We philosophize because we anticipate death, fearfully. We seek out religious consolation because we anticipate death, fearfully. We seek in philosophical rumination and religious observance and faith some deliverance from our mortality, some way to ‘stay alive,’ to not be annihilated. One kind of introspection these forms of thought encourage is to look a littleContinue reading “Fear Of Death Is Fear Of Immortality”
Tag Archives: consciousness
Wittgenstein’s Lion And Solaris
Kris Kelvin, Snow, Gibrarian, and Sartorius are all puzzled and perplexed; as other educated and intelligent residents of Station Solaris–a sophisticated scientific laboratory–have been before them. They are stumped and bewildered by their interactions with the planet Solaris, with the ocean that covers its surface, the one that plays host to mimoids and symmetriads andContinue reading “Wittgenstein’s Lion And Solaris”
A Synesthesia Of Sorts
For a long time now, perhaps as long as I can remember, letters and numbers have had colors and personalities and aesthetic grades. Here are the ways in which they do, for me: I see colors in vowels. The letter ‘a’ is yellow; ‘e’ is red; ‘i’ is white; ‘o’ is black; ‘u’ is grey.Continue reading “A Synesthesia Of Sorts”
Learning From Injuries
An injury is always a learning experience. Most straightforwardly, if you are an active type, you acquire the dreadful knowledge of the precipitous drop in mood that follows one. There is also the terrible castigation, the self-flagellation that is the inevitable accompaniment to such disasters: there is always, in retrospect, some decision that was fatal,Continue reading “Learning From Injuries”
George Steiner On The ‘Unvoiced Soliloquy’ And Collaborative Creativity
In Grammars of Creation (Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 84-85), in making note of the ‘anxiety of influence,’ and the valorization of solitary creativity, George Steiner writes: I want to point to the elected presences which makers construe within themselves or within their works, to the “fellow-travellers,” teachers, critics, dialectical partners, to those other voices withinContinue reading “George Steiner On The ‘Unvoiced Soliloquy’ And Collaborative Creativity”
On Seeking Out The Unpleasant For The Subsequent Relief
This past Saturday afternoon, after I had completed my abortive attempt to scale Mt. Washington, I returned–exhausted, bedraggled, and freezing–to my motel room in North Conway, NH. It was about 3:30 PM; I had stopped off on the way to pick up a cup of coffee (and had my car get stuck in the parkingContinue reading “On Seeking Out The Unpleasant For The Subsequent Relief”
Honey And Me And Quining Qualia
I grew up loathing honey. I preferred jams: plum, orange. apple, ‘mixed fruit,’ gauva, mango, marmalade. Toasted bread with thick white cream and jam; never honey. Honey was just a little ‘sickly-sweet;’ its taste was a ‘little off.’ It crossed some permissible boundary of ‘sweetness’ and became cloying; it sent shudders through me. I couldn’tContinue reading “Honey And Me And Quining Qualia”
Straight Trippin’: Sartre, Mescaline, Nausea, Crabs
In a previous post, I had wondered whether Jean-Paul Sartre‘s description of Roquentin’s ‘vision in the park’ in Nausea was an indication of psychedelic experiences in Sartre’s past:
‘Nausea’ And Psychedelia: Was Antoine Roquentin Tripping?
My re-reading of Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre‘s existentialist classic, for this semester’s independent study on existentialism has now prompted me to blog on it two days in a row. Today, I find myself returning to a question which I had first considered a couple of decades ago during my first reading of Nausea: Was Antoine RoquentinContinue reading “‘Nausea’ And Psychedelia: Was Antoine Roquentin Tripping?”
Dreams of the “Undiscovered Country”
Hamlet suggested that “What dreams may come after / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause” and that “The dread of something after death / The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns, puzzles the will.” The eternally indecisive Danish prince was right, of course: many, ifContinue reading “Dreams of the “Undiscovered Country””
Samir Chopra 