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Grendel's Laundry List: Readings for Friday, April 25
"The last illusion is disillusionment." Dr. Omed
"A republican government has virtue as its principle, or else terror. What do they want who want neither virtue nor terror? Terror is the piety of revolution."
Louis Antoine Saint-Just
Grendel notes: Saint-Just was a disciple of Robespierre during the French Revolution, a member of the "Commitee of Public Safety," called "the Apostle of the Terror" and "the Crimson Angel" because he sent so many of his fellow revolutionaries to the guillotine, where he and Robespierre eventually lost their own heads.
"We must not accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the basis of ethics. For whenever we are faced with a command by an authority, it is for us to judge, critically, whether it is moral or immoral to obey. "...in whatever way the Deity should be made known to you, and ever if He should reveal Himself to you: it is you who must judge whether you are permitted to believe in Him, and to worship Him."
Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason (1794)
"There are no ultimate sources of knowledge. Every source, every suggestion is welcome; and every source, every suggestion, is open to critical examination. Except in history, we usually examine the facts themselves rather than the sources of our information."
"The pessimistic cave story of Plato is the true one... But although the world of appearances is indeed a world of mere shadows on the walls of our cave, we all constantly reach out beyond it; and although , as Democritus said, the truth is hidden in the deep, we can probe into the deep. There is no criterion of truth at our disposal, and this fact supports pessimism. But we do possess criteria which, if we are lucky, may allow us to recognize error and falsity. Clarity and distinctness are not criteria of truth, but such things as obscurity or confusion may indicate error. Similarly coherence cannot establish truth, but incoherence and inconsistency do establish falsehood. And, when they are recognized, our own errors provide the dim red lights which help us groping our way out of the darkness of our cave."
"Some recent philosophers have developed a doctrine of the essential impotence and practical irrelevance of all genuine philosophy... Philosophy, they say, cannot by its very nature have any significant consequences, and so it can influence neither science nor politics. But I think that ideas are dangerous and powerful things, and that even philosophers have sometimes produced ideas."
Karl Popper, Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of
a profound truth may well be another profound truth." Niels Bohr | 
