1 In Boston, there is a rather grand and mysterious painting by Gauguin called Where do we Come From? . . . What are we? . . . Where are we Going? Everyone always has difficulty with the last question, whether they are an oracle, a politician or a business analyst. What is certain, I take it, is that there is no hope for answering the last question unless we have some ideas for answering the first two; even if we conclude that we can never answer the last question, that will only be because we have some insight into answers to the first two. (Bernard Williams, What Hope for the Humanities?)
2 In fact, emphasis on the study of the Humanities and their importance is in itself neither conservative nor radical. What it implies is rather something about the level of reflectiveness at which either conservative or radical opinions are held. (ibid.)
3 The Humanities are concerned with a truthful understanding of what we are and where we have come from, and they, above all, demand a truthful understanding of themselves, and hence a truthful justification of their value. Moreover, society itself and those who are trying to run it also need those understandings. For it is only those understandings that can issue in reasoned demands for change, and the alternative to reasoned change is, as always, not no change, but unreasoned change, which will destroy not only the Humanities but the society that forgets about them. (ibid.; my emphasis)
4 …the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary… a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity; my emphasis)
5 Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. (ibid.)
6 (I leave the most provocative to the end:) A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species. (ibid.)