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."