Anti-Climacus

QUOTES FOR THE EVENING: The following Eliot is the first thing of his I ever took to and memorized. I have no idea what exactly compelled a 10th grader to recognize the weight of 'and youth is cruel, and has no remorse,' but I like to think Eliot sees himself in both of the people here: the young man is all arrogance and self-possession, but he recognizes that the way he sees things now is not the way he'll always see them. Anyway:

"Now that the lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands';
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea."

-T.S. Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady"

"We exercise the kind of dictatorial authority to which Kant objects whenever we arbitrarily restrict the criticism we are prepared to accept from others, whether by preventing them from voicing it at all or by discounting what they have to say when we have no reason to think they are in error. If so, then while we might on occasion regard someone as, say, an object of theoretical inquiry or behavioral control, we exercise dictatorial authority if we decide that we will not in general regard others who are able to reason as reasoning beings. For in so doing we remove our reason from any criticism that might be offered by others, and decide, in effect, that ours is the only voice we will attend to."

-Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility, "Holding Others Responsible"