Bruce Wilshire

“… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self.”

“[William] James observed that if one who desires self-knowledge takes exclusively a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate view of oneself, one has already prejudiced what one can be, and, of course, what one can know of oneself.”

“The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, apparently, of how they (and their professors, presumably) have come to hold such a view, they have no idea of how it might be criticized, or who they are who hold it.”

“[According to John Locke] the enlightened philosopher is to accept a subordinate position: he must be, says Locke, an “underlaborer” to the empirical scientist.”

“Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is.”

“Kierkegaard, William James, Thoreau, and others I admire are very close to Nietzsche in his condemnation of philosophers who will not or cannot reflect on their own persons: that is, wholly professionalized philosophers.”

“In this distancing, are aspects of our own reality as persons deeply concealed, and the concealment concealed? Are many professors of philosophy today afraid to reflect? I think so.”

“Could this reaction against the personal by [analytic] philosophers … be, at bottom, one of fear? … Are … bright people … blindly afraid of their own precarious identity and unspeakable vulnerability as particular bodily beings?”

“Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul.””

“Once, Socrates was a sort of patron saint of philosophers. It was understood that philosophy was a way of questioning, musing, ruminating, living—a way of being a person.”