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…
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…
When a man [woman] chooses himself [or herself], he chooses for all men. Of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. Existence precedes…
Moral choiceis comparable to the construction of a work of art. As there are no aesthetic values apriori,there are values which will appearin due course in the coherence of the picture— in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. One cannot judge a painting until it is done.likewise with morality.In…
The story of the individual is embedded in a larger set of stories. We play our part in an ensemble cast. How do we imagine a successful strategy for addressing the tension between the needs of the individual and the problems of satisfying those needs within the social, economic and natural environment? We must…
Real animals and plants separated from their spiritual truth slowly rejoin the empty objectivity of tools, the mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form…
