Robert Nozick Quotes on Life
Robert Nozick, the American philosopher, reflected on the individual life both in his political philosophy and in his later, more personal work, and the quotes gathered here draw on both. The foundation of his libertarianism is a claim about lives: there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good, there are only individual people, with their own individual lives. Against hedonism, Nozick devised the experience-machine thought experiment, arguing that someone who plugs in will not have lived a real life, because we want actually to do things and to be a certain kind of person, not merely to feel as if we had. In his later work he held that our principles fix what our life stands for. Drawn from Anarchy, State, and Utopia and The Examined Life, these passages present a life as something irreducibly individual and lived for real.
Quotes
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“There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, with their own individual lives.”
Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32 -
Attributed to Robert Nozick:
“Plug into an experience machine and you will not have lived a real life.”
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Attributed to Robert Nozick:
“Philosophy is not just doctrine; it is a way of living.”
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“The Examined Life (1989)”
When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato 's Republic , front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. -
“Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.”
The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181 -
“Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.”
Anarchy, State, and Utopia(1974) | Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 152