And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die. All took leave from life [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Philosophy'
“If This Is A Man” – Primo Levi
April 12th, 2012 · No Comments · Philosophy, Uncategorized
Tags:Death·Mortality·philosophy
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 9th, 2012 · No Comments · Morality, Uncategorized
There is divine judgement, there is the judgement of a State and the judgement of society, but there is one supreme judgement: the judgement of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian state and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of [...]
Tags:Free Choice·Freedom·Guilt·Liberty·morality·totalitarianism
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 8th, 2012 · No Comments · Humanism, Ideology, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized
This senseless kindness is condemned in the fable about the pilgrim who warmed a snake in his bosom. It is the kindess that has mercy on a tarantula that has bitten a child. A mad, blind, kindness. People enjoy lookng in stories and fables for examples of the danger of this senseless kindness. But one [...]
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 7th, 2012 · No Comments · Christianity, Humanism, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized
People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good. And so the good of a sect, class, nation or [...]
Tags:Christianity·Freedom·Humanism·philosophy·religion·State
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 6th, 2012 · No Comments · Genocide, Humanism, Philosophy, Uncategorized
An electronic machine can carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of [...]
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 5th, 2012 · No Comments · Culture, Humanism, Philosophy, Uncategorized
Somehow the music seemed to have helped him to understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities arise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away…. Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone [...]
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 4th, 2012 · No Comments · Humanism, Ideology, Morality, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized
A conversation between and old Bolshevik and a former Tolstoyan in a German concentration camp: ‘Where acts of violence are committed,’ he explained to Mostovskoy, ‘sorrow reigns and blood must flow. I saw the sufferings of the peasantry with my own eyes – and yet collectivisation was carried out in the name of Good. I [...]
“Life and Fate” – Vasily Grossman
April 4th, 2012 · No Comments · Humanism, Ideology, Philosophy, Uncategorized
Linda Grant’s Introduction: Grossman takes us into the minds of a group of soldiers waiting in the forest: one is full of dire forebodings, one is singing, one is chewing bread and sausage and thinking about the sausage, one is trying to identify a bird, one worries about whether he’d offended his friend, one is [...]
“The Guns of August 1914”, Barbara Tuchman
March 30th, 2012 · No Comments · Philosophy, Uncategorized
A new book, “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war had become vain. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would [...]
Tags:philosophy·sociology·war·WW1
Kenneth Arrow on Certainty – “Recollections of a Bleeding Heart” – Don Watson
March 14th, 2012 · No Comments · Ideology, Means and Ends, Philosophy, Quotes
Kenneth Arrow, the father of the theory of general equilibrium, one of the laws of free-market economics, once said, ‘Vast ills follow a belief in certainty.’
