Is arts of less importance than cosmology, genetics or medicine? Maybe I am wrong see an engineer as an illiterate blue collar job. Maybe it is more meaningful to understand the redshift of the expanding universe than to have read Virgil’s Aeneid. Does the chemist have a more lasting impact on humanity than the humanist? What mystery is revealed to the enlightened man: does he follow a path of career or does the mysterious road leads him inside his heart?

Few people know the aesthetic of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, but many are comforted by the magical entertainment of the images on glass. Is the technology that enables the internet more important than the information it sends around the world? Continue reading →

I am not a person who is politically motivated. Politics is the battlefield of social interests, in which the individual is represented but not present. The individual’s interest is sacrificed in the system of representative government to the amassed voice of the collective. Anyone who participates in this late 19th, early 20th century system justifies the distance created between their personal interest and its representation.

A hundred years ago it was the mass organization that vied for representative government and liberated the masses from the rule of the elites. In the era of mass organization through mass media and technologies, the representative government was the logical outcome of historic development. But this system like any other organized collective gravitates intrinsically to abusive power with fascism and stalinism as a result. Only when there are absolute checks to protect the single interest is this system stable enough to maintain the status quo, like in the United States was the case.

New technologies however have created an economic production process that requires greater mobility on a macro and micro scale. Globalization and the rise of a post-industrial socio-economic structure are the necessary outcome of this process. The politicis of the representative system however has not kept pace with these technological developments that drive social organization. Continue reading →

“Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals,
that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.”
Homer, The Iliad (24.503-26)

Milan Kundera’s novel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ from 1984 depicts the idle attempt of man to chase happiness. But happiness to Tomas is what is the bunch of grapes to Tantalus, such is the wreath of life to man. Certainly, the greatest desires of mankind and in history is happiness. Happiness is not only the least well defined objective of man however, it is also trivial. A man of great spirit not per se rejects happiness, nor does he need to be indifferent toward it, but it has no weight in the balance of his objectives.

In the philosophy of personal integrity the pursuit of happiness is undesirable, for happiness is trivial and capricious. Continue reading →

The scholastics of the dark ages were succeeded by the enlightment of Descartes (1596 – 1650 BCE), this we are taught at the public schools in western society. But these public schools are secular but still rooted in the christian dogmas on which they were founded. The Renaissance of Man had created the ideal circumstances in which the Enlightment could take root, and it blossomed and grew into the full reach of the Age of Progress of 19th century Liberalism and the Heaven on Earth of Socialism. But these versions of the history of philosophy or the history of western thought, ignore the findings of Heidegger completely, they ignore the loss of presence to the world of man that the Greeks had possessed. Strangely enough, this presence has never gone lost in the mysticism of Orthodoxy, perhaps especially because of its strong ties with the Greek and Roman orthodoxies. But Nietzsche restored our intuitive understanding of the unity of the Apollonian and Dionysiac soul, and finally Heidegger merged the two pendants into the paradoxical harmony of the Greek ontology.

Fear not those who kill the body, speaks Jesus Continue reading →

At the age of twenty-five the Czech mathematician Goedel published his Incompleteness Theorems. The first incompleteness theorem is the most beautiful mathematic statement I have read, although I must confess that my mathematical knowledge is limited and random at best. But certain ideas appeal to me, it is not even clear if this means that I understand them and the appeal consists of an erupting euphoria that makes itself master of my shallow understanding: eureka, I understand! Or if it means that I stubbornly resist the idea of not grasping the essence of the thought. But eitherway, the aesthetic experience is overwhelming and rare, certainly not a daily commodity for a working man, more common I know for a student or a man unburdened by the obligation of having to make a living.

“For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true 1 but not provable in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.”

Continue reading →

“Do you feel pity?” I asked.
P shrugged his shoulders but his eyes lit up, “What is pity?”
“Compassion. Do you feel sorry for a person who suffers?”
“Pity causes spite.”
“Yes, this is true,” I said, because it does, you know. No person enjoys to recognize one’s own failure, to capitulate one’s independence and freedom and submit to the help of another peer. And I feel pity for the bitter resentment it causes too, but I feel pity, my soul drenches in pity.
“This is true,” I said, “because people are incomplete, but their sufferring is not only self-complacent but it is in need as well. One does not exclude the other, suffering is double headed.”
“People who suffer are selfish. Their need is too absorbing to considerate and I do not feel pity with such people.”
“Let me tell you a story about the peasant Marey, a terrifying figure for the child that Dostoewski was, living at the real estate of his family. In the dark wood while picking mushrooms the child heard suddenly a wolf’s howl. Terrified the child ran out of the wood straight at the peasant Marey who was working the land. Marey comforted the child and put his earthened fingers against Dostoewsky’s lips to hush the child’s cries. Later in the labor camp Dostoewski reminesces the childhood experience and it enables him to dig for the diamond in the common man’s muddened heart.”
“So you believe in the utter goodness of man?” P smirked knowing that this would bring him to a sure victory with a world so evidently full of betrayal and evil intentions. Continue reading →

Let me first distinguish the terms morals and ethics. Morals are the issues of good and wrong, while ethics is the study of morals. Ethics or morality are a social construct not measurable by singles. The individual acting with benefit to his own interest cannot be called an ethically good person although the result of his intentional act if satisfying to himself. Ethics is a social construct, man cannot be both the receiver and source of his own goodness by ethical standards. Individual man is incapable of moral behavior, for morality is the intentional application of ethical acts on fellow man.

Man cannot be moral when inactive or ignorant, it requires a purposeful act of goodness to another to become a moral being.

For example, the outcome of an action by an animal can be judged a good deed by its coincidentally beneficial outcome to one or some, but it cannot be called a moral deed if the intent is not a priori present.
Similarly, can we call a man with noble thoughts a noble person if he fails to act upon them? Although good intent is present, no result of this nobility can possibly be perceived or felt. Continue reading →

The absence of meaning and purpose of life creates a void in the experience of excitement. The aloofness that is caused by nihilist filosophy obliges one to engage oneself consciously. I am continuously caught between this urged sense of obligation to enagage myself and the inescapable and truthful conclusion of meaninglessness. This struggle between obligation to engage and intrinsic aloofness is the nucleus of life. There is no true meaning or purpose in life, but there exists the obligation to delude oneself to believe in the overwhelming passion. The consequence of the essence of life is that we need to renew the delusion of meaning continuously, because it is unrealistic and bound to slip away.