Being Ethical
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
Sex Ed
Perhaps Sex Ed has some benefits. There are statistics showing it. I don’t want to deny its success. But it reveals a much more general failing of schools—the terrible quality of true, genuine, liberal arts education, an education of the person as a whole. It is necessarily to provide kids with certain statistics and certain … Continue reading Sex Ed
Productivity of Negativity
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
The Humanity of Mathematics, from discussing “Event”
(I organize a Maths-Except-That-It-Is-Much-Cooler-Than-Most-School-Maths Society, and during our last meeting a question came up: What do we mean by an “event”? Here is my answer—which reads like a piece of Heideggerian apology): We have to first specify what we really mean by an “event”. When we say event, we can mean an “event” in mathematics … Continue reading The Humanity of Mathematics, from discussing “Event”
“Crushing My Soul”
To be crushed. What does this mean? To not have any room to maneuver. To be pressed into a corner. To not be able to breathe. In short, to not be able to do all that makes life worthwhile—Dance. Sports. Music.. And, along with it, to not be able to think. It is not nice … Continue reading “Crushing My Soul”
Normality and Quine
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
Love. Rethought.
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. Rethought.
On Meetings and Bureaucracy
I don’t approve of most of what Stalin did, but there was one thing that he did do well: he was not lenient to bureaucracy. In the Great Purge, 80% of the party members were purged. 14/16 of army commanders too. And many NKVD members (some 3000 in a month), who themselves were doing the … Continue reading On Meetings and Bureaucracy
The Temporality of The Fall (Genesis III)
The most mysterious founding myth of the West is the fall. “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: … Continue reading The Temporality of The Fall (Genesis III)
Chaos and Personal Responsibility
We all know the thing about chaos—a chaotic system is sensitive to initial conditions, where the effect of a minor variation grows exponentially. But it has just occurred to me what it means for personal responsibility. It is often said that a feature of modernity (late capitalism, as Marxists would say) is the increasing “bureaucratization” … Continue reading Chaos and Personal Responsibility
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