The best individual, as conceived by Aristotle, is a very different person from the Christan saint. He should have proper pride, and not underestimate his own merits. He should despise whoever deserves to be despised. The description of the proud or magnanimous man is very interesting as showing the difference between pagan and Christian ethics,…
Category
Philosophy
Neitzsche aka Freddy The ‘Stache’
Poster via dead-philosophers.com
A New Language. Do you speak it?
Another Language Recently another language has grown up within the one others use. The new language has a special way: it avoids saying obvious things as if they are not so obvious; it never proclaims something that the kind of person being addressed is presumed to know already; it courteously gives credit to the needs…
The Three Dominant Classes of Contemporary America
We have three dominant classes in contemporary America: We have the poor and outcast… We have a slipping working class that considers itself middle class. And we have powerful, and often greedy, Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats. Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats dominate our political, economic and cultural systems. Powerful words tweeted by…
Only a weak, deficient being can love.
“…even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simple that with love, I am ‘something’—in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being…
A post about procrastination. Don’t wait, Read it now!
This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why…
A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“My grandfather came into my room. I had already undressed and was lying in bed. He sat down on the edge of my bed. He had in his hands a box of liqueur-filled chocolates. His eyes, usually mischievous and smiling, that night looked at me from under his gray prickly crew-cut with a tired and…
The philosopher should not care about eating and drinking
The philosopher should not care about eating and drinking, but of course he should eat as much as is necessary; there is no suggestion of fasting. And we are told that Socrates, though indifferent to wine, could, on occasion, drink more than anybody else, without ever becoming intoxicated. It was not drinking that he condemned,…
Kierkegaard on Genius, Irony & Mysticism
September 6, 1839: Most men think, talk, and write as they sleep, eat and drink, without ever raising the question of their relation to the idea; this only happens among the very few and then that decisive moment has in the very highest degree either the power to compel (genius), or it paralyzes the individual…
The Man Who Proved God Didn’t Exist
Sometimes the thing we desire most is the very thing that prevents us from obtaining it.