promotes living well in general.
A sign of this is the fact that we call people intelligent about some restricted area whenever they calculate well to promote some excellent end, in an area where there is no craft. Hence where living well as a whole is concerned, the deliberative person will also be intelligent.
Now no one can deliberate about what cannot be otherwise or about what cannot be achieved by his action. Hence, if science involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of anything whose origins admit of being otherwise; and if we cannot deliberate about what is by necessity; it follows that intelligence is not science nor yet craft-knowledge. It is not science, because what is done in action admits of being otherwise; and it is not craft-knowledge, because action and production belong to different kinds.
The remaining possibility, then, is that intelligence is a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about what is good or bad for a human being.
For production has its end beyond it; but action does not, since its end is doing well itself, and doing well is the concern of intelligence.
Hence Pericles and such people are the ones whom we regard as intelligent, because they are able to study what is good for themselves and for human beings; and we think that household managers and politicians are such people.
This is also how we come to give temperance its name, because we think that it preserves intelligence. This is the sort of supposition that it preserves. For the sort of supposition that is corrupted and perverted by what is pleasant or painful is not every sort-e.g., the supposition that the triangle does or does not have two right angles-but suppositions about what is done in action.
For the origin of what is done in action is the goal it aims at; and if pleasure or pain has corrupted someone, it follows that the origin will not appear to him. Hence it will not be apparent that this must be the goal and cause of all his choice and action; for vice corrupts origin.
Hence since intelligence is what temperance preserves, and what temperance preserves is a true supposition about action, intelligence must be a state of grasping the truth, involving reason, and concerned with action about human goods.
Moreover, there is virtue or vice in the use of craft, but not in the use of intelligence. Further, in a craft, someone who makes errors voluntarily is more choiceworthy; but with intelligence, as with virtues, the reverse is true. Clearly, then, intelligence is a virtue, not craft-knowledge.
There are two parts of the soul that have reason. Intelligence is a virtue of one of them, of the part that has belief; for belief is concerned, as intelligence is, with what admits of being otherwise.
Moreover, it is not only a state involving reason. A sign of this is the fact that such a state can be forgotten, but intelligence cannot.
