On occasion while reading, a statement or a paragraph effects me like the booming, sympathetic vibration of a rung bell. These statements outlining a concept of “the soul” had precisely this impact. Almost no intellectual now-a-days, attempts to use the term “soul” let alone risks a cogent account. The soul,—an internal incubus, an ephemeral…
You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more. –Morpheus, The Matrix film Chaos is a…
This is a topic that I am least qualified to write about. I am not female, and thus am unlikely to be subject to rape. My imagination is quite unable to construct a facsimile of the experience of rape. If I were female it would be otherwise. A spirited email exchange was conducted yesterday…
We revisited Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein last night. The Investigations are just that. Wittgenstein used his classroom lectures as an opportunity to do original research with his students. His method was to have a free ranging dialog with the class, doing philosophy of language. Notes of these lectures were published posthumously. The Philosophical…
Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite. What defines thought in its three great forms— art, science, and philosophy— is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it…
Art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the…
Not a “minute of the world passes,” says Cezanne, that we will preserve if we do not “become the minute.” We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. What terror haunts Van Gogh’s…
Didn’t get to write this morning. The server behind the Starbucks Wifi was not happy. Since I was unable to reach my blog, I finished off the last chapter in the philosophy book that I’ve been reading. What Is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari is among the most difficult material that I’ve attempted reading,…
rising economic inequality breakdown of the nation-state militarization of borders totalizing global surveillance curtailment of individual freedoms triumph of transnational corporations the rise of neurocognitive capitalism the rise of nativist ideologies the degradation of the natural environment ….all of these are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of…
Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain…
