pretension is the professional risk we run in the humanities

--- Graham Harman, in "Graham Harman and Slavoj Zizek: talk and debate: On Object Oriented Ontology" (YouTube), a talk at the "Lost-Weekend" Cafe, Munich, December 1, 2018, at timecode 35:43

Quote in context

[After quoting Daniel Dennett's wine tasting example of a "flamboyant and velvety
Pinot lacking in stamina":] There are a lot of pretentious wine tasters, there are pretentious theater critics, pretentious architecture critics, pretentious philosophers.  You're probably not going to find a pretentious chemist or physicist. That's not the congenital vice of the sciences – pretension.  You might find arrogance or narrow mindedness, lack of intellectual breadth; but you're not going to find pretension. This pretension is the professional risk we run in the humanities, because we have to rely on indirect discourse in a way that the other the sciences do not. And we should own that; we should become comfortable with that.

More on indirect discourse from the talk:

At [33:00]

I've already talked about undermining and overmining, and how philosophy can't get a knowledge of the things because the things are never reducible downward or upward; that kind of knowledge of the things can never exhaust the things. And so this is why for us aesthetics is important; why indirect discourse is important.  

At [37:05]

I mentioned jokes before. A joke only works when it's indirect. When you literalize a joke, you ruin it. 

Those who know better, should do better

--- Arnold Kling, in conversation with Russ Roberts on the Econtalk podcast, April 6, 2020, about he revised edition of his book The Three Languages of Politics

In context

Russ Roberts: I see this book, in a way, as an attempt to reshape the culture and to think differently about our political disagreements. One of the problems I have with it is, I think it appeals to you and me. And most people don't want to learn that other language of their opponents. They don't want to empathize. . . . [So] for most people, they're not so interested in what you're selling. How do you react to that?

Arnold Kling: That may be true. I think if you're trying to--if I were trying to sum up a prescription of this book, and I don't have this phrase in the book. Like, this is one of these things that I keep thinking about as I go along, and I sometimes come up with better formulations. But, I would say my phrase would be, 'Those who know better, should do better.'

If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map

--- Anne Michaels, in Fugitive Pieces: A novel (1998), via Helize van Vuuren, "Between the Stormberg Mountains and Timbuktu: Aucamp's ars poetica/Tussen die Stormberge en Timboektoe: Aucamp se kunsteorie" (2005)

Quote in context

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map. 

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

--- Upton Sinclair, validated by Quote Investigator, with cite to I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, p. 19