Quotes by Robert C. Solomon

Jai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, jai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose dabsolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit quune personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde dexcuses.

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply do what you like, Im just here for you, but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what theyre thinking, and in particular what theyre thinking of you.

We choose our friends on the basis of, among other things, our conception of ourselves. Thats not to say that friendship is narcissistic, it doesnt follow that we choose people like ourselves; in fact we might choose people very different than ourselves. For example, if Im not very intelligent, and Im concerned about my lack of intelligence, I might take up with an extremely intelligent woman, precisely in order to have her intelligence, in some sense, radiate onto me.The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that its going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him.

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, its not a question of giving up all values, its simply a question of which values.

Love can be understood only from the inside as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.