Functionalism Quotes

“To recognize the nature of nihilism, we see feces and death as the "dark side" of the mouth, and through that recognize life beyond the human perspective. Humans fear things that disturb them personally, and then assign to those things a universal status, like a monkey trying to convince a tribe that his enemy is its enemy. Escaping this is the essence of nihilism, or a reduction of all value except the inherent and holistic. "Disgusting" is not important; the function of the world and the human body is. Function, measures in real-world changes and results, is more important than sensations or moral judgements,feelings and emotions.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology

“To limit one’s field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique