Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Mind Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

View all Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes
It may seem strange that there can be a structure for breaking all structures and that it can have a precise, limited form, and be built to particular specifications. Yet we have two major examples of such a structure in our experience. One is the mind as imagination. The other is society, progressively recast on the model of the imaginationː organized to shorten the distance between our context-preserving and context-transforming activities and to diminish the dependence of transformation on crisis.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices by which we invent different futures bring down upon us a storm of impalpable meteors. The risks to which these practices subject us, the commotions, the hurts, the joys, strike and break the coats of armor within which we are all slowly dying. They enable each of us to live in action and in the mind until he dies all at once.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
A central thesis of this book is that the connection between thought and practice is most intimately and fully realized only when our minds are addressed to our own affairs—the concerns of humanity. When we direct our thoughts to nature, even if to see ourselves as fixtures of nature, we loosen the connection between thought and practice. When we loosen it, we are tempted to assume the posture I earlier called naturalism. We survey both the human and the nonhuman worlds from a supposedly godlike distance. We treat the achievement of such distance as the realization of our longing for transcendence.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
If society is organized to insulate its own arrangements from challenged and change, and thus to give itself the semblance of a natural object or an alien fate, the noncomputable and the nonmodular aspects of the mind will remain no more than a penumbral light around the darkness of computability and modularity. However, as society acquires the features of democratic experimentalism, those aspects become central to the life of the mind. The hold of the innate mental faculty on our experience gets turbinated by a political construction.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
I ask myself in this bookː on what assumptions about the world and the mind, the self and society, do these beliefs—mere translations and developments of a creed that has already taken over the world and set it on fire—continue to make sense? Within what larger combination of ideas can we ground, develop, and correct them?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Philosophy is a concentrated deployment of the transgressing facilities of the mind.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger