We live in a world that is dominated by science. And that's not a bad thing - not at all. But one of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. For example, I no longer accept my being in the world practically and then try to describe that or elucidate that; rather, I see the world theoretically as colors and objects and representations which are fed through my retina into the brain.
Simon CritchleyPhilosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.
Simon CritchleyPhilosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.
Simon CritchleyHere we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of ลฝiลพek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.
Simon Critchley