mostly philosophy
No one wants to hear this, but we are all being mind-controlled, and the truth is not true anymore. You may think that this is a harsh statement, maybe it is, maybe it is not. It depends where you are standing. The problem these days is how do you know what’s true and what is […]
No One Wants To Hear This!
Nietzsche was among the very few who talked about dancing as the complementary art of dancing, both the ultimate Dionysian art.
Here is a list of my posts on Nietzsche and dancing:
In last Tuesday’s post, Stoic philosophers believed that living life according to nature is a way to achieve happiness. The full post is on this link https://maylynno.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/living-life-according-to-nature-the-stoic-principles/
Stoic philosophers transformed philosophy into a praxis, a practical discipline of daily life. If nature is bigger and stronger than all of us and if its actions aim to survival in a rational way, then wisdom is to live according to nature.
Therefore, wisdom is the root virtue without which one can not be ethical nor a philosopher. Even success and real power can’t be achieved without wisdom. Think about Marcus Aurelius who was a Stoic philosopher and one of the greatest emperors of the Roman Empire.
What is virtue? Virtue is a life led according to nature.
Walter Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German philosopher, and a cultural critic, combining elements of German Idealism, Romanticism, Marxism, and Kabbalah. He was associated with the Frankfurt School.
Benjamin was early on keen on art. He saw in photography a democratic form of art. He considered that the photographic reproduction of an artwork (a poster or a postcard for example) was of higher social value than the original (only viewed in a gallery) because the artwork in question could be possessed and enjoyed (very democratically) by the art lover in a time and place that suits them. He sensed that a copy was of higher social significance on postmodern thought and has influenced (in one way or other) a number of late-20th-century art movements, including Pop art and Conceptual art.
Whereas high art needed the intervention of an art expert or critic to explain its true meaning, Benjamin was an admirer of Hollywood cinema because the sound film could be enjoyed collectively by the public without the need for a critic to explain its meaning: “the greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form,” he said of the Hollywood film, “the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.”
In the same frame of thought, Benjamin helped explain urbanization in terms of an historical and ideological shift from a culture of production to a culture of consumption and commodification.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It is a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world. According to its teachings, as social beings, the path to eudaimonia (happiness, or blessedness) is found in accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure or by the fear of pain, by using one’s mind to understand the world and to do one’s part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others fairly and justly.
Nature (understood also as the universe) is rational and deterministic whose actions aim for survival. The universe is governed by the law of reason. There is no hazardous phenomenon in the natural world nor intention. Everything natural happens for a reason.
Humans are part of the big nature; thus the importance to live according to its plan. Otherwise, human actions can provoke a disequilibrium as it is the case today with climate change, endangered species, floods and storms which are all lethal to humanity. If money is the goal, then nature is overexploited. Since nature is rational and tends to harmony, not to forget that it is much stronger than people.
One day, human actions can wipe out all existence. According to Stoic, this is the peek of human foolishness.
Gilles Deleuze was a 20th century French philosopher (1925-1995) who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. His work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literature, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Here is a list of my posts on Gilles Deleuze:
Gilles Deleuze on the world and space dilemma
Gilles Deleuze and his views on people
Gilles Deleuze on desire, becoming an Idiot and dismantling systems
The Idiot: Deleuze’s political concept to crack the system’s wall
Le nomade, le migrant et le sédentaire chez Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari Reading WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (17): Spectres and Personae (Deleuze and Derrida)
Having two different definitions, one is matter (body) and the other is “anti-matter” or spirit (mind), the correlation and the relation between them have made thinkers and religions obsessed. There are mainly two explanations: dualism and monism.
Here is the full document that I posted a while ago:
The mind body connection (part I)
And below is the French version of the document:
Seneca
Ryan Holiday, the specialist of Stoic philosophers and the creator of the YouTube channel Daily Stoic which I highly recommend, talks about the strong relationship between Stoic philosophers and sports. In his video, he breaks down the idea of a workout routine and its benefits to Stoic philosophers. In addition he talks to professional athletes who were inspired by stoicism and how it helped them in their career.
Click on the link below to watch the video:
Le désir est une notion philosophique principale et un concept fondamental pour la compréhension de l’Homme et de son action dans le monde. Ce document ci-contre propose deux définitions du désir:
In continuation of the previous post the-power-of-stories-1, story telling changed completely with the invention of the printing machine in 1450. A story was not recited orally and collectively, but it became an individual solitary activity. How did this shift in stories status affect us?
As aforementioned, a story became written in a book for a solitary individual activity. At its start, reading was the rich and educated pleasure. So, the story lost its collective social and sociable aspect and turned into, not only a solitary activity, but a social class matter.
As we all know it today, reading has many benefits on the brain and on human faculties despite the social segregation it brought for a very long time. Progressively, people became individualistic in a way and more of thinkers. Reading is a slow activity that developed critical thinking, discussions and debates which didn’t exist massively in ancient times. All types of books began to emerge with all types of topics. Books helped science, knowledge, art, philosophy and much more to evolve. This meant, more reasoning, more curiosity and depth, more emancipation.
In other words, political revolutions wouldn’t have taken place, hadn’t the book been invented.
