How many conversations have I overheard on the “golden rule”? You know the maxim which recommends that I demonstrate toward my fellowman/woman the same deference which I am wont to demonstrate toward myself. The consensus: everyone approves the rule of harmony, this prescription for universal peace-love-and-understanding. Simply keep the Golden Rule in mind, and…
Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means… Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a…
I perused the New York Times email of today’s headlines. We are two weeks out from election day. Have you ever found yourself watching a prize fight that lasted too many rounds? At the final bell, judges render their decision and in the case of Trump v. Harris the judges will be the American…
I have nothing specific in mind, this morning. This text merits bringing to the fore for consideration. Scratch the surface of the widespread dissatisfaction with American society, and you will find those who wish to turn the country over to a sociopath are convinced that doom is in store. Divine judgment is near. There’s…
We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is…
A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends,…
The statement is enough. It will be sufficient to linger for a while to consider what this means, how extensive the repression of imagination. Our imagination expands our world. The world is held conjointly, you and I in relation, even more, in company with all living and nonliving things. Who is to say that…
I am a fan of civilization. The comfort of this Starbucks, the soothing background music, the efficient and professional-polite barista, and this “just right” hot cup of delicious coffee, all appeal to me. Is this what is meant by civilized, polite society? I mean a society calibrated to ensure security and comfort for those…
Words published in 1881 persuades us that we ought to stop lying to ourselves. Nietzsche, the philologist compares the epoch of modern humanity, an era marked by reason, and the search for knowledge, by awareness of class differences, of institutional injustice, (a few of the hallmarks of a liberal-democratic society) – a juxtaposition with…
Attempting to wrap my mind around this insight – I inwardly shiver. To become well educated in the contemporary sense means a grasp of cause and effect, of a mechanical notion of reality, that events, even occasions of unspeakable enormity, of power so destructive that ordinary words cannot serve, – are no longer divine…
