“Philosophy is an unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession. The body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation. The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light. Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme. Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.”
George Steiner, via New English Review. Matt Langer has posted many excellent quotes recently, too many to reblog. Regarding the above: one needs only investigate the catastrophic domestic and romantic lives of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to substantiate the thesis.
(Note: my own pitiful domestic and romantic life has less to do with philosophy as an “unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession” than with ordinary weirdness. However, the fact that “the body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation” is indeed related to what an awkward male I can be).
