Relevant Insights of the Day

From Friedrich Nietzsche:

1. "Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication"
- The Gay Science (1974; New York: Vintage Books, pg. 171)
2. "Whenever I climb, I am followed by a dog called 'Ego.'"

From Ian H. Angus:

3. "The main point of Marcuse’s account of Plato is that dialectic was not primarily a method of knowledge, but a process of the becoming of being in which the unifying and separating of being occurs through motility, which is the passing of every being into nonbeing or otherness...dialectic thus refers to the motility of being."
- "Review Essay of Herbert Marcuse's Heideggerian Marxism." Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (2005).
4. "Since humanity appears as both the subject and object of social representations, the reflexive capacity of language demands a theory of social praxis as a complex of expressive forms."
 "Language as metaphor has turned philosophy and the human sciences away from this subject-object posing toward a conception of culture as its primary realm of investigation. But culture must be understood on this basis not as a merely external activity but as the process of formation of individual, group, and inter-group life. This process of formation of identities is expressive, albeit one shorn of inner-outer assumptions, in the sense of a sociocultural praxis as the shaping of a distinct way of life. Such a self-shaping, or instituting, of a way of life requires a notion of expression, even if we must abandon the notion of an already existing subjectivity hiding behind the forms of expression. Expression can thus be understood as a primal scene of self-shaping through culture, indeed as the active component of the instituting of a social order."
- "The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis' Communication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences." Canadian Journal of Communications 9 (Winter 1998).