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The sole critique of a philosophy that is possible, and that proves anything, namely to discover whether one can live by it, has never been taught at universities: only the critique of words upon words.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer from perceiving this art.
Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1976) -
I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; We convince by our presence.
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road (1900) -
Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the virtues also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.
Aristotle, Nicomachaen Ethics Book B 1103b -
I would argue that theory is not just irrelevant but was and continues to be an impediment to the development of a culture of innovation in architecture. Posing as a youthful alternative to Enlightenment certainty, theory was instead old-fashioned enlightened critique turned on itself—unremit- ting critique chasing its own tail, without purpose or end. Theory also perpetuated the Enlightenment belief that thinking is separate from and in fact guides doing; that manifestos guide political action; that architecture theory guides architecture practice.
Michael Speaks, After Theory (2005) -
As I see it, the attempt to make philosophy useful to the arts is OK if philosophy is used as a source of inspiration but dubious if it is used as a source of instruction…One way to tell the difference between a work of art being inspired by a religious or philosophical view and its being an application of that view by asking yourself: do I need to know about the view in order to appreciate the work? This is not a very good test, however: appreciation is a matter of degree, so the more you know about all the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, the better you can appreciate it. A slightly less crude test is: do I have to believe in the view in order to take an interest in the work? Is the work the sort of thing that only a follower of Ficino, or only a convinced reader of A VISION, or only a pious Hindu, or only a devout Mormon, or only a passionate Heideggerian, can really get into it?
Richard Rorty, Remarks at MOMA October (2007) -
Do something.
dosomething.org (2010) -
Patton’s response to me seemed to open a space for moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?
Eve Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (1997/2003) -
I have inveighed elsewhere against the Aristotelian practice-theory and the Kantian prudence-morality distinctions, and I shall try not to repeat myself here. Instead, I want briefly to say what can be salvaged from both distinctions. For there is, I think, a useful distinction which is vaguely shadowed forth by these two useless distinctions. This is between knowing what you want to get out of a person or thing or text in advance and hoping that the person or thing or text will help you want something different – that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus to change your life. This distinction, I think, helps us highlight the difference between methodical and inspired readings of texts…
What ‘theory’ has not done, I think, is to provide a method for reading, or what [J.] Hillis Miller calls ‘an ethic of reading.’ We pragmatists think that nobody will ever succeed in doing either. We betray what Heidegger and Derrida were trying to tell us when we try to do either. We start succumbing to the old occultist urge to crack codes, to distinguish between reality and appearance, to make an invidious distinction between getting it right and making it useful.Richard Rorty, The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation (1992) -
[I]f, like Derrida and Foucault, you are a scrupulous academic who is largely an academic, you stage the crisis relationship between theory and practice in the practice of your theoretical production in various ways instead of legitimating the polarization between the academy and the real world by disavowing it, and then producing elegant solutions that will never be seriously tested either in large-scale decision-making or among the disenfranchised.
Gayatri Spivak, More on Power/Knowledge (1992)
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