/tag/duty

9 quotes tagged 'duty'

The Society of the Spectacle
Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: kindle import (0)
16

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship both extensively and intensively. In the less industrialized regions, its reign is already manifested by the presence of a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by the more industrially advanced regions. In the latter, social space is blanketed with ever-new layers of commodities. With the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production.


The Denial of Death
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)
323

As a being, as an extension of all of Being, man has an organismic impulsion: to take into his own organization the maximum amount of the problematic of life. His daily life, then, becomes truly a duty of cosmic proportions, and his courage to face the anxiety of meaninglessness becomes a true cosmic heroism. No longer does one do as God wills, set over against some imaginary figure in heaven. Rather, in one’s own person he tries to achieve what the creative powers of emergent Being have themselves so far achieved with lower forms of life: the overcoming of that which would negate life. The problem of meaninglessness is the form in which nonbeing poses itself in our time; then, says Tillich, the task of conscious beings at the height of their evolutionary destiny is to meet and vanquish this new emergent obstacle to sentient life. In this kind of ontology of immanence of the New Being, what we are describing is not a creature who is transformed and who transforms the world in turn in some miraculous ways, but rather a creature who takes more of the world into himself and develops new forms of courage and endurance. It is not very different from the Athenian ideal as expressed in Oedipus or from what it meant to Kant to be a man. At least, this is the ideal for a new kind of man; it shows why Tillich’s myth of being “truly centered” on one’s own energies is a radical one. It points to all the evasions of centeredness in man: always being part of something or someone else, sheltering oneself in alien powers. Transference, even after we admit its necessary and ideal dimensions, reflects some universal betrayal of man’s own powers, which is why he is always submerged by the large structures of society. He contributes to the very things that enslave him. The critique of guru therapies also comes to rest here: you can’t talk about an ideal of freedom in the same breath that you willingly give it up.


298

Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls “the knight of faith.”4 This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant’s parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others’ lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
274

The relation to the outside world is, in large measure actuated not directly by the individual, but by that imaginary entity the 'group,' whose incarnation is the leader or leading animal, and whose consciousness does duty for all parts of the group*.\n\n *That this same relationship still remains catastrophically in force in Western civilization is painfully obvious.  Even today, the ruled are mostly supine members of the herd with no direct orientation of their own.  The ruler, the State, etc., acts as a substitute for individual consciousness and sweeps us blindly into mass movements, wars, etc.


In My Own Way
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: New World Library (2007)
0

The natural event of a man and a woman living in constant companionship, with or without children, is an admirable arrangement which works to the degree one does not insist it must work, and does not treat one's partner as property.  Another being regarded as property is automatically a doll.  Whenever I perform a ceremony of marriage for personal friends, I give some such discourse as this:\r\n \r\n>What I am about to say may at first sound depressing and even cynical, but I think you will not find it so in practice.  There are three things I would have you bear in mind.  The first is that as you now behold one another, you are probably seeing each other at your best.  All things disintegrate in time, and as the years go by you will tend to get worse rather than better.  Do not, therefore, go into marriage with projects for improving each other.  Growth may happen, but it cannot be forced.  The second has to do with emotional honesty.  Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.  For the same reason, do not require love from your partner as a duty, for love given in this spirit doesn't ring true, and gives no pleasure to the other.  The third is that you do not cling to one another as to commit mutual strangulation.  You are not each other's chattels, and you must so trust your partner as to allow full freedom to be the being that he and she is.  If you observe these things your marriage will have surer ground than can be afforded by any formal contract or promise, however solemn and legally binding.


0

Making money just for the sake of making money is a game, like bridge, in which people can find extreme pleasure and which can occupy almost all their waking hours.  But one of the rules of the game is that you must pretend not to enjoy it.  It must most definitely be classified as work; as that which you have to do as a duty to your family and community, and which therefore affords many businessmen the best possible excuse for staying away from home and from their wives.  The nemesis of this attitude is that it flows over into the so-called leisure or nonwork areas of life in such a way that playing with children, giving attention to one's wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain luxuries (which are largely symbolic) also become duties.  Survival itself becomes a duty and a even a drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the game gets under the skin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuous emotion.


Meditations
Author: Marcus Aurelius
Publisher: Penguin Great Ideas (2005)
0

Whatever befalls, Nature has either prepared you to face it or she has not.  If something untoward happens which is within your powers of endurance, do not resent it, but bear it as she has enabled you to do.  Should it exceed those powers, still do not give way to resentment; for its victory over you will put an end to its own existence.  Remember, however, that in fact Nature has given you the ability to bear anything which your own judgement succeeds in declaring bearable and endurable by regarding it as a point of self-interest and duty to do so.


0

Everything - a horse, a vine - is created for some duty.  This is nothing to wonder at: even the sun-god himself will tell you, 'There is a work that I am here to do,' and so will all the other sky-dwellers.  For what task, then, were you yourself created?  For pleasure?  Can such a thought be tolerated?


The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2009)
0

Seven years earlier, a complex neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in Tereza's town.  They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the provincial hospital in his place.  The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed.  He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant.  Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's table... And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.