Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 5

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• After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

  Philip Kitcher

  Children, Diaries, Six

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another such moment. It would be interesting to explore Proust's great novel from the perspective of seeing how stable synthetic complexes are formed and modified.

  Philip Kitcher

  Grandmother, Interesting, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.

  Philip Kitcher

  Perfect, Desire, Use

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Character, Lasting Change

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.

  Philip Kitcher

  Venice, Wandering Around, Sexuality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.

  Philip Kitcher

  Growing Up, Philosophy, Self

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• conclude, what Thomas Mann really wanted was a limited physical relationship with beautiful young men: the opportunity to gaze at them, an occasional touch, a restrained kiss. That isn't a surrogate for what he'd like to have if he were somehow free from social constraints. It's what the young Platen wanted, it's what he wanted - and it's what his Aschenbach wants.

  Philip Kitcher

  Beautiful, Kissing, Opportunity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about "how two men can sleep together".

  Philip Kitcher

  Sex, Father, Sleep

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that displace some we've previously considered to be fixed parts of ourselves.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Sometimes, Synthetic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There's a disciplined erotic component to it, so that the height of sexual contact is the embrace, the modest touch, a relatively chaste kiss. An important passage from the surviving 1942 diary (one I quote in the book) relates this mode of sexual expression to his own life. Mann had returned to his diary for 1927 (one of those he burned) and to his parting from the young man, Klaus Heuser, whom the family had met on holiday and invited to Munich.

  Philip Kitcher

  Book, Holiday, Kissing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love - and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early reading of Platen's poetry, and, probably when he was in his early twenties, of Platen's diaries, introduced him to a form of sexual expression he found profoundly congenial. It's not quite Platonic.

  Philip Kitcher

  Sex, Reading, Fate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Writing, Balance

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).

  Philip Kitcher

  Different, Opera, Film

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I found a deep kinship between Mahler's recurrent attempts to confront all sides of life and to affirm himself in the face of his own finitude, and Aschenbach's dedication to persevere in the literary evocation of beauty. Exploring this kinship led me to reflect on many of Mahler's songs and symphonies - and particularly his great masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde. The end result was a way of reading Mann that I hadn't originally anticipated at all.

  Philip Kitcher

  Song, Reading, Dedication

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.

  Philip Kitcher

  Reading, Tragedy, Roles

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Reading, Ideas

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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