…to get away from the various annoyances in my life is…is my lawn. When I’m out there mowing, edging, watering, even fertilizing, nothing else matters.
In the first instance, we must characterize Being-towards-death as a Being towards a possibility
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Heidegger, Being and Time
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But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history
to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.
There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators.
To define consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth.
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Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror” (1953)
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We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds me to this or that creature. That compound is not the same for another person. I do not have the right to cover all these experiences with the same name. This exempts one from conducting them with the same gestures. The absurd man multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus he discovers a new way of being which liberates him at least as much as it liberates those who approach him. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.
Philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we’re beings toward death, and we’re featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us. We’re beings toward death. At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time, and so it’s desire in the face of death.
And then of course, you’ve got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty,various forms of idolatry, and you’ve got dialogue in the face of dogmatism. And then of course, structurally and institutionally you have domination and you have democracy. You have attempts of people tying to render accountable…elites, kings, queens, suzerians, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to eveyday people.
So philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of- of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy- trying to keep alive very fragile democratic experiments- in the face of structures of domination; patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power, state power. All those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by them.
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Cornel West in Examined Life (via one-bitch-wolfpack)
God I love me some Brotha Cornel West.
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“On the meridian of time there is no justice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, the great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing…
But what, let’s ask, is the aim that makes science treat the world as picture and things as objects? The aim is said to be truth - that’s what science says it wants. But Heidegger argues that it’s something else, that comes to light only once early modern science has become technology. […] It is a way of controlling, it aims at control, by setting-in-place. ‘[From] its beginning modern natural science is in its essence the technological assault on nature and its conquest.’ It’s for this the ground-plan is built by method and industry. Technology is simply an extension of this ongoing effort, so that it is ‘the same’ as science. Placing things into science’s framework confines them in a theory, a step to the full systematic and totalized mastery that now shows itself as the aim all along.
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John Richardson on Martin Heidegger
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The debate about homosexuality comes down to a debate about an over-organized, over-regulated, narrowly oppositional space in which there are only two hierarchically ordered places, a “binarity” of male and female, of male over female. For Derrida, the way to break this up is to open up all the other places that this binary scheme closes off… That is why “feminism,” while constituting a strategically necessary moment of “reversal,” a salutary overturning that purges the system of its present masculinist hegemony, must give way to “displacement,” which is a more radical “gender bender” in which the whole masculine/feminine schema is skewed.
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John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell
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‘The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.’ No pain, no trouble — this is the neurotic’s dream of a tranquilized and conflict-free existence.
You aspire to the free heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your wicked instincts, too, thirst for freedom. Your wild dogs want freedom; they bark with joy in their cellar when your spirit plans to open all prisons. To me you are still a prisoner who is plotting his freedom
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Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarahutstra: First Part
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But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!
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Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part
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