/tag/motivation

4 quotes tagged 'motivation'

The Bakhtin Reader
Author: Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, Pam Morris (Editor)
Publisher: Arnold (2001)
45

Any motivation of one's behavior, any instance of self-awareness (fore self-awareness is always verbal, always a matter of finding some specifically suitable verbal complex) is an act of gauging oneself and one's behavior. In becoming aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person, another representative of my social group, my class. Thus, self-consciousness, in the final analysis, always leads us to class consciousness, the reflection and specification of which it is in all its fundamental and essential respects. Here we have the objective roots of even the most personal and intimate reactions.


The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: kindle import (0)
37

But the underlying problem of cybernetics, which makes it an endless success/failure, is to control the process of control itself. Power is not necessarily wisdom. I may have virtual omnipotence in the government of my body and my physical environment, but how am I to control myself so as to avoid folly and error in its use? Geneticists and neurologists may come to the point of being able to produce any type of human character to order, but how will they be able to know what types of character will be needed? The situation of a pioneer culture calls for tough and aggressive individualists, whereas urban-industrial culture requires sociable and cooperative team-workers. As social change increases in speed, how are geneticists to foresee the adaptations of taste, temperament, and motivation that will be necessary twenty or thirty years ahead? Furthermore, every act of interference with the course of nature changes it in unpredictable ways. A human organism which has absorbed antibiotics is not quite the same kind of organism that it was before, because the behavior of its microorganisms has been significantly altered. The more one interferes, the more one must analyze an ever-growing volume of detailed information about the results of interference on a world whose infinite details are inextricably interwoven.


The Denial of Death
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)
8

One of Becker’s lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat “atheistic communism.”


The Portable Nietzsche
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Publisher: Portable Library (1977)
496

Most of our general feelings - every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympathicus - excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that - for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only - become conscious of it only - when we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them - not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes, are the causes, is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause - even precludes it.