The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by the logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power, [Macht] — of…
Nihilistic pessimismand rationalistic optimismfail in their effort to juggle awaythe bitter truth of sacrifice:they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it. Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her occupations, and her whole past life, “Get cured. The rest has no importance.” “But if nothing has any…
A child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more movingor that [she] has more of a right to happiness than the others:it is that [she] is the living affirmation of human transcendence;[she] is on the watch, she is an eager hand held out to the world,[she] is a hope,…
American history has been about guns. Ask any indigenous American. Ask any Republican for that matter… Yesterday I watched an old Western movie entitled, Last Train From Gun Hill, staring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. The plot as you can guess is about outlaws and gun-play. The “good guy,” the one wearing the star…
Choice/Responsibility and Fate/Doing What Your Daddy Done The trick it seems when it comes to philosophy is to make sense of a coincidence of opposites. On the one hand, is our intuitive sense of choice, that decisions are pivot points with consequences for which we blame ourselves (and others) or believe to be praiseworthy. …
Two things, there are two momentous “passages” the unavoidable transitions attendant to this life. Without any question there are two inescapable events that all living must abide, that of birth and that of death. The first passage recedes in the past, is not even in memory. The second great transition is ahead. I refer…
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. day, the national Federal holiday for marking the birthday of Dr. King. I was in high school, in the South when Dr. King was in the news. King was organizing, raising to consciousness the formal and informal practices by which we whites were relegating black citizens to second…
Every manneeds the freedom of other men,in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestlythe consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardeningin the absurdity of facticity. -excerpt, The Ethics…
There is in all things a patternthat is part of our universe.It has symmetry, elegance, and grace–these qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find itin the turning of the seasons,in the way the sand trails along a ridge…We try to capture these patternsin our lives and in…
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This…
