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Brand Blanshard

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Famous Brand Blanshard Quotes

“Most men's minds are so constituted that they have to think by means of examples ; if you do not supply these, they will supply them for themselves, and if you leave it wholly to them, they will do it badly. On the other hand, if you start from familiar things, they are very quick to make the necessary generalizations. In a sense they are making such generalizations constantly; whenever they recognize the thing before them as a chair or a lamp-post, they are leaping from the particular to the general by a process of implicit classification.”

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Book:On Philosophical Style
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“The five movements last mentioned-naturalism, instrumentalism, positivism, linguistic analysis, existentialism-are perhaps the most influential philosophic movements of recent years, and they are all derogatory of reason in its traditional use. This is particularly striking because philosophy is, supposedly, an attempt on the nature of things by reason, and if that attempt is futile, philosophy would appear to be futile too. But the rebellion of the last half century has gone far beyond philosophy; indeed it has broken out in every department of culture, and in most of them with marked virulence.”

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Book:Reason & Analysis
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“There is in human nature a distinct drive to know, a distinguishable theoretical impulse or urge to understand. It is at work at every level of cognition, from the simplest impersonal judgment, like ‘it is hot’, to the most comprehensive mathematical or metaphysical system. But like other fundamental drives, the moral, for example, and the aesthetic, what it is seeking - what will ultimately satisfy it - is far from apparent at its lower levels and is defined only gradually in the course of a long advance. But that advance is not simply a matter of blind trial and error. Its direction is set by its end, which works as an immanent ideal within the process of thought. The pressure exerted by this ideal increases as intelligence rises in the scale. … As thought matures and realizes in fuller measure the end it is seeking, that end lays its movement under increasingly firm constraint. … The higher our altitude on the long ascent of intelligence, the better is our position to discern what lies at the summit. To be sure we never see this clearly. In no human activity do we ever fully know what we are about. We are aware of the end, or we could do nothing but wander aimlessly. We never see it clearly, so we are condemned to much groping.”

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Book:Reason & Analysis
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“One of his [Freud] favourite doctrines was that of 'rationalization', which may be put as follows. We pride ourselves on being reasonable in our beliefs and actions; when we accept a belief, we like to think that we have adopted it on good grounds; when we decide on an action, we like to think that we have done so because it is right; and if challenged, we readily produce reasons. But these reasons turn out, when examined, to be 'rationalizations' merely, that is, attempts to dress up in rational guise beliefs or actions that sprang, not from reasons at all, but from non-rational causes. [...] What fastened the attention of Freud was that man continually goes wrong. His religious beliefs record an attempt, 'patently infantile', to find a father-substitute; his philosophical systems are projections upon nature of his half hidden desires; his scientific and artistic pursuits mark the sublimation of frustrated instincts; his political convictions are apologies for, or protests against his position in society; even his ethics is an uneasy compromise between selfish desire and group pressures. 'I am sure only of one thing,' Freud wrote, 'that the judgments of value made by mankind are immediately determined by their desire for happiness; in other words, that those judgments are attempts to prop up their illusions with arguments.”

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Book:Reason & Analysis
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“...reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest.”

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Book:Nature of Thought
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“Rhythm is one of the subtlest of all instruments in the delicate work of conveying thought. But there is one general rule that is at once so simple and so near the heart of the whole matter, that I must at least mention it. This rule is to make the emphasez of sense and rhythm coincide. Plain men know by a sort of instinct where to hit hard ; they never say, " There is in my mind a desire which would be gratified if you were to transfer the hammer into my possession " ; they say, " Give me the hammer." This is true style. Someone has said, " All peasants have style," and philosophers cannot afford to get wholly out of touch with the fine economy of natural talk.”

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Book:On Philosophical Style
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“[How to think about a problem:] The first step is to make the problem specific . . . ; The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yourself of that burden . . . ; The third step is to develop in foresight the consequences of your proposals . . . ; The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme of life as a whole . . . ; Whether you choose a vacation or a spouse, a party or a candidate, a cause to contribute to or a creed to live by - think!”

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Author:Brand Blanshard
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“I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.”

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Author:Brand Blanshard
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