Philosophers Hate Life

‘You are not sufficiently democratic,’ answered the policeman, but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor animal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate.  

We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals.  We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. 

Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. 

Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.  Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seem to them to be lesser lives.  But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other peoples.

Quotation from The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, 1908

Like Everyone Else

“Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia — make you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

“All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genius engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts—all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

‘Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity. “I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

“What would you do then?”

“Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

Quotation from:  The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell