This was the first step toward a more adequate construction, and it was this step that Socrates retained, never permitting himself to rush ahead to the work of construction until the dismantling of false conceptions of reality had been completed. By so doing, Socrates demonstrated the potential of language to discover and analyze misrepresentations of reality. The artistic attitude attempts to create, or rather, the artist in the artistic attitude attempts to create an image of a world in such a way that it can be experienced directly, intuitively, emotionally, and naively. Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation.
Dialogue requires at least a minimum of love and trust.
What we as a nation have lost is the joy of thinking, the challenge of understanding, the inspirations as well as the consolations of philosophy. Philosophy, in the terminology of another age, is a general, not a special science. Its referential matrix is not the regional ontology of a science but a lived experience prior to all regional delimitation. Its statements, contingent on a subject's lived experience, evoke an insight and become meaningless when they are simply memorized and recited. The task of philosophy is to describe the language games which we play successfully, and to cure the players from playing those which only lead to useless arguments over the meaning of words. . . .