amnesial fogs

foggy ideas about outer, as well as inner, histories...of external events and places, and ideas and traditions, lived by

"By Jupiter!" "Oh my Zeus!"

Jupiter

c. 1200, "supreme deity of the ancient Romans," from Latin Iupeter, from PIE *dyeu-peter- "god-father" (originally vocative, "the name naturally occurring most frequently in invocations" [Tucker]), from *deiw-os "god" (see Zeus) + peter "father" in the sense of "male head of a household" (see father). Cf. Greek Zeu pater, vocative of Zeus pater "Father Zeus;" Sanskrit Dyauspita "heavenly father." The planet name is attested from late 13c.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Jupiter

Zeus 

supreme god of the ancient Greeks, 1706, from Greek, from PIE *dewos- "god" (cf. Latin deus "god," Old Persian daiva- "demon, evil god," Old Church Slavonic deivai, Sanskrit deva-), from root *dyeu- "to gleam, to shine;" also the root of words for "sky" and "day" (see diurnal). The god-sense is originally "shining," but "whether as originally sun-god or as lightener" is not now clear.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Zeus&allowed_in_frame=0

mundanity

the modern global theology of earthly life: the icons and prayers of advertising

fearless theology?

theologians' assumptions that God is distant, distracted, or "dead"
or...
the unfear of the Lord is the beginning of theological erudition

everyone

those no One, are like everyone

bemythed theologians?

reading periodically for four decades in theologians' centuries-old descriptions of "God", His character, motivations, acts, intentions...

they seemed to be bemythed

   

if religion is the opiate of the masses...

...then what were the theologians, philosophers, metaphysicians, mystics, et al, on?
some heady Italian, German, Latin, French wines?

Jefferson and Nietzsche?

surely it would be interesting, and perhaps quite enlightening, to compare the reactions and relations to "Platonism", also in "Christianity", of Jefferson and Nietzsche!
 

Leibnitz on God?

what one learns of Leibnitz on God is Leibnitz
(but in this he is just representative of many others.)
 

divine self-deception?

if all religions past and present...
and all "spiritualities" however conceived...
plus all philosophies...

are really just mankind talking to itself ?...
 

skeptical?

a hopeful skeptic

the self-determination of persons?

Moscow (in)sights: so many other-determined.

   

modern misosophy...

which might also be termed philosophism...
do these expressions not well characterize much of what is taught academically/professionally as "philosophy"
 

be in-Formed

Platonically speaking:
one must be in-Formed to recognize the world in which we live
 

"Why for God's sake did that...?"

or for man's?

"God only knows!"

some saw an ancient first light...
     which others conceived ever repeating...

one sought on a mountain top...

outside a cave...

an other inside...

some looked into a mirroring macrocosm...

others up to an empyreal, throned Lord...

some for a loving Father...

one sought The Reason...

another a wholly, holy other...

one looked into an abyss...

others yet view into an ultra-deep field after an incomprehensible Bang...

The $$$ Habit Hobbit

The Hobbit: The (so-called) Desolation of Smaug...
in the main another action film, part two of three making as much money as possible
 

escape to a Sinai of ideas

travailing alone...seeking escape from the surrounding dearthly mundane mind...
in search of some sacred Sinai of veridical ideas
 

Bing's "Silent Night" Magic in Moscow

in the center of Moscow...
inside the new Galleria Shopping Center (http://moscow-gallery.com/)...
Bing Crosby's hymnal version of "Silent Night" sounds...
with prices 10x higher than in the USA, from whence much of Moscow's Christmas music comes...

the deep, mysterious consoling goodness inside both the 1818 Austrian-composed song and Bing's 1947 voice and version...

what do Russians make of it?...
besides atmosphere for Christmas and New Year's shopping season?...
 

oh my god!

Moses' ?
Plotinus' ?
Paley's?

statues in our fog

we live as if glimpsing religious statues and sculptures through thick drifting fogs
 

gnothi seauton?

we are asleep...
our religions, beliefs, "philosophies", etc like consoling (or nightmarish) dreams imagined real
 

the right eye

looking from right to left eyes, we indirectly briefly "encounter" each other stranger

and if a god dies, shall he live again?

a historic necropolis of Gods, ruling-consoling spirits, theologies and theodicies, holy books, mystics, philosophers,...
or are they rather merely asleep in cemeteries
 

World War words

the first world war, 1914
the First World War (UK), World War I (US), ~1939 (Time magazine, June 12, 1939)
the Second World War, World War II, 1939 (Time magazine, June 12, 1939)
(interesting facts on these terms in wikipedia, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war
 

somnambulism in ideas too

human daily somnambulism is of those working and living with body, soul and mind
 

social salvations in medias res

there are only temporary ideas and solutions to the best and right way to organize and understand one's life and live, physically and "philosophically".
like detailed unchiseled biographies on a dour yet boastful Edinburgh tombstone.

2 lessons from history...

Lesson # 1: humans do not learn from history.
Lesson # 2: humans do not realize they do not learn from history.

philosophy? philalethia? philomathy?

philosophy -- "wisdom"?

     but if few agree that there is and what is "wisdom" (as was not or less the mind of Pythagoras)

philalethia -- "truth"?

     but if the existence of "truth" is so disputed and disagreed...

philomathy -- learning

"In the beginning, Science..."

most every person who has ever watched a science program on the universe believes they have "seen" the "real" "beginning of the universe" in the increasingly sophisticated imagery of the Big Bang...
just as in times before in Christendom and its secularized descendants there was the Biblical inner imagination and Church imagery of the Creation of the World...

imagery has replaced words to the same effect, and probably the same reality and certainty

need a cultural history of the "beginning of the world"

the error of Er?

and if the widespread, collective assumption -- by which many millions actually 'live and move and have their being' -- that we are supposed (to be able) to enjoy life and world...is an idealistic error?

like an error of an errant living Er?
 

Plotinus and Moses?

quick answer to an educated, skeptical pessimist on their relationship...

they both claimed peak experiences, though one inner, the other on a mountain top in the Sinai...
and both are said to have experienced the Founder and CEO of the Universe, the Top "I"!
 

the future end of the "Big Bang"

as history shows, the current speculative scientific "mythology" of the Big Bang will pass, as have all such similar scientific "certainties"...though it may take a few more years than the mere seconds it took for the "creation" of the universe...
 

cultural imperialism?

like Alexander the Great's?

not another mundane day

striving to live so that "just another day" does not pass that way away

Centuries-Old Bible Study Maze: Enter at Your Own Risk

a serious study of the history of scholarship and study of the Bible is a kind of centuries-old idea-maze in which one enters at the risk of becoming lost, possibly escaping in despair, or having long lost any beliefs and faith one had upon entrance

Bibliocide by Human Causes

By the time the centuries long investigation of the Bible was complete, the patient was dead.
 

had the real Newton been known...

...how would he have been viewed by eg Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, Steiner...

the Bible's via dolorosa

one might speak of a centuries-long via dolorosa and Golgotha of the Bible in history

the Bible's eclipse by...

the earthly...
human reason...
the Enlightenment...

Review: Anthropography, Vol. 2 (?), Part 21.

"A fascinating tragicomedy...with love and death, sex and slaughter".
-- Moscow Review of Books, December 6, 2013, Stephenwolf

For those of you coming late, or confused by its characters and events, it is highly recommended to read and study the story leading up to now.

endless travel

why is it that people travel so often and so far and don't come back changed, or seem to even conceive to regret having not

Platonic pleasure

recognizing the shadows on the "cave's wall"
including one's own
   

Modern European Church Uncles

Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Otto may be seen as "Modern UnChurch Fathers", or let them be European Church Uncles, both in and out of the confessions, seminaries, university religious studies departments,...
yet however much of a "system" they claimed, or may be found or understood by scholars to have or to have not had (at least in their writings, teachings, or preachings, if not deep, personal beliefs and positions), their's are really just their own personal "theologies" of the world as they experienced and understood it...
more Modern European "Church Uncles" than Church Fathers.
though certainly suitable for academic consideration without end.
 

Huxley contra Pythagoras: philosophy after agnosis?

Huxley's agnosis may have been conceived mainly in contrast to Christianity, and Deism or Theism
but it is clear that "philosophy" can hardly have a substantial meaning when there is an assumption that there is no sophia, no wisdom, to be sought and found.

so many nice things!

in Soviet times so few nice things...

and the consciousness of most was, and now otherwise is, so determined.

Film review: "Paganini: The Devil's Actor"

Seems that a skilled violinist who looks like this...

needed, unsuccessfully, the inspiration of the devil to also act.

Rome did not fall in a day

that "Rome is falling" had been preached over the centuries since it did, while others were enjoying the descent!

the somniloquism of theology

after 4 decades...
theologians discussing "God" are like people asleep unaware they are in a dream

the theologies of children

the simple believer may naively assume a "loving, fatherly 'God'", while modern theologians naively -- and all-too-seriously -- assume that their words of and about "God" are more than speculating about they know not what

mirror mirror on the all

Otto's ideas of the numinous experience, speculative as it is, is another example of man's self-reflection of himself. self-mirroring.

the physical sublime in "Into the Mind"

Dramatic, almost impossible filming of extreme skiing in steep mountains...

more aptly named "Into the Emotions"...
by and for those for whom "gnarly and "awesome" are adequate articulations of peak experiences among peaks -- once described as "sublime", pictureque.
the  desire, the need for intense experience -- "extreme" -- not contemplation of the sublime, but the need now to experience it at the edge of death, thrill, danger...

Unconvincingly collaged around a loosely-construed idea of 13-stage initiation a la Tibet.

Don't expect to need use your mind in "Into the Mind". But see incredible risk-taking...

the science of religion...

was a dead end street which some are still trying to map

Isaiah 6:3 Holy, Holy, Holy...?

rather, I say, uhhh...
'Silly, silly, silly, is the Lord of Earth, the whole world is full of his story.'

abandon hope all ye who enter

Kant

two apples

would be interesting to muse on the origins, histories and currencies of human "default (un)consciousnesses", from Eve's to Job's...

sacred Red Square?

a Duma deputy has it seems described Red Square as sacred ground...

...it is pretty $afe to $ay that -- a$ide from the ground$ and propertie$ of the rich and powerful of Ru$$ia -- that little can be agreed to a$ $acred in Mo$cow the$e day$.

anti-multiculturalism as an English lesson in Moscow

overheard a lesson in a Starbucks by an American who likely didn't suspect it was a native-speaker sitting within good hearing range.

an English lesson lambasting the USA, including admitting "freely" (to his cute Russia student) that he is an anti-multiculturalist and a racist...and how "20,000,000 Mexicans" are ruining America... "which doesn't really exist as a country anyway now"... and blacks have five kids with five different fathers for benefits... about how he and his indifferent (East) Indian neighbor in the USA don't speak, having nothing in common... something against the Chinese...

an odd English lesson in Moscow on a Saturday afternoon

religion and politics

"Dispensing advice that dated back at least to the seventeenth century, etiquette writers stressed that relgious controversy was to be shunned and the very topic of religious doctrine avoided. Politics came under a similar prohibition. In social gatherings, civility supplated substance."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, p. 158.
   

the Ninth is not enough

Beethoven's 9th...
by the Vienna Philharmonic in Moscow...
bought an expensive seat

but it is still not enough...not deep enough for our psyches.

20th century opiate of the people

consumerism as the replacement "opiate of the people"
and much better than crusades and jihads.

The Divine Right of Masses?

the Divine Right of Kings might not have been so bad had they truly been the servants of the Divine.
in the mean time, we are in the time of the earthly rights of the masses.

a broken conversation in Beijing's Bookworm, 2012

need to finish the conversation with Cathy, from the Netherlands, lawyer on sabbatical 2012, polyglot...who spoke with in Beijing's Bookworm July 2012
 

unquestionably so

there may be no Answers
but the questions are real

avoiding the skull

a popular, ongoing, unconscious assumption that life is judged by life, not by death as a mere void
ie, the meaning of life is not sought in death

middle-classed Weltanschauung

the middle-classification of the world, life, experience...

the ultimate raison d'etre

the raison d'etre seeking the Reason in Being

in the era of equality

as is evident on a walk on any street anywhere anytime...
continuum hierarchies physical, psychic, mental and 'spiritual'

branding

herds of cattle are painfully branded for identification; most humans seem to enjoy doing it to themselves

all nations are created exceptional

as an Austrian diplomat said in a TV interview a couple of days ago regarding American exceptionalism...
'It is a 19th century concept. All nations are exceptional...or all are equal'.

an exposing politeness

the Starbucks was full...
an intelligent looking Russian couple waiting for their orders saw a table they had espied coming free grabbed by one of the many teen girls typical in them

knowing I was to leave, I caught the woman's searching eye, indicating that my table would be free.

gathering my books and coat, she approached speaking English to me -- which virtually never happens due to my "Russian appearance".

"Why did you speak to me in English?"
"I didn't know if you spoke Russian."
"But how did you know I was a foreigner and not Russian?"
"I don't know...I guess it was the politeness."
 

top brand consumer cathedrals of Moscow

as Moscow increasingly successfully duplicates the "cathedrals" of globalizing consumer religion, it will of course be applauded as civilized and successful
 

decades of truly bad facts

the names Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, NSA spying scandal...ruin a reputation.
but would be less of a shock to those who study the deeper aspects of American foreign policy and action vis-a-vis the CIA, et al, since eg WWII.

self-revelation

each is an apocalypse
for most a revelation occurring out about them, but including them.
rarer are those whose lives were an apocalypse of their selves...
some of these are still known and famous; others were apparently simply mad

elements of a higher "sociology"

Manicheanism

     internal
     external
in from intellectuals to oafs

genes' jeans

blue jeans show off the lower tendency to herd

the ahistoria of 'the sixties' (and 'New Age')

if those in "the sixties" had not naively mis-imagined that they lived at the beginning, apex and end (in two senses) of history, then it would not have been "the sixties"

(the "New Age" was and is similarly well-informed)
 

Steppenwolves amid societies' sheep

how to think and feel when daily seeing so many who have the inner independence of sheep?
 

endarkening

the Enlightenment was also an Endarkenment

naturally

the belief that natural is good, derives in part from the disbelieved God's "and he saw that it was good"

religion by another name

The Religion of Science
Main Branch: Evolutionism
 

a stupid theft thwarting

the two Caucasus men who walked into the Starbucks at the Moscow Europeiski Shopping Center did not look or act at all like they were there for coffee.

one nodded to a third man already inside, and all three were just milling oddly around...
they observed everywhere...for a table at which to sit? unlikely.
was the tall one going to the back for the restroom?... no.

then, just beside the counter in the very center of the shop, at a stool, a Russian fellow sat absorbed in his laptop world.
the smaller thief, by chance a yard from me, lifted the arm strap of the shoulder bag, and was getting ready to walk out. I reached for the arm strap, took it from him, and put it back.
to his surprise and mine.
he then ambled out...

the bigger one spun a small pocket knife in his hands as he looked at me.

no one else even noticed that all this occurred, including the man in his computer world.
(though there was a ceiling camera directly above this.)

closer to impromptu stupid than courageous.

music saves

not in human cathedrals...
nor sublime peaks...
nor lakes districts...
nor "paradisaical" forests...
the communicating gods have retreated into music.
 

a Southern bell

living inside a semi-conscious sleep of received ideas.
 

so, what's the story?

who in all of human history has lived without any story?
even if it were that there is none.
 

the play must go on

dreamy marionettes of social traditions' ideas, ways, beliefs, mores, manners, attitudes...
 

gnothi seauton: Fukushima

it is not just that men and women of Man overestimated their knowledge and capabilities to manage dangers such as "nuclear energy", but that once a deadly example of their inabilities is shown, like Chernobyl, now like Fukushima, they refuse to take realistic and consistent notice of it, and to thereby learn from it
homo insapiens, again.

Godrise, Godset?

the gradual believing...
and the gradual disbelieving...
of "God"
 

an old gods' home?

old folk's home?
old god's home
Zeus
Thoth
Baal
Jehovah
God the Father
...
 

anno Nietzsche?

BN: before Nietzsche
AN: in the year of Nietzsche
 

the ongoing, living world of traditions and ideas

waking in the ongoing living world...
discovering one is out of it, lost...
not in the clear physical, natural, even social, worlds...
but in medias res traditional beliefs, ideas...of religions, mores,...in and by which
-- as one can increasingly clearly realize --
most dream and move and have their beings...
and then seeking and studying for years to find one's position therein...
inside the ongoing, living world of traditions, beliefs, ideas...

the United States Congress: sic transit gloria mundi?

watching the US Members of Congress this week has lead to a new idea:

sic transit trivia mundi

above their natural element

mediocrities in high places are literally above their element
 

dated parochial politics in DC

provincial mediocrities in power,
on a global stage
   

what does it matter?

why would, or how could, merely evolved matter need meaning?
 

sic transit gloria mundi?

Darwinian vs Dantean

Most men here are on the ape side of the angels. They will prove it you doubt their "dignity".

Many women closer to copying magazine-dressed dolls.
 

"In the beginning...

matter...."
 

man: the immeasure of all things

the deepest fact(or) about human knowledge -- be it in what is now divided into and called eg the sciences and the humanities -- is not that man is mostly talking to himself, but that he so little recognizes this.
 

floating mid-Pacific in Moscow's Metro

Kon-Tiki, chapter 5...

the smile in history ; )

the polite smile...
though it might hide scorn, boredom or hate...
may (have) help(ed) prevent wars.
; )
a study of the influence of the smile in history, as also in art history, in literature, is needed.
 

TV commercials...

pollute the person
 

the sunset proof of God

when he quietly said of the rather extraordinarily colorful mid-August sunset with unusual clouds, something to the effect that 'it showed there is a God', he in fact merely voiced a vague version of the idea that Nature reveals the work of God...in a way traditional in his region and social group
 

unconscious history

as there is intellectual history, and the history of ideas, so there should be a history of un- or semi-conscious assumptions about the "nature of the world"

   

"life, liberty, and the pursuit of..."

insight
 

dispersed responsibility = ?

= 0 responsibility...
in Nazi Germany, and "Greed is good" USA.

A criminal court should be set up in New York, London, other capitals, to prosecute the 2000s'
Economic Crimes Against Humanity
 

ergo

Some year or so ago, President Barack Obama, amid some recurring problem with the United States Congress to fund the government, said something to the effect that 'this is not how the greatest country in the history of the world should act'. But it did so act, ergo...
 

unacknowledged lighthouses of the world?

ignored, rarely-noticed human lighthouses...
of society, world, life, history.
 

unconsciously being human

most are unconscious of the ideas in and by which they live
 

Meaning

a history of human ideas of Meaning

a history of human ideas of Meaninglessness
 

$ vs ?!

the ? at and about the mind and heart of world, life and self
 

the ideas in which we sleep, move and have our being

recognizing that suburbs life, the hunting and country clubs, the summer camps, going out into "the woods", camping, the seeking of some consolation and/or reverie in nature... are in fact embodiments, realizations, of ideas in which most are happy to blithely pursue their life, liberty and...happiness" unreflectively... or at most semi-conscious in and of the ideas, in thought, of what they are doing, is a solitarizing awareness and awakeness.

(reflection on Peter J. Schmitt's, 1969, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in American Culture)
 

created equal?

yes indeed, inthought, inword...
in their virtues and vices
 

if "all the world's a stage"...

where are the director, producer(s), the scriptwriter(s)?
 

the Moscow drowned

the barren Soviet social ideology has over the past two+ decades been gradually flooded by the consumerist mentality and raisons d'être...
and like much of the rest of world, most seem rather content to seek to be happy so.

few seem wishing to struggle to keep their heads above water, gasping for culture, for much of any aire of higher things...
  

a changed Moscow -- summer 2013

anyone who saw the center of Moscow only at the beginning of summer 2013 will be shocked at how much it has changed by fall's begin. including the absence of what had become omnipresent street advertising.
 

after "hell on earth"...

those who have been through "hell on earth" can hardly communicate with those who haven't.

Dante's limits

Did Dante Alighieri actually travel into Hell, he'd unlikely have made it to Purgatory, and likely would've committed suicide failing trying to describe it all.
   
 

ontological children

most all of those who speak about and for "God" in reality have the ontological maturity and psychic awakeness of children playing.
 

the worthless lifestyles of the rich, powerful and famous?

high living and plain thinking?

ardent passions of critiques of social decadence, UnBildung, the worthless lifestyles of the rich, powerful and famous,...cannot but be sobered and matured by learning convincingly of the centuries old historical recurrence of both.

-- thoughts on: The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E Shi, 1985.
 

conscious amid sleepers

to gradually recognize and separate from the ideas in and by which people around one still sleep...
to shed shared cliches of thoughts and emotions, reactions, attitudes...
to even escape the habituated psychic tradition of workdays and weekends...

to find one's own inner relation to the world, with one's own thoughts, feelings, days, views...
which can consciously replace those in and by which one was raised, and in and by which those around one still "live"
 

Putin's rhetorical combative political theology?

"We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." V. V. Putin, Op/Ed NYTimes, September 11, 2013

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." US Declaration of Independence, July 2/4, 1776, written mainly by Thomas Jefferson.

Well, now we have President of Russian Vladimir V. Putin (without attribution) less or more consciously citing Jefferson, who himself said he was just expressing the mind of the British Colonial American times, when he penned what later sociologists would call the "America Creed".

But is it true? And does the President of Russia really believe it? Or is he just using "God", a theology of politics, as a convenient political pawn?

And in a piece written by a President with a questionable personal CV related to "democracy"... about one nation's killing of its own people who want(ed) "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and "equality"... about whether another nation, or nations, is, or are, to enforce international agreements on protecting human rights...does he want attempt to voice the rest of the "American Creed" to America? to the world? to "men" or just to nations? and Russia? in his taking exception to America's claim to exceptionalism?
   

deus ex machina, 2013

considering the details of human history, and contemporary facts of the human condition, an impossible divine intervention seems the most realistic hope... ;)

see deus ex machina for how it was rejected by eg Aristotle and Nietzsche.

"Privet, Russia" again!

the hosts and guests of RT's "Privet, Russia" are not really as shallow, trivial and gabby as they appear, but they do seem to give it a good sincere professional effort
 

Nietzsche as gnothi seauton of Europe

one could argue -- as some have, if in other words -- that Nietzsche was a individual gnothi seauton for European Man and "Culture" of his time.
 

shopping or Bildung

and pretty much the entire life of shopping and consumerism is in the most fundamental contrast to Bildung in its relation to the inner life.
 

a time asleep: "AD"

again I note:
the year, now [September 8,] "2013" is an external, temporal frame not only which most people no longer accept, or reflect on, the basis for, or at any rate do not much live so.
and they are -- also in this way -- asleep to the fact that the year according to which they not only count their lives, and their "location", their time in time, has no obvious or certain meaning in earthly, solar, galactic time.
the time frame by which people count and order their lives, is one in and to which they are asleep
 

living with flatlanders

how very few have dramatic mountains, or rich cities, inside to explore...
 

the myths peoples live by...

and the myths they kill by.
 

the chosen ones: euphoria(s) in history?

whether of nations or individuals, in Sinai deserts or central Asian steppes, whether in small sects in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean or "New Age" California, and whether viewed sub specie aeternitatis or sub specie humanitatis...this "psychology", this "sociology", of being chosen, of being capable and actual to speak of one's special "chosen" individual or social place in history, in time, in world, in cosmos, must be clearly understood in the manner of self- and social-knowledge.

euphoria must be understood here, also as a "driver" of and in history
   

the history of mental milieus

the history of the changing, molting mental climate(s), the mental milieu(s), of the ideas by which, in time, the passive vast majorities as also the more active minorities 'live and move and have their being', is the human world in which they find identity(ies) and meaning(s) to survive
 

RIP Philosophy?

a history of the institutionalization of philosophers is needed to understand the death and burial of philosophy in the modern universities

a moment civilizing a tribal mind in Moscow

New housewares shop in basement of new shopping complex
Need a new shower head
Locate their unpriced selection in shop shelves
Ask youngish man with shop shirt-logos the price...
"I don't know the price," he responded dismissively.
"You should know the price," I said with my ongoing motive of civilization, training.
"No, I should not know the price," he replied looking at me with challenge in his stance and glance.
"You work here?" I said, with no condescension or aggressive attitude or look.
"I'm Georgian." (As if that was an answer.)
"And I'm a...(as I searched for the word "customer" in Russian)..."
"...I will check the price."

He was not yet civilized, or trained, enough -- when he told me "130 rubles" -- to even reply to "Thank you."
 

conversations with the dead

unfortunately and dismayingly, about the only serious, substantive, thoughtful and educated conversations I can find these days, is with often dead and/or distant authors
 

a history of tans?

and a history of attitudes to tans might be rather interesting, revealing even... also in literature and painting...
certainly in the 19th century being lily-white showed one did not need to work...
as in periods and places during the 20th when having a deep tan in eg winter might indicate -- before tanning salons -- the same.
but this is in fact superficial...
 

moon tanning?

at full moon, at varying distances and earth seasons, what is the range that sunlight reflected from the moon to the earth heats the atmosphere, and earth features?
 

cultures of kissing...

watching teenagers "tongue wrestling" in public...
even kissing at all in public was rarely if ever to be seen in the USSR
 

back to the durdom

arriving from Berlin in Moscow, overheard a quite common looking, pudgy Russian woman, on reaching the crowd at Passport Control, say to someone beside her: "Durdom nachenayetsa". ('The madhouse [or the house of fools, or idiots] begins".)
indeed.

who gives a damn, anyway?

for the almost innumerable few who read this... for July: search Stephenwolf + GerMania
  

America's loss of moral authority? the malefit of the doubt

though for many it was McCarthyism or the involvement in Vietnam, for other (the Long) Civil Rights (War), for some the assassinations of the 60s, "Watergate", for others eg "The College of the Americas",...onto the financial malpractices of the 2000s, and kindred international and domestic, but it is perhaps an irreversible change in attitudes, when the USA's "moral authority and leadership" is undermined, undermined now by what will be a tendency to skepticism, to disbelief...not the benefit, but the malefit, of the doubt,  influenced by such as "secret rendition", "torture" in other words, permanent detainees in "Guantanamo", and most recent and influential(?)...the spying of the USA secret agencies on apparently everyone in the world possible.
the demise of the USA both domestically and internationally has been predicted from various views, historical contexts and times, since the War of Indepence...but the loss of American moral authority, seems now to be an irreversible global pandemic.
who will simply believe and trust again?

music abuse

few may be sure whether God and the hierarchies are, even invisibly, extant, but perhaps only a few would question whether music and its power exist, though indeed there would be arguments about whether and how it is abused and trivialized, used to eg manipulate and control (eg in "commercials").
but music is often, in this writer's view, abused.

question to "Cathy of the Netherlands"...

...who I met in Beijing's Bookworm July 13, 2012:
is it correct to write: sic transit trivium mundi?"

self-befoolment?

studying in the history of ideas, religious...
mankind's willful, perennial self-befooling?

sound and fury, signifying...

history -- the story of mankind's self-deceptions?

Anthony of the Desert meets Goethe in der Campagna

Michelangelo, The Torment of Saint Anthony, c. 1487-­88

Tischbein, Goethe in der Campagna, 1787

wax lyrical?

wane lyrical
wax poetic
wane poetic
wax prosaic
wane prosaic

plotless, Plotless, plot lost or Plot lost?

are we in a plotted or plotless story?
the search for its meaning.

sunlight in Moscow

the light from the sun the past two days here has had an extraordinary character. like it was 'whitening' all it touched. but what has made this so?

"the Arbat"

no intelligent and discerning individual could long be satisfied and pleased by the sights and visages on the obligatory walk along the Old Arbat.

Goethe turned to stone

Goethe, after some five years in the small Weimar society, turned to "stones and plants" as a kind of replacement for the social isolation he found himself increasingly inside of.
this before his escape to Rome.

"killer" of buildings = ?-cide

a word needs be created to label those who destroy buildings. ?-cide.
iconoclast is somewhat close, though that mainly applies to the contents of buildings, eg icons in cathedrals.

(where is the polyglot I met in July 2012 in Beijing's Bookworm, who might can help with this!?)

"Priv'et Russia!" -- Program Host Job Responsibilities

Applicants must be able to take a 15-30 second story, and chat about it insipidly for 5-10 minutes.
Higher education is not required.
http://rt.com/on-air/privet-russia/

gnothi seauton of nations?

gnothi seauton and its avoidance belongs principally to individuals, but it is perhaps unfortunate to and in history that those nations that might try (have tried) to, seem almost constitutionally unwilling to face themselves realistically

flattening the world

does your mentality make the world flat again?

the soul of tattoos?

tattoos -- superficial social patchwork displays of what are not real inner developments, emotions, stories?

do not go gentle into that good night?

rage, rage, against the dulling of the day!

the Terror(s)

ever at least since the French Revolution has it been possible to prove ignorance of (the lessons of) history -- even now on into the "21st century" -- of the what the majorities will eventually do.

Big Brother is watching?

No, Big Uncle is watching!
(Aren't you!!!)

pointless

so few views, no response, no subscribers...there is really no point to post more

the coming disasters

if the past is any guide, we are pursuing happiness... are just in a time before the next disasters, mostly man-made

Stephen Hawking's misleading science

"Stephen Hawking's Universe" on Discovery Channel is worse than science fiction, because it suggests itself as more scientific, and its sophisticated graphics creates in the minds of most viewers "realities" about as certain as what is written in the book of Genesis.

Misgressions in Moscow: high school cheating, continues

another time hearing from a parent how the entire 9th grade class cheated on their final exams. now using their smart phones, either on them or in the restroom.
the teachers need good grades.
this is excellent training on how getting around the system, by avoiding or ignoring the rules, is the way to get ahead. another example of the misgressions in post-Soviet Moscow, still in 2013.

well-traveled in the worlds of ideas?

as there is geography, so there could be an ideography, a kind of world of ideas, mapped as it were, in which one travels, explores, become an experiential traveler, even a guide. not the physical world, but that of ideas conceived as a single, unified world.
and if there is a publication National Geography, so to there might be a historical ideography

echoes from Mt. Sinai

the lightning long ago atop a mount in Sinai -- even though which mountain is not truly known, and even if it never occurred -- has continued to echo down onto our times

"I'm proud to be an...?"

it is readily observable that (political) "nationalism" is strong amongst the majority of Americans, but also to be noted, in order to understand American psychology is an emotional (if somewhat naive) "state pride", ie an emotional loyalty and self-identification to one of what became 50 states, especially for those who live in the state where they were born. both of these aspects must be recognized in order to understand self-, community-, state- and national identity.

theology is biography sub specie aeternitatis

Schleiermacher's "theology" is one single example of how "theology", even at its most sincere and/or earnest, is in reality biography -- revealing itself in relation to "God" and within his time and tradition.

history of the psychology of theologian's presumptions

a history of the psychology of theologians (and related philosophers) should be written, focusing on the varied ways, in their minds, times and climes, they presumed to be able to think, write and speak of "God".

theology as sleepwriting, somnscribing

"theology" seems to have been done in a kind of dozing which was simply divine!

theology sub specie humanitatis

forty years study in the history of ideas...and years of travel and observation in various civilizational-culture traditions...

most men and women are, mainly unawares, just "hanging out", whether in theology, philosophy, science, bowling alleys or bars.

the problem with anthroposophists and Jungians

the decisive problem with most anthroposophists is that they only understand the world via anthroposophy, rather than anthroposophy via the world.
but the Jungians tend to be worse, they imagine they are the world.

the president's real opinion?

what does the President personally really think of the people he and his government do their best to control?

living in the world of ideas

who -- with waking enough -- did not begin as a novitiate in the ideas by which mankind lives in the world?
like a huge swirling storm in which one is lost and tossed..
or a great expanse of invisible though ordered ideas and forces..
or like a great fog in which one can see further the clearer one's ideas...

it is possible to make oneself traveled, experienced, at home in this world of ideas, so that one is no longer lost or confused in it
(realizing that most do not have occasion or will to come close to realizing such is imaginable)

and after the disenchantment of Modernity?

in so far as "post-modernism" is a disenchantment of "modernity" -- and seldom is this intended to return to some pre-modern clime of mind -- thenafter what remains?

sub specie aeternitatis and Job 28:24?

is there any direct relation of Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis to Job 28:24?

ants and Job 14:14

and when an ant dies, shall it live again?

Stephenwolf

what can continuing polite conversations mean to someone who has now for more than 40 years sought, studied, searched,...in libraries and nations,...in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Varanasi, Qufu,...in theology, religions, philosophies, history, science, biographies,...atop Mt Sinai, the Mount of Olives, Taishan,...at Troy, Mycenae, Rome, Tintern,...in Concord, Dornach, Weimar,...

old New Age problems

most believers in "'the' New Age" knew and know little realistic of the old(er) age(s), also of what and how their "New Age" repeats the "old(er)", thus also having an anachronistic naivete about its being "new".
their ahistoria is a childish ignorance -- which is also not new in history

Paley < -- > Lovelock

if amidst the misty ideas and new-age psychobabble (aka rhetoric?) of "Gaia", some clear(er) idea is to be argued, it would surely be interesting to compare the social, cultural and intellectual histories and contexts of Paley, et al's Clock-maker God and Lovelock, et al's the Gaia Hypothesis.

pre-Darwinian sundial-maker God

Cicero's sundial-maker God

total meaninglessness of the Christian story?

Nietzsche rejected the Christian myth for his own. But even if theology -- be it Lutheran, Pietist, Roman Catholic, Alexandrian, etc be merely or all-too-human, can this whole story -- in its fullness, breadth and depth -- have been only accidental beliefs, arguments, creeds, churches, devotions, sacrifices, crusades and wars,...about what was essentially arbitrary?

saved from the abyss?

even if Feuerbach was, in essence, wrong, years of reading in theology seem to reveal it as trying to save God from 'disappearing into an abyss'

human idolatries?

"What created by man -- mental or material -- to or for "God" when- or wheresoever was not really a human idol?

and how few see, or have seen, it so?

the personal a priori in Swedenborg's visions?

considering the character(s) of the spirit worlds experienced by Swedenborg, could lead to concluding that Kant's idea of a priori categories were also rather personal in Swedenborg's extrasensory sense.

Kant Forest

Kant is like a dense, dreadful forest in which many get lost, and after they happen out -- tired and probably troubled -- many are not likely to try to reenter again.

ventured in again today. finding my way around more and more, but needing good guide maps...
some news areas..

ahhh... so because we are moral, God (must) exist... unconvincing...

rumors of treasures...but really little or no gold. a few man-made structures mainly...

most are wise to just go around -- to avoid Kant Forest all together

philosophers in the cave?

in medias res...but what if Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, et al are merely cleverer cave-dwellers?

about the Scriptures, apes and such

yesterday afternoon in the new Starbucks in the rebuilt Hotel Moscow building (though, as it typical of such in the Russian capital, the hotel is still not reopened).
had an interesting meeting for a couple of hours about the Scriptures, apes and such, with Johnny Eichhorn, Sam Wilberforce, Ed Pusey, Big Ben Jowett, Charlie Darwin, Tom Huxley, Bob Chambers and a few others.

a popular waking state of sleep

one cannot understand the phenomena on the streets of Moscow with discerning how they do not notice, or are at most dimly and rarely aware, of the extent to which they are determined by forces -- social, habitual, moral, fashionable, mental, psychic -- external to themselves. less individuals per se than instances of social influences...like a shared waking sleep. social institutions as instincts.

"Newtonian"?

not only the views, ideas and attitudes of those who rejected Newton, eg Blake, Goethe, Steiner, et al, must be reexamined due to the deeper facts of Newton's life and thought, but the views of those who, like Clarke, Pope, Brewster, Jefferson and many others, deists or other, supported 'Newton the first real scientist', and who based their ideas on a misunderstanding of his.

Paley < theos > Plotinus

Paley's theology was profoundly not a Plotinian theo-sophy.

P(In)C

frankly: stupid and ignorant people have rights too; though not to be called intelligent and educated.

Paley, Darwin, the voyage of the Beagle, Plotinus

The outer voyage of the Beagle...
it was of eg Paley and not eg Plotinus as to what was to be thought "divine" by Darwin et many al.
not even as speculative theology was some "inner expedition of the Beagle" in consideration.
that they did not find the divine should perhaps not have surprised

God > Lenin > Jewels > ?

yestereve, as is common, a common crowd flowed casually across Red Square, most likely unawares (but certainly now reflective) of how it had been "sacred space" not so long ago. Lenin's Tomb was (un)holy ground. respect. silence. whispers. "awe".
Moscow's iconic Saint Basil's had been such for centuries before the Bolshevik Revolution.
and now? now that St Basil's is an icon and reopened tourist site, and hardly seen with awe...
and Lenin and his tomb are basically ignored...

where now is sacred there on Red Square? seen with "awe"?

the jewelry shops of GUM?

AC 360 "(Un)Reality TV"?

watching AC 360 Gossip

Schleiermacher and Steiner's contrasting anthropologies

Schleiermacher influenced theology from a rational, dogmatic, traditional system to one centered in experience, mainly his famous "feeling of absolute dependence" (on a presumed God, not the Void, which would come to be felt more widely later in the 19th).
with a different anthropology (which Schleiermacher would have rejected), Steiner held also to an experiential "theology" of (mystical) sorts, but one more of conditional independence.

Schleiermacher in Moscow

having a chocolate-coffee near Revolution Square in Moscow in a Seattle-based cafe this afternoon, reading C. W. Christian's Friedrich Schleiermacher, finally understood his theological thought and position...first encountered some near four decades past in a class at Duke.

no one will have noticed or course. few understood if they had. and how few can appreciate a scholar's smile?

saving God, or avoiding a void?

with 40 years of periodic readings in religion(s) and theology(ies)...
often it seems rather less true that theological writings are an explication, or even apologetics, than an attempt now some centuries old, to save God.
or worse...
avoid a void

lost in the words

even if God is there to be found...
most get lost in the words...
especially if seeking in the thick ancient and new-growth forests of theology, religious studies, philosophy...with their conflicting maps and criss-crossing paths

??

how many -- who -- people have come to wonder if the ? has an interesting origin, and social and cultural history?

Don Quixote in Giza...

encountering the Sphinx...

no angels above...

not being able to look to any caring God for consolation with even his very real periodic physical suffering and his meaning of seeking...Nietzsche -- after "Darwin" -- seems to have tried to look from the animal below (and in) man upwards not to any angelic or Platonic delusions, but to a kind of nonetheless noble surpassing of man: the Übermensch

which universe of discourse

it is within the university rather than the universe that most try to think about the world and life, especially since the last quarter of the 19th century.
(if in places like California it is rather New Age bookshops)

enthusiastic?

choose your god wisely

Mt. Sinai... Mt Tabor... Sils Maria...

Nietzsche...creating a replacement for the Christianity he had disbelieved and rejected...

not Mt. Sinai on the Peninsula, nor Mt Tabor, nor Mount of Olives...but Sils-Maria Switzerland

 "6,000 feet beyond man and time"

and a BBC documentary on Nietsche:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuxDMEDF6Vs

Personal, Confessional Bibles?

"Fragments of a great confession" (Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession) à la Goethe's own CV autopsy...

Moses' Pentateuch...

4th-century Holy Bible...

et al

what writer, poet, philosopher, theologian, critic, scientist, essayist..

has not, essentially, written their own?

Boston

international coverage of the events...
but -- bluntly, yet realistically -- who gives much attention to eg Baghdad's regular bombings?

he's a wise guy

where is a leader who feels he must be learned, knowledgeable and experienced to wisely lead a people?
and is such a person electable?

are you a world travailer?

a traveler, a travailer, through history/ies, religions, philosophies, sciences, biographies, ruins, peoples,  places, nations, cultures, mores, minds, ideas...

"oh, its nothing really."

if there is only emptiness, a void, really nothing, hereafter...
then there is nothing really to worry about.
; )

the biblical myths of science

someday, most of the contemporary scientific discoveries in eg atomic physics and astronomy -- about which scientists and encyclopedias are so serious and confident now -- will be seen to have been as mythic as the once-believed and defended stories of the Bible.

thoughts also on reading: Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001.

The Job of a lesson not to be drawn from history

clever, but the below is not the lesson to be drawn from history...
that man exaggerates his knowledge and ability is closer to the facts.
Job 38:4-7, 31-33.

"It almost feels like we're taking our first baby steps as a species, as a civilization, towards actually having a model of the universe that will hold up over the next 500,000 years," proclaimed Perlmutter shortly after discovering the acceleration. He may be right -- the present model certainly paints a coherent picture of the universe we see around us -- but if there is one lesson to be drawn from history, it is that time is a harsh judge. Many theories have had their day in the limelight, only to disappear into the wings when another one appeared. Over the centuries each new generation felt it had found, or was close to finding, the right answer, and it is worth remembering that Ussher was not alone in drawing the wrong conclusion about the age of the universe. Many of the greatest minds in science were equally blinkered, trapped by their own beliefs, or the prevailing assumptions of their day. Newton was every bit as religiously dogmatic as Ussher and fought to reconcile his science with the Bible; Darwin exaggerated the Earth's age to allow enough time for species to evolve; while Einstein was forced to concede that the universe was not static, but expanding -- his "greatest blunder." Given this track record, it seems all too likely that our present picture of the universe is flawed in some way."

-- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001, p. 291.

individuation

to develop and grow out of the social patterns of a society's customs and mores is neither simple nor common; to grow individually out and "above" its mentality and emotions is even less so.

a "standard candle" of knowledge?

in order to measure the age and size of the universe, a standard for measurement, a "standard candle" was needed, and has been thought to have been found in the "20th century".
but, as learning from the biographies of the history of science in nature theology, natural philosophy, geology, biology, physics, astronomy...shows of the search...
the human mind is not a "standard candle".

-- reflections on Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001.

second-hand music

people understand second hand smoke, but few second-hand music...
which can also pollute the other person

fools' gold

walking by a new high-end jewelry shop in Moscow, with its display of various gold and precious-stoned objects, which people ogle and treat as of some high worth...it really need not be stated that for one searching for some "gold" of truth, insight, understanding, vision...this physical gold, which most assume to worship, is that of fools.

atomic apes

the unembarrassed chest-thumping of nations' leaders and their passive masses about possessing -- or wanting to -- nuclear weapons, should be recognized clearly as a terrifying fact of gnothi seauton. 

two materialisms in Moscow

Marxist
Mall-ist

there are no atheists in...

"there are no atheists in foxholes"...
what about the new malls in Moscow...
did the Marxists or the malls produce more atheists in Moscow?

Jefferson's "equality" vs "natural aristocracy"

it would be too unrealistically idealistic to expect the many who American-creedally repeat "all men are created equal" to give much of any thought and discernment to the epistolary dialogue of Jefferson and Adams on "natural aristocracy".

Plotinus & Co.

if Plotinus was truly insightful, then we are truly deceiving our selves

we might say we are lost in medias res

once upon a time: "God willing"

now...chance willing?

Russia Today today?

in the noble tradition of Soviet propaganda: everything is bad elsewhere...

a Moscow moment 40 minutes long (2013)

2013
Moscow has changed dramatically since 2003, since 1993, since 1983...in many ways...

New Arbat's Dom Knigi, the well-known House of Books. (the main book store of Moscow and Russia)
a modest three part purchase.
discover later that the two self selected parts were correct; that part by the bookstore staff member -- who genuinely seemed to want to help -- not.

two days later... ok, return for refund or exchange for the 270 ruble (~$10) purchase.

2013. improved, refurbished, upgraded, modernized...Moscow... Dom Knigi...
a pleasant (!), warm, middle-aged "information desk" woman kindly starts the process helpfully filling in the required 2-page form herself...
"passport information, please"     ?      ("oh no")! (nascent regrets)
"address in Moscow"
then all 'purchase receipt' details filled in by hand...

first form with slight mistake... she rewrites completely.
5 minutes.
second form, slight mistake. rewrites. 10 minutes...

"wait here please"...then disappears towards the original purchase point cashier's desk. 15...20 minutes...

slight error. rewrite third time. still smiling. (meaning, the staff member)

observing the process...now counting...the time...the year...the cost of 270 rubles...
Moscow's main bookstore!!!, 2013!!!... (sms a friend to express astonishment)

finally, all correct. 30 minutes.  ~ : )

papers sent to back room.  : ( !
...35, 36, 37 minutes....

"please, how much more time?"...adding (finally with open frustration) "it has been 35 minutes... Moscow 2013... simple return... two minutes in the US"...
immediate face/attitude change. "you must not expect here what you have in America; if you are going to visit here you must adjust to life here."
"but its Moscow in 2013, not 2003!...been here '15 years'!"

a stray pen mark noticed in accounting -- "a mistake" -- requires an additional document initialed to certify that the first was not invalidated.

her friendliness gone. closed. (~arrogant American?)

now 40 minutes...escorted to money desk..."please give Mr. USA 270 rubles". huffy, curt, hurt. gone.

thenafter (to repair inter-national/-personal/-cultural relations) return to her: "didn't want to offend you, but expected more in Moscow in 2013 in Dom Knigi. hasn't it changed?"
"nyet, it will never change".
"but the store has improved so much in recent years... 2013, not 2003"

animosity gone..."you know, in fact I agree with you" said with an open smile.

Russian openness...friendliness...
and inefficiency, in the center of Moscow. 2013.

sunset story?

needed: a history of the "understanding" of sunsets

that's awful

seeking but cant find:
a history of the meaning/sense, idea of "awe"

devoid revelation on a "Mt. Sinai"?

reading in the details of the biographies and ideas in the history of 19th century agnosticism...
it would perhaps be more convincing if at least someone had had a Mt. Sinai "devoid revelation", or found themselves in a mounting darkness riding to Damascus...

what would be the opposite of theophany?

samsara is for the gods

the 2011 film Samsara...

perhaps it is for the best that the young teen in the next seat was only almost successful quietly extracting and chewing her chips ...

the film was effective in the sense that the scale, be it of the desert dunes, the hundreds of Asian factory workers making irons or eviscerating cattle carcass industrially...the shanty town dwellers...

the scales were appropriately beyond the human...

the feeling of it all, unnerving...
like an unavoidable massacre where no one cares or survives...

samsara is not an idea for humans...
if it be one for any indifferent gods beyond

can't Kant?

how many people, not specialists in philosophy, since he began lecturing and writing, actually understood Kant's "system"?
and if it was (and is?) so important, how can so many have lived, thought and died who either poorly or wrongly understood -- or were completely ignorant of -- Kant's explication of human psychology?

the labyrinth Kant built

attempting to understand how Kant influenced Thomas Huxley's word and idea "agnostic"
have -- over decades -- always found it impossible to fully understand and recall the abstract intellectual labyrinth Kant built.
hopeless?
useless anyway...?

19th century cavemen?

some have gnostically claimed that the 19th century was the/another culmination of the/a Kali Yuga...

however that may ultimately have been, it does seem -- examining the writings, thoughts, biographies...of the time -- that many then were quite convinced and content to consider and dispute 'the wall and shadows of Plato's cave'

shopping with Columbus

Columbus believed that the Paradise before time, was nearby in his; so seemingly and similarly do shoppers today.

sensible Nietzsche?

Nietzsche struggled to make sense of and in the world. reaction then showed this was not a very sensible thing to do.

inner and outer God

Plotinus vs Paley

church and state

compare Constantine the Great and Jefferson in our history

with some horrible inhuman harmony?

treading "holy, sacred ground"...
perhaps blasphemy...

"Auschwitz" and Ennead III.2.15

re: Steppenwolf's Mock(ery)-trial

compare Apuleius' Metamorphosis III

cf. Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea, Lynda Christian, p. 47.

terrible truths in a theatrum mundi?

Ennead III.2.15 and Bhagavad-Gita II

the stars of Bethlehem?

joining the procession through the years, a new "docudrama" (History Channel, Easter 2013) considers the "Star of Bethlehem" and the "Magi"...
alignments of planets, comets, occultations, super novae... comparisons with Chinese records, numismatics... Philo, Josephus, Dionsius Exiguus, Herod, Augustus...
common, misleadingly-simplistic computer graphics of "space"; hokie cartoon images of the magi observing the sky, acameling to Jerusalem...time estimates of travel, etc

but the 6-7 scientists, astronomers, ministers...all seemed like children playing at Biblical explanation

reverse history?

to recognize the ideas by which we live and move and have our being

reverse historicizing?

The Playwright?

The search for the missing Playwright post-mortem dei?

Reverse playwrighting?

homo post-sovieticus?

homo po$t-$ovieticu$

on the streets of Moscow

quantities of predictable similarities

the slow death of Man?

over a century or three:
the death of imago dei post-mortem biblia...?

inhuman?

what that a human does is inhuman, and why?

Plato's Academy and Jesus' Golgotha?

instructive in regards to more than sic transit gloria mundi to read in In the Footsteps of the Gods: Travellers to Greece and the Quest for the Hellenic Ideal (David Constantine, rev. 2011) how both the Apollo's Temple and the Platonic Academy were difficult to locate, as the English traveler Jacob Spon reported of his journey in the 1670s.
the Christian sites in Jerusalem were also unnoticed, unmarked and uncertain when Empress Helena made her journey in 330.

gnothi seauton!?

man imagines it knows himself (or could if it made the effort)

(worth knowing that while "know thyself" in one form or language or other is spread from (disputably) Thales of Miletus via Plato, Linnaeus, et al, even onto The Matrix, that there appears to be no full scholarly study of the history of it as an idea: gnothi seauton, nosce te ipsum, know yourself.)

the gospel truth

coming to the end of The Enlightenment Bible...
to seriously believe in the Bible's stories, it is seriously better not to know its history

one's lowered Self?

passed by an old, gray-faced, short, unhealthy-looking man...

likely poor, unattractive...with the end of a cigarette in his hand...

I wondered if his daena did not look much the same.

Humboldtian "Happiness"?

To a friend considering how to end his now miserable, lonely life...

"He who can say to himself when he dies: 'I have grasped and made into a part of my humanity as much of the world as I could', that man has reached fulfillment...In the higher sense of the word, he has really lived."
-- Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1804.

(Cited in The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: 'Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, W. H. Bruford, p. 24; small extract from a letter from Rome, 9 October 1804, to Karoline, in Wilhelm und Karoline von Humboldt in ihren Breifen, vol. 2, p. 262)

'meaningless desolation' in the CV of Western Civ?

the apparent 'desolation from cosmic meaning' (both trans-mundane and post-mortem) that Nietzsche presented with his "madman" -- of the earth, life, mankind, "God"...loosened from meaningful moorings, without e.g. any three-tier world or Dantean spheres, and more like a La Place>Hawkins 'merely' astro-physical cosmography -- describes an experience of the human on the earth in godless space and time (which Pascal apparently also sensed, with the "infinite spaces" which terrified him) where there is no here-beyond or hereafter...

want a subtle, detailed study of this precise idea, or sense, of human 'cosmic desolation' in the CV of "Western" history.

the purpose of existence!?

cafe comfort as a goal in life

from the theres, thens and whys

helpful sometimes understanding what one can in the theres, thens and whys of history, but naturally necessarily still needing to live in the heres and nows.

transmundaning

to inwardly rise above the daily mundane mind of those around

gnothi historia

seeking in the fullness of human history to know when and how we are now

"wow...that's awesome, man!"

a history of the concept of "awe"

the greatest dramaturge of all time?

if the skeptics, cynics, nihilists, atheists are wrong...
then the dramaturge is very clever

democracy po-russki?

da!
power over the people

Descartes' cogito revisited

interesting to learn that, as Windelband wrote 120 years ago in his History of Philosophy (Geschichte der Philosophie):

"The ordinary translation of cogitare, to think (denken), is liable to occasion misunderstanding since denken in German (and the same is true of think, in English, at least in philosophical terminology) signifies a particular kind of theoretical consciousness. Descartes himself elucidates the meaning of cogitate by enumeration: he understands by it to doubt, affirm, deny, understand, will, abhor, imagine, feel a sensation, etc. For that which is common to all these notions we have in German scarcely any word by Bewusstsein (consciousness)."

and what of...

I think therefore I am
I feel therefore I am
I will therefore I am
I eat therefore I am
I drink therefore I am
I be merry therefore I am
I suffer therefore I am
I make love therefore I am
I talk therefore I am
I am lost therefore I am
I seek therefore I am
I am therefore I am

Kant and the Whirlwind

compare Kant's Critiques of human knowledge to that of the Whirlwind in Job 38-39

the blood and agonies of revolutions

the terrors in history of eg the French, Russian, Chinese,... Revolutions can be realized by watching the more graphic reports from inside Syria

existential/cosmic estrangements in history

needed: a study of those in history who 'climbed up out of and above' the minds, societies and cultures of their times, places and milieus, and looked -- if only for a moment, or an hour -- at the world, themselves, society and life, and realized they did not know...
of those moments recorded in history when an individual awoke to realize that they were in a world they did not really know

man -- the creature that seeks spiritual sleep

no matter what nature, man's inhumanity or ineptitude or stupidity, science or history inflict, the human being seems quite capable to return to sleep.

a Reasoned Crucifixion?

as there was a Hellenization...
so too much later was there a Hegelianization of Christianity
...which could (and can) be recognized from some world-views as a kind of Reasonable crucifixion

Feuerbach vs Moses

anthropophany vs theophany

T or F? "Nietzsche is dead -- God"

reading excellent thick bio of Nietzsche...
reflecting on university offerings and attitudes many years ago in "religious studies and philosophy", would need to say that Nietzsche was more alive than "God" there then -- though was surrounded by what Mencken (The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908) -- during the "Scopes-monkey trial" -- named "the Bible Belt".

seems got out without being too belted.
thank God.

holy smoke?

it is another telling lesson about the maturity and seriousness of our time's "culture" and "news" to observe how "adults" speak with such excited anticipation of the color of smoke from a small chimney in Vatican City.

and, of course, "the holy spirit" will decide who wins the vote, finally, as if the spirit couldn't decide on the first ballot, or the cardinals needed some extra, fine tuning...

and this is all taken, and given, and discussed, and reported, quite "seriously".
(there seems really to be very little serious to much of this)

endings from "In the Beginning..."

even the most dull, boring, tedious, irrelevant, published-or-perished academic paper or monograph is a mundane, often all-too-human, minuscule institionalized descendant of "In the Beginning..."
(thoughts reading Karl Lowith's Meaning in History, p. 100)

oh, yes...and the Holy Spirit will...

the long-out-dated, now still lamely-claimed silliness that it is, of course, "the Holy Spirit" which will inspire the cardinals to elect...

self-knowledge via respect

knowing personally who or what is above oneself, allows more realistic self-knowledge

the damnable abuse of children

related to the abuse of children in many countries of the world by priests of the Catholic Church...

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40)

where did Dante place such persons?

sociocide on the streets

one can watch Russian males committing sociocide, as they walk down any street smoking their lives away

Thoreauvian demographics

Thoreau in Walden, described humanity as he saw it around him then and there:

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic and divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” 

unconscious being determining consciousness

it is possible to daily observe how "being" redetermines "consciousness" in post-Soviet Russia, especially in the psychologies of those raised after the dissolution of the USSR.

utopianist 60s

the ahistoric, naive utopian idea(l)s and dreams of the "60s", still unmatured by most of them.

"that doesn't make any sense"

to Lowith's Meaning in History...
meaninglessness in history

low male life expectations?

is the low male life expectancy rate in Russia due essentially to their low social and self expectations in life? (it is certainly not some uncontrollable virus. and this is 2013, not 2003 or 1993)
and revealed in chronic widespread visible smoking, and reported high alcohol consumption

the cups of Socrates and Jesus

a Disney depth of life experience...
or...neither Socrates in Athens nor Jesus in Jerusalem should have drunk their cup

group selves

their self-identity is external, inside the group. what Goethe dscribed as larvae, pupae.

"God only knows"

perhaps if not even belief in God, or Meaning, the search for such

BREAKING NEWS!

or breaking gossip?

lessons unlearned

people also don't recognize that Rome fell in our world, life and time
and already even the terrors of the "20th century" seem to have left no lasting deeper lesson in society, culture and psyche

...in their various images

not God in their own image, but gods...
from Fichte or Kant to fundamentalists to socially Christian...
from ahistoric "New Age" narcissists to Hubble Deep Field Deists

articulated unconscious assumptions of young Moscovites

"Last week a professor said that God had died somewhere in Germany in the 19th century."
"Oh really? I hadn't heard...what a pity."

Pascal and the Hubble Deep Field

Pascal was frightened (Pensées 206) of the infinite spaces...
but do we see the "Hubble (Ultra/Extreme) Deep Field" as awesome,
or awful?
(aside from the psychological fact that such is only infinitesimally relevant to most humans in their lives, and the likely physical-ontological fact that we are only infinitesimally relevant to "it")

Heilsgeschichte?

Bildungsgeschichte?

Origen, Eusebius, Augustine, Orosius

in the direction of the history of meaning made or found in "History", the "allegorizing" of Origen, the interpretive flexibilities of Eusebius, Augustine and Orosius, reveal their dreamy assumptions of being able to speak of and for "God". a dreaminess that still continues with many today. they were not really awake.
perhaps interesting to read of Nietzsche on them; and to see how complexly Feuerbach considered their personal interpretive projections

post-historical contemplation of the mundane?

if, in deeper recognition, the varied traditional religions must be seen as anachronistic, passe and provincial -- if one cannot simply turn to their saints, startzi, holy men, gurus, hermits, for some "ultimate" evaluation of earthly life...what can be the inner (and outer) position of a contemplative, one who wishes to see the mundane world sub specie aeternitatis in a global age (which is, in deeper recognition, religiously plural, if not post-religious, and also post-modern)? from which position might they speak?

Emerson contra Faust

Depths of persons, perspectives, cultures and influences are revealed when Emerson said to Charles Eliot Norton in London (in April 1873 -- after RWE's trip in Egypt, and before returning to the Massachusetts with CEN): "I hate 'Faust'. It is a bad book." (Letter of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 1, p. 488; Journal, London, April 20-May 10, 1873)

Transcendental Emerson < > Cynical Carlyle

after meetings with Carlyle, Emerson, Darwin, et al in London in April 1873, Charles Eliot Norton characterized the difference between Carlyle and Emerson in a letter so:
"They have grown apart; content with the world is the humor of one, discontent with it that of the other. Both, however, are alike in the underlying tenderness and sweetness of their souls. Emerson finds Carlyle too cynical, Carlyle finds Emerson too transcendental; daily intercourse is not delightful, but each recognizes in the other the highest gifts of nature..." (Letter of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 1, p. 485-486; letter to J. R. Lowell, April 20, 1873)

an ideal life

few live by ideas, the others sleep

just another day?

try not

the missing half

that there is some ideal, completing 'other half' is a dreamy belief which current presence cannot be fully accounted for by a mere history of/and transmission of chivalric and romantic idea(l)s.

2013 anno...?

a way for many to count their age, if they have no idea it would indicate an Age.

belightening?

if one can be enlightened, why not be able to belighten some aspect of the world around

hear ye, hear ye!(?)

thinking to be able to speak about how poorly people in recent attempts at conversation had listened to what I wanted to say...found she couldn't listen either

"Are you s e e r r i ous?"

what, seriously, would be a serious person?
or a person to take seriously?

seriously? very few seem so, even in our history

beware of dog

if you handle the average Russian male as a barely trained dog, you will avoid being unexpectedly bitten.

Cathy...

...where in the world are you?

a history of ?s

a study of the stories of human questioning(s) in history

history sub specie aeternitatis?

is there some "history" which is a coherent story which endures the constant presence of  death, dearth and destruction?

idea environmental change

the history of changing idea environments and climates

herded

if smoking can be associated with being a herd act, the herd can be stopped from smoking

the vertical state of the union

if the US President's predictable "State of the Union" is a "horizontal" consideration of the USA, any real Steppenwolf would attempt to find the "vertical"

passive masses

no even their bad habits are their own

corruption?

being "corrupt" seems a true revealing of their character

how are you?

(ignoring much of the world's conditions: increasingly repressive politics here...ominously terrible air and water conditions in China...economic conditions due to human self-befoolments in the USA, Spain, Greece, Ireland...inept leadership in Europe, the US Congress and elsewhere...the growing disaster called Syria...the unsettled and unsettling, shaking and shaky social (dis)orders in eg Egypt, Libya, Tunisia...who remembers Fukushima already?...the many years of passionately-cheered deceits in sports in Europe, Australia...declining fish stocks...global warming,...) "Pretty (aside from the loneliness of a steppenwolf...unavoidable and persistent daily street-smokers...the deep sleep around me...) well. How 'bout you?"

history of the popular mind

by which ideas have people dreamed their lives

the misery of Les Misérables

a famous melody + two halves of others.
otherwise, for the thoughtless, heavy with unrealistic emotions.

merely "American"?

reflecting on an American...
"American" and individuality of person, in thought, word and deed, also in an era of history when "equality" is spread(ing) to all aspects of law, people, society, ideas, culture,...cannot but make a kind of common person(ality), which is determined by having been born (cf. natio-) in some particular family, neighborhood, socio-economic position, town/city, state, region, culture, education...in the USA which are all basically passive elements of one's personality, rather than one's active individuality being developed to surpass one's mere "nationality".
even as an idea this seems rarely present

facades people live by

not only the brazen self-righteous lies of the world 'hero' Lance Armstrong...or the widespread, years-long match fixing in European football revealed just days ago, but today's reports from sport-proud Australia of widespread, systematic drug use in sports...
the facades people live by and cheer for...
"what a least of work is man"

Goethe < > Nihilists

to discern contrasting limitations and mentalities in "Western man", it is revealing to compare Goethe and his ideas of post-mortem continuance to Nietzsche-influenced "nihilist" philosophers, for whom there is even neither a post-mortem, nor a pre-natal, void.

mis-timed

being in their mornings, most of my young friends here cannot understand my reflections on the day.

excellent!

here now few to no standards of excellence for the passive -- except material comforts with financial success.
the USSR, for better and for worse, enforced ideas of excellence in most all areas of human being.

cool, man

being cool as a way to hide their real lives from themselves

Polyglot, Historophile Cathy from the Netherlands

still looking for the Cathy 'of the Netherlands', a solicitor on sabbatical during 2012, who was in Beijing in July 2012 studying Chinese.
Talked in the Bookworm bookshop in Beijing.

RIP Russian Soul?

fill in the blanks...

RIP

"Russian Soul"

(possibly fictitious personality)

Born: ______

Died: ______

Russian soul in Mo$cow?

in prison in Omsk Dostoyevsky came to discover Christianity among even the prison's murderers.
can one still find some special aspect of "Russian soul" in the post-Soviet youth in the malls and cafes of Mo$cow?

lost

if man has no other home than this world, then it is truly lost.

fake(y) African cat skin anything

of those who wear fake some/any/everything African cat skin...leopard, cheetah, panther...
if they cant kill it, skin it and prep it...they nonetheless merit being eaten by it

China's cultural revolution of the air

seems that -- also reflecting on being there in July 2012...
the major cities of China are showing a "cultural revolution" of the air and environment.
then they destroyed much of their past for a while, now their present.

addenda to Dante: bibliocide

the reported burnings of manuscript collections in Timbuktu is somehow worse than a human massacre. people die. killed or naturally. but do books have even a believed justice "post-mortem"?
and books and manuscripts burned destroys their contained lives and ideas of the past, the contents possible for learning and edification. and it is perhaps more the ideas, or the stories and searching systems of the world on the pages than the physical rarities -- but also these rare pieces, anchors of the past -- that are lost and mournable.
there have been book burnings for ages, even before trying to understand the a-historic, anti-historic (pre-historic?) mentalities who would proudly be destructive iconoclasts -- but remember England during the Civil War, the anti-religious destruction in the early USSR, Alexandria's library, burning books at Nuremberg,...
Prefer to condemn such an act as those of "primitive" (though this is too simplistic) human, impassioned ignorance; to comprehend revenge within the Inferno of Dante's Comedy.
and if there are therein none who committed bibliocide, let this be added.

smoke signals in Moscow

close (but irritated) daily observation of smoke in Moscow signals with ~90+% accuracy that that someone smoking is "a no one". part of the crowd.

Russia will be healthier when these passive Russians have been manipulated to smoke less. that they can or will not stop themselves -- even for better health -- is clear at any moment of the day or night in Moscow.

Dostoevsky † and Nietzsche †

studying their stories...were not the lives and works of eg Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in their own ways a self-sacrificing

the missing links

on the level of psyche, there do seem to be "missing links".
even some walking the streets of Moscow

Plato's cave in Moscow

from Plato's cave to the crowded new modern malls of Moscow, most are now at most dreaming their lives away

missing God?

sitting in cafes or walking in malls here it often seems less that God is missing than that He isn't missed

nationalisms too shall pass

national(istic) human social identities arose in history, and they too shall pass from history.
but few of those passionately patriotic want to know this. thus they remain asleeping in these their beliefs.

another motley spellbinding inauguration

from inside Spaso house -- amidst all those with ties and high heels -- watched the inaugural of President Obama...a polite Steppenwolf...
certainly one can find in the rhetoric of the Senator, the woman (who seems to have had little idea what an invocation is, but who nonetheless) gave the invocation, as well as Obama's address, some idea(s) or other(s) to dreamily live by.
but not one of these gave a talk of any real coherence and order. eg God was included more like a sun-god: distant but warming...and apparently liberally willing to be claimed as approving of such somnabulistic unclear speaking about "Him" in the clear light of mid-day, and how "He" blesses this and that of America...
and all the various re/acquired elements of the American credo were restated in one combination or other: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of...", "government of, by...", "liberty and ...", freedom, equality.... (in relation to Hesse's Steppenwolf: they are "for everyone"...not for "madmen".)
a kind of smorgasboard of inspirational wordings: take and remember what you want Americans.

but do not try to make much sense out of these words. they were more for lulling than reasoning. a few contrasting theologies were hinted; variations ontic and political anthropologies; varied social-political theories mixed....

a forgettable commemoration. all seemed adequately and politely spellbound by the motley rhetoric of America. more traditional local/national anesthetic than any clear statement of the American state.

accursed answers, проклятые ответы

after some more than 15 years of periodic querying, searching, wondering the whence of the Russian expression proklyatye voprosy, accursed, damned questions, today came upon the apparent source...in a 1858 prominently published translation of an 1853 German poem.

and that source leads back into the very deepest questions in all of "Western" history.

a deep pedigree.

another rare day of the goldener Spur in Moscow

Vivaldi saves

on abandoning after years the settled, safe but what I had come to be feel was shallow life of California -- a kind of pleasant "inner desert" -- to come "one way" to Russia in '94, the move left me in a kind of mourning despair, and the first year through the cold Moscow winter was among the "darkest" in my life. rationing. disorder. uncertainty. ...
somehow -- was it on the fuzzy SW radio or at the Conservatory? -- I heard the second movement of Vivaldi's concert for 2 violins in A minor, and its principle theme was immediately consoling in an inexplicable but unquestionable way.
during the first year especially, I would very often walk around the snow-covered empty streets and paths of the hospital where Dostoyesky had lived as a child, and -- most times, but not always, being able to call the theme up inside -- inwardly or actually hum this theme...again and again and again... and this for days, for months...

letters from Havel, Solzhenitsyn and Page Smith had helped...but there was nothing in word, book or church which aided me like those notes.
and I listened to it inwardly, or voiced it, over the subsequent years when need came.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1k_yexUE6s (second movement: 3:54-7:24)

happy fantasy "spirituality"...

...of, by and for elementary school spirits

"life, liberty and the pursuit of..."

...wealth?
...health?

...fame?

...wisdom?
...knowledge?
...insight?
...truth?
...god?

...happiness?

Dostoevsky's life, depressing?

a personality test:
reading the details of Dostoevsky's life is depressing or consoling?

contrary to what several Russians supposed, his life story -- in Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time -- rather consoled than depressed.
certainly kin and counsel to any real "Steppenwolf"

he who dies with the most toys, loses

how many are not thoughtlessly gathering much more than they need or use?
but this is good, the world economy needs them.

"God only knows!"?

it is easier to stand up, alone, if one imagines at least God knows

: ( ! vs : ) !

nihilism < > new ageism

Bildungskosmos?

Frashokereti (Yasna 30.9)

Romans 8:20

Scola animarum (Origen)

Theatrum Mundi (Epictetus, et al)

Life is a school (William Rounesville Alger, et al)

Vale of Soul-Making (Keats)

Bildungsleben

Bildungsgeschichte

Bildungskosmos?

Gottesspur

Amidst the satisfied, drowsy, new, post-Communist consumer life of Moscow, eg those who carpe coffee at a Starbucks, and even with discussing Syria (Qaddafi's or Mubarak's fate?) with a well-known correspondent (who is for hours each day immersed in reading) the very serious political trials and tribulations in the world...a text of Harry Haller's "Gottespur":

"Life for Dostoevsky was, as it was for Keats, "a vale of soul-making," into which Christ had come to call mankind to battle against the death of immersion in matter and to inspire the struggle toward the ultimate victory over egoism." -- Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, (2010), p. 411.

who knows, where the time goes?

while we all are in history, few know it

starvations

of the body
and/or the soul

unworldly survival fare

the internet's contents, millions of blogs, words words words infinitely increasing, can not but present an impossible horizon of variety. but, as to depth, a verticality in the great horizontality...

for someone truly in a "Steppenwolfian" state, achievement of level, relation to the world -- and not as some self-romanticization or bravado -- the isolation and aloneliness can only be relieved by what Hesse had Harry Haller describe as the golden thread amidst the mundane and satisfied middling -- by pursuits, studies, observations...that give some insight into the (possibly meaningless) human condition, world and life.

in medias res...the one-volume Frank bio Dostoyevky, readings of the history of "the Sixties", et al, are the kind of unworldly fare that makes it possible to survive in this world. as a "Steppenwolf".

so that philosophy is less a practice of dying, than trying to live in another world while confined embodied to this one. even if the "other world" does not (of a certainty) exist.

theological democracy

the details of the history of the democratization of "God"

why why?

accoutrement rather than accursed questions

who's in charge here?

rarely self-determined

a total eclipse of the...

the earthly fully eclipsing the...
but most don't notice.

the Meaning in meaning

the need for meaning is the nearest proof that there is Meaning.

W

W -- aka President George W. Bush -- may have disappeared from the scene and news inside the USA since his Presidency, but the effects of his Presidency still are present, not only in great problems with American taxes and government funding, but with the tremendous war debts and ill-advised US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
history will judge him as one of the bottom five Presidents in US history, as is the mentality he (re-)presented.

Americanization -- Yee haa?

spell it yeehaw in the original American cowboy movies and TV...the Russian (by voice a) late teen male, just a bit ago yelled it from the window of a car driving by, like a here new whistling one sometimes can hear calling a dog, or a familiar US college-fraternity horn-honk pattern on the streets of Moscow...or the 4 year boy, some years ago, who, when something dropped, spontaneously exclaimed: "oops"...