Philosophy

Day 3227, Spinoza.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Video

Almost thirty years ago, I read about Spinoza for the first time, and he became one of my inspirations to dive deeper into the world of philosophy. Every now and then, I will get a reminder of why he inspires me so much, and this video is one of those. 

I dare to say that without Spinoza, there would be no Nietzsche, maybe a little exaggerated, but not in my world where Nietzsche followed Spinoza. Here is a quote from Nietzsche from one of his letters.

“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness.”

Day 3224, the futere is clear for some.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry 
I recognize that shape from the past
it looks like stairs going up
but I am fooled before
and wonder if I ever
should even go there

The former Dutch prime minister is now the boss of NATO. He is warning everyone that we have to prepare for the next war. He is doing that because the warmongers in Washington told him to. Russia is doing the same, and China has joined the party too. I am pretty sure that most people don’t want war, especially not the one these so-called world leaders wish for, because the next war will probably cost half a billion people their lives. We, as outsiders, can do very little because a couple of thousand people, at most, decide our destiny. In the USA, there is a democracy, Russia has a strong leader and a very weak democracy, and China is a dictatorship. It does not really matter what kind of government there is; in the end, a handful of people always decide the destiny of the rest. It is frustrating, and it can make you angry. As an Anarchist, I just hope that in the distant future, we all live in small communities, so small that even if one produces a little dictator, he or she could do little harm to the communities around him let alone the world.

Governments are hiding places for people who wanna play Risk with real people; we are and always will be children, only our toys change. I never took any active part in our so-called democracy and hope no one does in the future.

Day 3221, error.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
From the Souls of Artists and Writers

149 The slow arrow of beauty. -The noblest sort of beauty does not sweep us away all at once, does not make stormy and intoxicating assaults (such beauty easily awakens disgust), but is instead the slowly penetrating sort that we carry around with us almost unnoticed and that we encounter again at times in a dream, but that finally, after it has laid discreetly upon our heart for a long time, takes full possession of us and fills our eyes with tears, our hearts with yearning. -What do we yearn for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful: we imagine that there must be much happiness bound up in this. -But that is an error.

Day 3219, mine.

Daily picture, Quotes

Pyotr Kropotkin

The Conquest of Bread

Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that, every new invention is a synthesis, the result of innumerable inventions that have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can anyone, whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?

Day 3216, no time to look.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Can you imagine that you lived a hundred thousand years ago? On a calm morning, you walk to the lake and look down into the dark water just before you put your hands in it to scoop so you can drink. You see a face, reflected, we might say now, a face like all the others you see around you, but this one is unknown.

These days, you see yourself more often. In the morning, in the mirror, and on pictures you have hanging around or on your phone. I am not sure if we really look at ourselves, but we know it is us that we see, though we probably have a hard time describing ourselves if we have to.  

I have to be careful when discussing how important your looks are and how much it contributes to your self-image. I have had the same haircut and beard lengths for half my life. It was never a choice out of style but out of laziness and practicality. I can trim my hair and beard once a month and be done with it. It is a style I am used to, and it bothers me when my hair gets too long, partly because of how it looks, I have to admit, but also because I don’t like to trim it. I know enough people who pay more attention to their appearance; maybe because I have little to work with, I never really developed that urge. 

Maybe because I was already partly bold and grey when I was twenty-five, I stopped seeing myself in the mirror as any competition in the particular world I was living in; there are standards, no matter where you live, and I didn’t meet them hair wise and didn’t care. Maybe not entirely because of this, but I started paying more attention to how I looked on the inside. To understand what beauty is inside, I started reading books that talk about this, and though beauty in this realm is also in the eyes of the beholder, we can all agree on what is ugly and what is not, even if it is not fashionable and politically correct. 

The mirror in this inner world can be your consciousness. And just like in the real world, we often don’t look deep enough into the eyes we see reflected in the mirror. Maybe this is because of the attention you don’t give it or because you see the look you want to see, the one that is in fashion; the world’s approval is enough for you. Perhaps you are like that person who lived a hundred thousand years ago, and you never had a clear, calm morning when you looked down into a deep lake to see your reflection for the first time.

Disclaimer: these words are a work in progress, and I know from experience that I would write them differently tomorrow, but we live now, and this is how I say it now.

Day 3214, poverty.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book One

17 Finding a motive for one ‘s poverty. – There is clearly no trick that enables us to turn a poor virtue into a rich and overflowing one, but we can surely reinterpret its poverty nicely into a necessity, so that its sight no longer offends us and we no longer make reproachful faces at fate on its account. That is what the wise gardener does when he places the poor little stream in his garden in the arms of a nymph and thus finds a motive for its poverty: and who wouldn’t need nymphs as he does?