Saw the one-hour BBC documentary on the Hiroshima bombing yesterday. Shocking. However I do agree with the comment on http://human-nature.com/reason/02/hiroshima.html that too few attention was paid to the why of this incomprehensible act. Probably because, just like that other more recent events 'of major order (Term used in Habermas and Derrida's discussion)', there is no why other than mankind's cruel or megalomaniac tendencies....

Reading this about John Stuart Mill, great English utilitarian thinker:

The boy was educated by his father in Ancient Greek and numbers from the age of 3. Later on also Latin, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Poetry were added; when he was twelve years old he started Higher Education, and joined his father as a clerk at the East India Company when he was 17... and when he was 20 he had a nervous breakdown, uncertain as he was about his emotionless intelligence.

No wonder, the poor kid!!!!!

And then it continues:

He got rid of his depression after he learnt to appreciate other aspects of life: emotions and art, expecially poetry.

Let that be a lesson to us, who spend too much time behind lifeless computers thinking they are all important!

 

 

In yesterday's philosphy class we discussed 2 difference viewpoints on pain.

-J-P Sartre's viewpoint. According to Sartre, you are NOT who you are. There is a distance between you and your conscience. As pain is conscience, you can take a stance against the pain, pain becomes the object to which you can relate. As such, pain can be a means to liberation. Sartre was the philosopher of the resistance during World War II, this is the context in which you should see this. Bear in mind that this viewpoint can easily turn into a sadistic one: where you tell people suffering from pain that they must and can endure.

-Levinas on the other hand, was a Jewish philosopher who had suffered during the holocaust. He did NOT agree with Sartre, and explained pain as a situation where you cannot take distance from yourself. In pain you want to free yourself from yourself but it is impossible. You are stuck with the annihilating force of pain. Pain, in this viewpoint, has nothing of the liberating qualities Sartre attributes to it.

 

 

When I was at university my favourite philosopher was Jacques Lacan, a French psychiatrist. Last week I bought a little book 'television' which is basically an interview with the guy. I had difficulty understanding what he was talking about and realised that most of what I once knew was lost in the years that passed since my college days. So I remembered having written an introduction to his thinking and spent a night typing that in to freshen up my memory. If anyone is interested, you can find it here: http://www.kristien.be/docs/schrijfsels/lacanintro.pdf. Beware though! It is the ramblings of a student's mind