Essays and Thoughts
Sometimes what sounds the easiest is often the hardest. As everyone who is trying to lose weight can attest, "eat less", "sleep better", "exercise more", are deceptively difficult. The same goes for thinking. In its most elementary, thinking is opening oneself to the other within oneself, to sit down and listen to that seed within … Continue reading Thinking
“Higher Power”. “Inner Child”. “Trauma”. A 21st century technological inept human being cannot but cringe when those words are uttered. Indeed, the entire 12 Step program is cringe and corny all the way through. Its simplicity verges on brutality, One almost cannot help but treat it with irony and sarcasm. Because it really is ridiculous. … Continue reading 12 Step
Out of the thinkers I know, Kant most rigorously theorized Ethics, tying it with Duty, Categories, Freedom, Universal Law, Causality (outside of nature), Immortality, and God. But his insight is remarkably simple: the very state of acting ethically is qualitatively different from everything else we do (what he calls "pathological actions"). It must be done … Continue reading Being Ethical
Frustration is very effective. In general, negative emotions should not be purged. Pain, Anger, Annoyance, are mechanisms for change. They prompt us into action. Pain, in fact, accompanies every single action we do. The sense of craving, the sense of striving, are all forms of pain. The stoics thought that all negative emotions should be … Continue reading Productivity of Negativity
Is language merely a tool for us to arrive at a consensus? For Quine, language is, in a special way, inherently social. Its meaning can only be understood in its use and with other people. There is no private meaning. Language just communicates and normalizes. This is similar to Habermas' idea that when you are … Continue reading Normality and Quine
The most interesting type of love is the purely formal one. A contentless transcendental object=X that is the condition for the possibility of my elusive desire, of my overwhelming, burning, wrenching, parching, swarming thought about an other, not for any fact, any empirical discovery about them, but about them qua themselves. To love them with … Continue reading Love, as I try to think about it again
I don't approve of most of what Stalin did. But he did one thing well when he purged the bureaucrats. Yes, violence is not good. However, when it comes to bureaucracies... Lacan said that the true idiot is not the random person on the street who believes that he is the king, but the king … Continue reading On Meetings and Bureaucracy
Warren's Brain Dumps 