(1)
Art is the universal
medicine—we have
art lest we perish
from the truth.
(2)
Politics is philosophical
to the extent that it thinks,
and philosophy is political
to the extent that it seeks
to establish trust in
its favour.
(3)
'Now tell us what you think about this:
Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
But Jesus knew their evil motives.
"You hypocrites!" he said.
"Why are you trying to trap me?
Here, show me the coin used for the tax."
When they handed him a Roman coin,
he asked, "Whose picture and title are
stamped on it?"
"Caesar's," they replied.
"Well, then," he said,
"give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,
and give to God what belongs to God."'
—(Un)Holy Bible,
New Testament,
Matthew 22:17–21
It is the same powers
that coin and tax—
we cannot have
one without
the other.
(4)
Money has trust
in its favour,
unlike ideals.
(5)
Almost everything under the sun
can be given a sexual reading.
This is the source in fact
of many a joke.
(6)
Let us not underestimate the relative
reliability and permanence to life
modern technological conditions afford us,
including as compared to the moods
and vagaries of humans themselves.
(7)
It is clear today that the social game of
networks, connections, and alliances
is heavily tied in with money and power,
including the very possibilities of
employment and earning a living,
as evidenced by the ubiquitous
expression, 'it's not what you know,
but who you know that matters.'
(8)
One of the charms of learning foreign languages
as an adult is that it enables one to relive a second
childhood as it were of word acquisition, in so far
as we will proceed from basic words to more conceptual ones,
and from simple constructions to more complex ones.
(9)
Collusions between the elite and the mob to
police thought do not bode well for philosophers
who, in any case, are a tiny minority
who, in any case, are a tiny minority
at the best of times,
and have been subject, historically,
to waves of persecution, depending
on the (lack of) quality of
and have been subject, historically,
to waves of persecution, depending
on the (lack of) quality of
the consciousness
of their time.
Power as combining pathology at the top
and at the bottom was subtly highlighted
by director Stanley Kubrick in his film
A Clockwork Orange,
as indicated by the film
Power as combining pathology at the top
and at the bottom was subtly highlighted
by director Stanley Kubrick in his film
A Clockwork Orange,
as indicated by the film
analyst Rob Ager.
[Van Gogh's Prisoners Exercising]
[Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange]
(10)
If philosophy is the friendship of wisdom,
and wisdom is the application of understanding, then
philosophy is the friendship of applied understanding.
(11)
Books that offer recipes for success,
as conventionally understood,
tend to sell better than books offering
the long road to wisdom.
(12)
To know oneself
is most of all to grasp
the relation of the 'I' to the 'me',
one that I have called 'conscience',
the perceiving of perception
and the knowledge of knowing,
which is to say: apperception.
(13)
'Life as the yield of life.—
No matter how far a man may extend himself
with his knowledge, no matter how objectively he
may come to view himself, in the end it can yield
to him nothing but his own biography.'
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human—A Book for Free Spirits,
Volume I, 9. Man Alone with Himself, §.513
Bio-graphy is indeed,
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human—A Book for Free Spirits,
Volume I, 9. Man Alone with Himself, §.513
Bio-graphy is indeed,
etymologically speaking,
the writing of life.
the writing of life.
(14)
Not existence but co-existence
is what makes life tricky,
due to the fact that
'it is hard to be good'
(χαλεπὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι)
and that 'the majority are bad'
(οἱ πλεῖστοι κακοί)—
as two ancient
statements put it.
(15)
The rule of the economic (οἰκονομική)
over the entire spectrum of society
can only serve to erode the political (πολιτικά),
because the latter demands a public space for
the freedom of speech and deed among equals
that is not that of the οἶκος, the household,
which belongs to the private sphere of necessity.
(16)
Negative interactions with close ones can sometimes
outweigh many months of good interactions with them,
depending on the intensity of the disagreement,
because when one is pained from hurt,
one seeks a cause and someone to blame,
whereas the neutral and jolly is taken for what
it is and requires no confrontation.
(17)
Both statism and capitalism are religions.
In fact, they are cults in so far as one cannot
readily escape either without coming a cropper,
all the more so that they feed into each other
as mutually reinforcing forces where
the former, statecraft, can be viewed as the
death-pledge to careless security, and the latter,
capital, as the mort-gage with numbered money.
(18)
The confession by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho,
one that ultimately, in his own words, 'meant nothing',
showcases a certain self-transparency on his part that is
showcases a certain self-transparency on his part that is
indicating of a grain of integrity, at least in so far as he does
admit to his true apathic nature, both to us the viewing
audience at the beginning and to his own lawyer at the end.