intellectual properties

word of the day: pleonexia

Pleonexia, sometimes called pleonexy, originates from the Greek language πλεονεξια and is a philosophical concept employed both in the New Testament and in writings by Plato and Aristotle. It roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others”, suggesting what Ritenbaugh describes as “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit”.

…

Pleonexia, being mentioned in the New Testament in Colossians 3 verses 1–11 and Luke 12 verses 13–21, has been the subject of commentary by Christian theologians.

William Barclay describes pleonexia as an “accursed love of having”, which “will pursue its own interests with complete disregard for the rights of others, and even for the considerations of common humanity”. He labels it an aggressive vice that operates in three spheres of life. In the material sphere involves “grasping at money and goods, regardless of honour and honesty”. In the ethical sphere it is “the ambition which tramples on others to gain something which is not properly meant for it”. In the moral sphere, it is “the unbridled lust which takes its pleasure where it has no right to take”.

…

Classical Greek philosophers such as Plato related pleonexia to justice.

Thrasymachus, in Book I of The Republic, presents pleonexia as a natural state, upon which justice is an unnatural restraint.

In discussing the philosophy of Aristotle, who insisted in his Nicomachean Ethics that all specifically unjust actions are motivated by pleonexia, Kraut[4] discusses pleonexia and equates it to epichairekakia, the Greek version of schadenfreude, stating that inherent in pleonexia is the appeal of acting unjustly at the expense of others.

–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonexia

and if you really want to get into it, that idea of Thrasymachus’ , that pleonexia is natural (human) state that society and “justice” restrains, has caused a lot of philosophical controversy, which you can read more about here, in The Case for Pleonexia.

(pleonexia was recently discussed  in the context of the Greek financial crisis and its causes. )

secularism and its discontents: loss of enchantment?

re: this piece in the New Yorker, i have had this post in draft since august as i meant to write a lot more about this topic, about the connection or lack thereof between spirituality and happiness, and how lack of belief in the supernatural/mystical/metaphysical purpose doesn’t mean you are some depressed realist who doesn’t see magick in things, but often quite the contrary.  here are the parts i excerpted:

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a long QOTD: this awakened life

[ed: line breaks added. each of these paragraphs is a QOTD in itself. read slowly and savor.]

“A traveller who had seen many lands and peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what quality in men he had discovered everywhere he had gone. He replied: ‘They have the tendency to laziness.’  To many it will seem that he ought rather to have said: ‘They are all timid. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.’

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience–why?

From fear of his neighbour, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbour, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself?

Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveller spoke.

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to the very last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious.

When the great thinker despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products, things of no consequence and unworthy to be associated with or instructed.

The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.’

Every youthful soul who hears this call day and night trembles when he hears it; for the idea of its liberation gives the soul a presentiment of the measure of happiness allotted it from all eternity–a happiness to which it can by no means attain so long as it lies fettered by the chains of fear and convention.

And how dismal and senseless life can be without this liberation! There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

And if it true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, that is to say in private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion; for which reason our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known, because least human, portion of human history.

I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these gruesome houses which the generation of public opinion has built for itself, not one will be standing in a hundred years time, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed.

On the other hand, how right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they too would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it–while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life.

But even if the future gave us no cause for hope – the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time.

We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsmen of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, the way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbor says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away.

Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity.

I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught that did not yet exist a couple thousand years ago?

All that is not you, it says to itself.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask; go along it.

Who was it who said: ‘a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him?

But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘this is really you, this is no longer outer shell’.

Moreover, it is a painful and dangerous undertaking thus to tunnel into oneself and to force one’s way down into the shaft of one’s being by the nearest path.

A man who does it can easily so hurt himself that no physician can cure him. And, moreover again, what need should there be for it, since everything bears witness to what we are, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we do not remember, our books and our handwriting.

This, however, is the means by which an inquiry into the most important aspect can be initiated.

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be…”

-Nietzsche, “Untimely Meditations“

(we are all stardust)

do you need to feel better about life today?

watch this.  it’s illuminating.

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

(also: near-death seems like a real trip. i started listening to this in the middle and thought for sure she was talking about an acid trip.  )

.::.

or: if you can’t watch the vid right now and want something else to brighten your day, check out these 45 photos from the National Geographic annual photo contest, each one simply amazing.

QOTD

You don’t have a soul.
You are a Soul.
You have a body.

–C.S. Lewis

reality-based

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

–via Corey Robin on the Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism.

…that post, and Robin’s new book, is a quick reference study on the roots of conservatism, and what it means today vs. what it used to mean, which if you are inclined to debate or discuss politics seems fundamental.

“Reality-based community” soon became one of the most cited quotes of the Bush era — a Google search yields 456,000 results; it even has its own Wikipedia page. It is an affirmation of everything the left ever thought about the right: that it lives in a fact-free universe where ideological purity is more important than pragmatic solutions; that it’s revolutionary and radical rather than realistic and moderate; that it’s activist rather than accommodating; that it’s, well… not really conservative.”

it goes on but to be honest i basically stopped reading there because i was sort of reeling from the idea of the use of “reality-based” as a pejorative term by those running the Empire of America (forgive me that i missed this conversation when it happened in 2004).

on the one hand, i find it philosophically beautiful that those running the world believe that Reality Is What You Create, that nothing is static and everything can change on a dime, and basing long term decisions about humanity on anything seemingly factual is foolish, because what might happen tomorrow? Focus On The World You Want To Create. and who can define Reality anyway?  what it means for one person or community can be radically different from another.

on the other hand, personal existential philosophies about what determines Reality aside, the use of this term as a flip side to “faith-based” creates a dichotomy in which i would have to side with “reality-based” as being the only way i can imagine organizing a global population. collect data, determine current realities, react, adjust, repeat.  “consensus reality” is hard enough to swallow as a middle ground (and also entirely undependable, as it is subjective);  “faith-based” seems a foolish path.

but wait – aren’t those the Dreamers? i thought i supported Dreamers. crap. so i guess it’s fair to say that my personal and political philosophies are divergent in numerous ways. but that is not to say that the personal is not political. oh no no.

(aside: i love that Truthiness is listed in the See Also links on wikipedia.)

anyway, i digress. i just hadn’t heard this discussion when it happened and my brain got a little blown for a second just now when i read that and started extrapolating into current life and Realities, which i’ll spare you further uneducated ramblings on. but i assure you the idea of “reality-based community” is permanently in my brain now.

(thx to Lukas for the link.)

your apocalypse was fab

telempathy fully dialed

exposing minority selves in a climax community

regression into stoned: immaculate : impeccable

the future willfully ignored;

phoenix philosophers waiting for everything to burn

and then rebirth at dawn:

5 a.m., july, new york city

7 a.m., september, black rock city -

sweat, dust, heat, atmosphere: utterly visceral, hedonistic.

romantic utilitarians, existential humanists,

shape shifters, line walkers, sliders, shadow selves

move through liminal space.

relative morality dependent on audience and a lack of absolutes,

the element-ary complicated by emotion,

disassociate and be grateful.

when I was an alien
cultures weren’t opinions

dreams of armageddon

thanks to the World Ending May 21st prophecy, and all the associated internet memes this week, last night i dreamed that it happened.  my POV was from somewhere in the north oakland/berkeley hills, and it was a clear night.  then suddenly:  a mushroom cloud and bright orange light from the west, and san francisco was gone. charcoal. obliterated. you would think there would have been more panic in my dream, but there wasn’t.  it was more morbid curiosity, or not unlike going into the hills to watch the 4th of july fireworks.   some time later, a smaller flash of light/explosion, approximated somewhere in berkeley.  even knowing that people i loved had died, i was still unpanicked.  perhaps it was shock.  i don’t remember what i planned to do, only that it seemed beautiful and i was not worried.

i assume this surfacing of the world ending May 21, 2011 calculation is Christian one-upmanship/backlash/backchannel against the “heathen” 2012 prophecy, which i also put no stock in. i mean, i did go to a remote canyon in Sedona, Arizona to Party Like It Was 1999 for Y2K, but that was more because the opportunity presented itself. i didn’t really care if the world ended.

in any case, jokes aside, being as i am, i have been thinking about What If The World Did End Tomorrow? i didn’t do anything different this week. no shopping sprees or sudden forays into hard narcotics, but i did think about the state of my soul. and perhaps from some belief perspectives, this is the sign of a true blind sinner, but i think i’m alright. i do not believe that Jesus Christ is My Savior, but i think he was, whether a fictional figure or a real man, a righteous revolutionary and i’m down with the philosophy of the JC. i’m pretty sure that i have not lied, cheated, or stolen from anyone without asking for forgiveness any time in the recent past, i think my moral compass is compassion-centric, and i believe that i do Good Works and not only avoid but fight against Evil. in short: i believe i have good karma.

i think that’s why in my dream last night i wasn’t worried. because, hey, if the world does end tomorrow, there’s nothing i can do to stop it, and nothing i would’ve done differently about the way i live my life. i mean, i would have DONE some different things, but not changed my philosophy. i think they call this “peace of mind”, and i feel good about that.

non sequitur: fasting

for reasons i won’t go into right now, on certain days i have an inordinate amount of time on my hands, and i often just start reading wikipedia entries on things that i’ve recently heard talk of or seen referenced that i realize i don’t actually know much about.  like Lent.

reading about Lent led me to reading about fasting, which i was also thinking about because some friends of ours are restricting their diets of starches, not because they have any malady, but as yet another nutritional experiment (possibly related to the recent phenomenon of the 4-Hour Body.)  it’s one of the quirky things that always amuses me about the bay area: all the fasting and dietary experimentation that goes on amongst the hippies and hipsters. it’s like a hobby around here, depriving oneself of things and proclaiming certain foods “bad”.  since when are carrots bad for you?  i always think of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer becomes a minimalist and declares “You know what I discovered? I really like depriving myself of things. It’s fun.”

disclosure: for a couple of years i did attempt to fast on Thanksgiving day as a way to express my gratitude for food, but it turns out i am prone to hypoglycemia and so any attempt at fasting – even juice fasting – has always failed for me. also: this is not cynical. i find the practice of self-imposed restrictions interesting and a worthwhile endeavor in this land of excess and plenty; i am not begrudging it. i am amused.

anyway, the wikipedia article on fasting omits mentions of it being a pastime for the hippie-bourgeois-foodie contingent on the West Coast of the United States. it focuses on the intersection of religion and fasting, which i found quite enthralling, particularly when i got to the orthodox Christan section:

For Eastern Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Christians, fasting is an important spiritual discipline, found in both the Old Testament and the New, and is tied to the principle in Orthodox theology of the synergybody (Greek: between the soma) and the soul (pnevma). That is to say, Orthodox Christians do not see a dichotomy between the body and the soul but rather consider them as a united whole, and they believe that what happens to one affects the other (this is known as the psychosomatic union between the body and the soul).

well that definitely jibes with all the yogi-fasting-tribal-ritualistic-hippie talk i hear around here, but although i grew up in a very Christian town -protestants and catholics alike – no one i knew ever fasted a full day in their lives that i was aware of, and this reverence for body-mind connection was never discussed in my church that i recall (outside of some being teetotalers). yet it seems if you read the bible closely enough and take its instructions literally, as many followers do, you should be fasting (or preparing to fast) MOST OF THE TIME.

i guess the nugget that stuck with me is that for a supposedly “christian nation”, most have managed to ignore the biblical bits about mindful and grateful eating and the body as a temple for the soul, and instead we have a land of processed fast food and an obesity epidemic.

oh, and this: “Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights, twice back-to-back, without food or water; the first, immediately before he received the tablets on the mountain with God. And the second, after coming down, seeing the Israelites practicing idolatry, and breaking the tablets in anger.”

well, isn’t that some interesting context.  i might see/talk to God after climbing to a mountaintop if i hadn’t eaten for 40 days too.

the book of eli (spoiler alert)

last night we watched The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic film.  the setting: nuclear (?) war causes hole in atmosphere, sun scorches earth, most people die, the scattered burnt-out civilization that remains looks a lot like hanging out with the DPW at burning man, only more desperate and violent.  all books were burned, and water is so scarce it becomes the controlling force for everything people do.  it’s sort of a cross between an old cowboy movie and mad max.  what makes it exceptional is 1. it’s beautifully shot in black/white/monochrome, and the mood is minimalist and desolate and 2. the cast: denzel washington, gary oldman, tom waits, jennifer beals, and mila kunis.

the premise, however, is tricky, and where i got a little put off (spoiler alert):

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