Essays and Thoughts
Everyone loves On Liberty. I have not met a single person who says that it is bad. Even people who do not live up to the standards Mill laid out in On Liberty loves the short book. No matter how much you are against Liberty, it seems like you cannot but praise On Liberty. It … Continue reading Contra “On Liberty”
"Better Never to Have Been," is the slogan of anti-natalism. Procreation is immortal and selfish. It is better for the human race to be extinguished. We have a pro-natal bias that has to be corrected (especially in a democracy, because the more people that are born under a certain demographic group the more power they … Continue reading Anti-Natalism
Hannah Arendt was a master at making distinctions. One of her most enlightening is the distinction between the public, the social, and the private. The public is where men (the gendered pronoun is intended because the concept of the public realm rose out of the experience of the Greek polis, consisting exclusively of man) act … Continue reading The Death of the Public
Resentment (or, to be fancy, ressentiment—signifying the technical Nietzschean definition for the term), is a horribly special emotion. If, for Heidegger, authentic boredom and anxiety fundamentally attunes us to the world, then resentment leads us eternally astray. Resentment is anti-life. It denials rather than affirms appearance. It is not hatred, anger, or envy, and differs … Continue reading Ressentiment
Kierkegaard: "Hope is a pretty girl, who slips away from one’s grasp." And again (!), "He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he … Continue reading Hope Contra Kierkegaard
For Kierkegaard, repetition, in contrast to (the Platonic) remembrance, a forward drive. It awaits a certain fresh recurrence of the wondrous beginning. It is an anticipation of pure faith, incomprehensible but necessary. (Reminding one of K's more famous lines, "life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward.") Repetition is, in some … Continue reading Repetition
The foremost imagery that I associate with the later Heidegger's analysis of technology is the Mine. A place where the logic of "challenging" nature, measuring the resources available, the most efficient ways to mine, the instrumental value of the stones, thus seeing everything as a "standing reserve" to be used and exhausted, "enframing" nature in … Continue reading Minecraft and Heidegger
What excites me most in philosophy are the making and clarifying of concepts that are muddled in everyday thinking. Hannah Arendt is a great practitioner of this, and here is one of her brilliant distinctions. Following the Holocaust, Arendt found it necessary to draw a distinction between guilt and responsibility. Guilt is to deserve punishment. … Continue reading Collective Guilt
Warren's Brain Dumps 