Aldous Huxley stated plainly, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption [SH: note that desire preceded investigation]. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with… Read More Huxley’s Faith and Confession
God and Nihilism in Nietzsche and Sartre. “Nietzsche is often associated with the proclamation, “God is dead,” which does not mean the literal death of God but the collapse of traditional religious beliefs and the loss of objective values. Nietzsche critiqued traditional morality, seeing it as a product of the weak, which suppresses human potential.… Read More Life, Death and Last Words of Jean Paul Sartre
There is hardly a Progressivist Catholic theologian who hasn’t heard of Harvard’s late existentialist philospher and theologian, Paul Tillich, a man of considerable intellect and impact. Most remain in awe of him. Situation Ethics, which Tillich subscribed to, doubtless plays a role in that admiration.”The law of love is the ultimate law”. In Situation Ethics … Read More Consider Paul Tillich
Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Mary Daly, Catherine MacKinnon, UNESCO… Dr James Lindsay is an author, mathematician, and political commentator. He has written eight books spanning a range of subjects including education, postmodern theory, and critical race theory. Dr Lindsay is the Founder of New Discourses, an organization dedicated to shining the… Read More “The Issue Is Always” and Only “the Revolution”
Excerpt from Jean Paul Sartre. Freedom and the Disclosure of Being. “It is through my horror that I am carried toward the future and, insofar as it constitutes the future as possible, my horror nihilates itself. It is precisely the consciousness of being one’s own future, in the mode of not-being, that we call anguish.… Read More Sartre and the Fears of Contingency
I’ve always loved Camus. But his shadow side must be faced. In his novella, The Fall, the Algerian-French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus stops lamenting social injustice for a moment as well as the “meaninglessness” and “absurdity” of an empty Nietzschean universe in general, and turns instead to biography, specifically to his own cruelty. Camus was a… Read More The Falls of Albert Camus
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on “How the New Deal Coalition Fell Apart” in the DNC Chicago riot of 1968. After a moment of goofy kidding around mimicking the “Yippies,” Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland tell the most dramatic story of this seminal event which many of us saw on our TVs, horrifying our… Read More The Riot That Tore the Democratic Party Apart: Chicago 1968.
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
