Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes on Mind
Roberto Mangabeira Unger treats the mind as a power of transcendence, and the quotes gathered here, drawn from across his work, develop that idea. Unger distinguishes the mind as imagination from the mind as machine, and holds that a free society is one that educates the imagination to become ascendant, able to question the very frameworks that ordinary activity takes for granted. Philosophy, on his account, is the imagination at war, a concentrated deployment of the transgressing faculties of the mind that explores what established methods do not allow to be thought or said. He casts his whole intellectual program as a struggle against fate through thought. These passages present the mind not as a mirror of the world but as an instrument for imagining and making alternatives to it.
Quotes
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“One of the greatest merits of the critical legal studies movement was to have created an intellectual space in which law and legal thought could be better used to resist the dictatorship of no alternatives. Its limited but important contribution to such resistance was the development of ideas about alternatives, made from the contradictions and variations in established law. The greatest failure of the movement was not to have embraced and executed this task more fully.”
p. 15 -
“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.”
p. 295 -
“The reader should understand that this book forms a small part of a larger intellectual program: a struggle against fate through thought, an effort to give new meaning and new life to projects of individual and social liberation that for the last two hundred years have shaken and aroused the whole world, a fight to imagine the forms that those projects can and should take if they are to have a future.”
p. 187 -
“I have pursued this intellectual program by building a radical alternative in social theory to Marxism, by recasting legal thought as an instrument of the institutional imagination, by proposing particular institutional alternatives for the organization of the economy and the state, and by developing a philosophical conception of nature and mankind within which history is open, novelty is possible, and the divinization of humanity counts for more than the humanization of society.”
p. 187-8 -
“Philosophy is a concentrated deployment of the transgressing facilities of the mind.”
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound(2007) | p. 30 -
“Philosophy is neither a discipline among others nor the master discipline. It is the imagination at war, exploring what the established methods and discourses do not allow to be thought and said.”
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound(2007) | p. 233 -
“There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.”
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy(1987) | p. 361 -
“We cannot wait until we agree upon the truths of a new social theory to think and act as democratic experimentalists. We must find the ideas our efforts and commitments require, and try to make no assumptions that the facts of social reality and historical experience invalidate.”
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative(1998) | p. 15