A fall Saturday is overcast. I plan to make my way to the drag strip perhaps for a last hurrah. There’s a chill in the air. Soon time will be past for “test and tune” of race cars, hand-built expressions of the personality of an owner, and that of crew members, who are likely…
The truly beautiful cannot be touched. It demands distance. Faced with the sublime, we stand back in awe. When praying we fold our hands. The sense of touch destroys distance. It knows no astonishment. It demystifies, de-auratizes and renders profane what is touched. The touchscreen sublates the negativity of the other, of the unavailable….
Communicationwith a smartphone is disembodiedand without a gaze.Community has a bodily dimension.Because of its lack of corporeality,digital communication weakens community.The gaze stabilizes community.Digitization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsiblefor the loss of empathy in the digital age.When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is…
In the age of non-things,there is something almost utopianabout the notion of possession.Possession is characterized byan intimacy and inwardness.For a thing to be a possession, I must havean intense relationship with it.You do not possess an electronic gadget.Because we no longer possess them, consumer goodsquickly end up on the rubbish heap.Possession is something internalized…
Mid September and Fall is approaching. I anticipate a last visit to the drag strip for the Saturday coming up. Drag racing is a quintessential male, warm weather sport. Race cars constructed to achieve maximum acceleration are an icon of a passing era. I confess my love of the adrenaline stimulating sight and sound…
I have never used that word before. It means utterly astonished. Yesterday four of us experienced an architectural tour of Chicago, narrated by Joe, our tour guide, progressing on both the south and the north branches of the Chicago river on the Wendella tour boat toward Lake Michigan. The word describes the wonderment that…
More from Friedrich Nietzsche… To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 3 Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of…
The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact, nothing is identical with anything else. -Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” Section 19 Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a…
Is it not the case that similar problems, analogous issues present themselves over and over, such as is suggested by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, Circles? Emerson wrote in his unforgettable way that life is composed of concentric circles, intersecting matters of concern, of compelling interest. Fresh to my consciousness is an email…
Got off to a late start this morning… I arrived at Starbucks and found a place seated against the wall, the small table holding the computer and a book, The space in between where I am seated and the counter behind which the baristas work, has been a whirl of activity for the past…
