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Hubert Dreyfus Quotes

Total quotes: 19
“Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent. The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds
Tagged: Business, Outcomes, Journey Not Destination
“If it’s terrible enough, it’s totally liberating.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Defeat, From Struggle Comes Strength, Lose Everything, Fear, Sublime
“Nobody I know who’s authentic got that way by thinking about what it was to be a human being or be authentic. I think they were that way all along. I love the movie Schindler’s List. Schindler had no idea he was a courageous man and a moral hero out of millions of people risking his life everyday for the Jews when he wasn’t even Jewish. That was part of the marvel of it. I suspect that that’s generally how it is.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Authentic Living, Just Go With The Flow, Everything Good Is Impulse
“Once you’ve gotten to the point where you’re open to a calling, there’s always a call.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Vocations, Calling, Outer Spirits of World History, Damon, Openness, Positioning Ourselves for Adventing
“I still feel insignificant and empty, but it doesn’t bother me. It liberates me and makes me free and makes me able to do crazy things.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: The Full Nothingness, Openness
“It’s not important to be significant. It’s important to follow those kinds of questions that are grabbing you.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Education, Learning, Self-improvement, My Philosophy, Vocations, Aphorisms
“The public sphere is a world in which everyone has an opinion on and comments on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, The public sphere is a world in which everyone has an opinion on and comments on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility.
Tagged: Death of Liberalism
“I had nothing in me. I still have nothing in me. That’s what’s so interesting and nice. I’m just absolutely as far as I can tell open to whatever problem comes and grabs me.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Openness, open-minded, Perspectivism
“I try to not give them any content they can copy or imitate. They can imitate the openness if they can do it, but nothing else. What other risks are there?”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
“We're like the man who climbed on a chair and declared he was a little closer to the moon.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do
Tagged: Progress
“Philosophical reflection is a bad idea because, if you think you can find some basis for why you should live, why you should be moral, why you should do what you do – any kind of rational basis, you discover finally that there is no basis. You can always keep saying, ‘Why? Why? Why?’, until you undercut everything.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, Thursday, October 20, 2005 Hubert Dreyfus Interview
Tagged: Thinking Ourselves To Death, Why Why, Reflection, Contemplation
“Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Homer, Theology
“There is no essential difference, really, in how it feels to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Lord, or to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Hail Mary pass, the Immaculate Reception, the Angels, the Saints, the Friars, or the Demon Deacons.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Belief, Religion, Secularization, Secularized Theology, Secular Theology
“Don’t try to see what all the colors look like when they’re added up. Instead, try to get into as many (revealing) moods as possible, as many ways of responding to the sacred as you can— and this life of serial resonances with the sacred is ultimately a kind of contentedness, happiness, even joy.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Color, Truth, Openness
“Pip is a kind of hero because he doesn't deny the lack of any ultimate meaning to the universe, but instead becomes a pure openness to it. To see God's foot upon the treadle of the loom and live, as Pip does, is to be deafened, to be made unfit for hearing any meaning as a human can. Indeed, after this event Pip has no identity at all; he becomes open to all interpretations...”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: All Truth Opens, Letting It Appear, Openness
“"I was really empty, knew nothing, and came from the back woods, relatively speaking, of Indiana and wasn’t terribly bright. But, there were wonderful people in the world who were very bright and knew a lot and I would go around sort of collecting them. These friends that I’ve collected are just amazing. And, they say they got something out of listening to me. It never seemed that way to me. I thought they knew how to do it and I wanted to listen to them. So, there must be a 3rd kind of person who thinks they’re insignificant and are neither willing to stay that way nor think that they could prove otherwise, but are very open to what other people have to offer. That’s how it was with me.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, A person who thinks they’re insignificant...
“In losing his identity, and having no perspective of his own, Pip can see that all the meanings in the world are meanings taken from one perspective or another. He can see the selfishness involved in thinking of these meanings as ultimate or final precisely because he can see that ultimately each is a perspectival rendering of something that has no deeper truth. This becomes clear in the fascinating chapter on the doubloon.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Perspectivism
“The public sphere thus promotes ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out of which specific issues grow and in terms of which these issues must be resolved though some sort of committed action. What seems a virtue to detached Enlightenment reason, therefore, looks like a disastrous drawback to Kierkegaard. The public sphere is a world in which everyone has an opinion on and comments on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility. Even the most conscientious commentators don’t have to have firsthand experience or take a concrete stand. Rather, they justify their views by citing principles, and, as Kierkegaard notes with disapproval, their 'ability, virtuosity and good sense consists in trying to reach a judgment and a decision without ever going so far as action.' Moreover, since the conclusions such abstract reasoning reaches are not grounded in the local practices, its solutions are equally abstract. Such proposals would presumably not enlist the commitment of the people involved and therefore not work even if acted upon. Kierkegaard concludes that 'what...the speakers at a meeting understand perfectly presented to them as a thought or an observation, they cannot understand at all in the form of action.'”
— Hubert Dreyfus, socrates.berkeley.edu
Tagged: Media, Public sphere, The Uprooting, The Problem of Knowledge Abstraction
“Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters and of how to act. The chances are strongly against this, however. There are always powerful conservative forces in the culture that tend to destroy the new understanding or to take it over and mobilize it for the current order. If the new world fails, therefore, it is necessarily measured by the current understanding, and against this norm it can look ridiculous.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Revolution
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