Enjoying the view from Limbo
Is that thing alive? Yes.
Is it a human life? Yes.
Is it acceptable to knowingly kill a human without just cause? No.
Can simply not wanting to share the planet with an innocent human who has committed no violence and threatens no harm constitute just cause for killing that human?
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.”
It is always our condition. It is never avoidable. As you move into the fog, you begin to make out the details of what had once seemed impenetrable, and enjoy a moment’s relief from the nervous sense of being lost in your isolation. Then, however, if you are honest, you realize that these newly defined near details merely mask a new set of...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 22, 2020 · Last modified December 25, 2020
Strictly speaking, the opposite of life is not death, but rather non-life. Everything depends, then, on how one defines life, in order to determine, by implication, what non-life entails. That is to say, it is possible that death is not essentially opposed to life at all, if life is defined in such a way that non-life may be attributed to a being that...
There is life, even when death rules — which means that death rules only by the grace of life. The ascendancy of evil only means the recession of good, not its evaporation, for privation is not a substance. Beauty lurks and abides through the ugliest moments, waiting in dark woods…
Where you climb, he soars —
waiting for you in welcome,
or mocking your pains?
Dark wings remind you
that you have struggled all day,
and night is coming.
If you reached the top,
he would be gone, you sense — to
tempt you to new strains….
This week, North Korea has continued to test and perfect its missile systems, while Donald Trump reassures everyone that all is well with his relationship with his good friend Kim Jong Un. Meanwhile, the United States of America, the last hope for any semblance of individual liberty and citizen self-determination to survive on this planet into the foreseeable future, has taken yet another...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 12, 2019 · Last modified February 14, 2019
(If you have not done so, please read Part One and Part Two.) I concluded Part Two of this series with the challenge, directed at all my students, real and hypothetical: “Why are you living a life you don’t want?” In a sense, the answer is obvious: Because they don’t know what life they want. In fact, I believe the problem is even...
To be fair, there are always a few humans out there who redeem the race and its history — perhaps upwards of two or three hundred of them living on the planet at any given time, to speak optimistically — but then, alas, there are the rest of the lot. From the “leaders” on down (in exactly that configuration), humanity often seems a...
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