Let us take an example in which the recovery of being is ambiguous, where it may under the same circumstances contain both authentic and unauthentic components. An American couple, we will say, drives down into Mexico. They see the usual sights and have a fair time of it. Yet they are never without the sense…
THE LOSS OF THE CREATURE It may be recovered by a dialectical movement which brings one back to the beaten track but at a level above it. For example, after a lifetime of avoiding the beaten track and guided tours, a man may deliberately seek out the most beaten track of all, the most commonplace…
THE DELTA FACTOR How I Discovered the Delta Factor Sitting at My Desk One Summer Day in Louisiana in the 1950’s Thinking about an Event in the Life of Helen Keller on Another Summer Day in Alabama in 1887 In the beginning was Alpha and the end is Omega, but somewhere between occurred Delta, which…
It’s puzzling that HDS’s most important film gets relatively short-shrift in so many of the reports on his death. It took someone of the calibre of Dirk Bogarde to make sure that this film got its due recognition. Anyway, here is Roger Ebert’s review and a Guardian reassessment. Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” (1984) is the story…
Because I believe that God exists and that he created the Cosmos (the Big Bang, as you vulgarly call it, embarrasses you, Aristarchus, doesn’t it?), that he created man through evolution, in the latest moment of which, perhaps the last Ice Age, man became ensouled and came to himself as man, body and spirit; that God…
For us, consciousness of self is no different from consciousness of anything else. A self here is an individual self yet also a self among other selves. C2 selves vary from moment to moment from self-grandiosity to self-refusal, from being the infinite great self in the world to being the worst and the least self—because…
How a young atheist and a priest who lost his faith made me a better evangelizer — America Magazine. What Percy called the malaise, Kierkegaard described as a kind of despair: being lost in everydayness, unable or unwilling to confront ultimate questions. Kierkegaard thought that every person lived in one of three spheres of existence:…
It was necessary to hit upon a mathematical and semantic vocabulary. The former was easy, again using the physical properties of the hydrogen atom, assigning the binary number 1 to the transition between the parallel and antiparallel proton and electron spins of the neutral hydrogen atom. Such a transition emits a radio-frequency photon of wavelength 21…
What if then even the erotic becomes devalued? What if it happens, as Paul Ricoeur put it, that, “at the same time that sexuality becomes insignificant, it becomes more imperative as a response to the disappointments experienced in other sectors of human life”? What then? Does the self simply diminish, subside into apathy like laboratory…
Five modes of recreation might be deduced from the semiotic which follows upon the placement of an autonomous unspeakable self in its world. The recreational modes of the autonomous self are understandable in terms of the semiotic options open to it, that is, those transactions with its world, itself, and other selves which are specified…
manwithoutqualities 