Tagged: materialism

Reflections on Appearances

The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...

Reflections On Meaning and Modernity

When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...

Materialism Makes Us Comfortable

The modern materialist insists he is right because his explanations obviously work. In this case, “to work” entails (and more than just incidentally) sucking all the sense of meaning out of human life as such. But to say that something works is to assume a specific goal in accordance with which “working” may be judged. Materialism works, therefore, if one’s goals are unrelated...

Materialism, Romanticism

Without the body, nothing else is possible. That is to say, the body is the necessary condition of all earthly existence. Does it follow from this that the body is the essence of life, to which we must look for all our understanding of ourselves and our choices? If you answer yes, then you are a materialist. Without the feelings, which are rooted...

Walking Away from the Body

Many people walk regularly, but we do not all walk for the same reasons. If you walk primarily for your bodily health, or to “get your blood flowing,” then your walking is not similiar to mine. I walk every day, as much as possible, and often for hours. And I do so, in the final analysis and in ultimate effect, for one reason...

The Question of the Body

As much as our modern temperament is inclined to demand simple reductions of everything — simple reductions being the wisdom of the common man, suitable for an egalitarian age that has elevated commonness to an ideal — there is in truth no single question that defines or epitomizes philosophical investigation. Rather, the essential questions of the philosophic pursuit may be represented as manifestations...

My Considered Reply to Elon Musk’s Peace Plan

Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire who has devoted his whole adult life to getting as rich as possible, often by selling out all free market principles to gain government protections and special government contracts, and an overgrown baby who flirts with libertarianism in the post-Ayn-Rand-follower sense, i.e., freedom redefined as license to indulge in recreational drugs and have all the mindless fun you want...

Materialism and Nihilism

Materialism as a social foundation leads to nihilistic self-loathing as a moral principle. The reason is clear to anyone who has thought through the implications of human life as matter seriously, which is to say without the self-deceiving funhouse optics of materialism as “scientific rationality” or “absolute freedom.”

Death, Immortality, and Courage

Late modernity, having adopted naïve materialism as its religion, has dismissed the belief in the immortality of the soul, not merely as a logical consequence of rejecting the soul itself, but rather morally, objecting to the belief in an immortal soul as a kind of cowardice, specifically a refusal to accept the “hard truth” of life’s brevity and the absolute finality of death...

Nietzsche, Materialism, and Progress

In his final sane treatise, The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche praises Descartes as the first philosopher with the audacity to describe animals as machines, i.e., as material mechanisms devoid of soul (§14). As the pioneer of this ingenious and ultra-modern idea, however, Descartes, so says Nietzsche, lacked the necessary critical distance from his religious-metaphysical inheritance to take the next step, namely to concede that man...