For so many years I've thought about Marx. Who hasn't? The idea of an equal and solidaristic community, free from ideological superstructure, or irrational will-o'-the-wisps. A world that only knows matter, and sees in it a scientific, progressive movement. Its goal? A world in which humanity is perfect, i.e., harmonious, without envy and resentment, solidaristic and equal, without alienation and external determination, which alone enables the unfolding of the individual within a collective. This dream of a better...
Cézanne drew and painted Mont Saint-Victoire over 80 times. Although from different perspectives, it was essentially just the mountain. This mountain has been there for a very long time; it exists in another era. A fruit fly has one day to live, then it's all over. We think in terms of generations when we expand our time horizon. A few hundred years seems like a lot to us. Our cultural history began 5000 years ago. For a mountain, that's practically yesterday. What do we see when we look at the same...
Today I heard a quote from Sri Aurobindo. He said, in essence, that each of us has multiple selves. That was clear to me. For decades, that has been my experience, that the different aspects of a personality are many and the idea of a subjective identity is a construct. I always saw the principles of construction as ideological, serving the logic of passports, individual responsibility and jurisdiction, but also of guilt and atonement, the idea of a soul in the Christian context, etc. My reaction...
When I was a teenager, I lost my heart to someone who lived in Rome. I traveled to the Eternal City with no money, no plan – it was supposed to be a surprise. That went somewhat awry. We shared a pizza, but otherwise, I had a lot of time to myself. On one of the hills, I spent many hours looking at the sky. I thought about Einstein. What else. Everything else seemed too trivial. There, for the first time, I had…
When I first came ’home‘ from India, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library, and what is not? My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books that deal with discourses of modernity and postmodernity – theoretical, historical, analytical, comparative... Often, the topic of representation is addressed. What is...
Can large topics be approached with small texts? The Mediterranean region is the birthplace of monotheism – Judaism, Christianity, Islam. India is the birthplace of Hinduism. Countless gods are conceived here, or else the absence of God, or the universality of the divine, depending on which of the numerous strands one follows. Two principles are visible here, however: the maxim of individuality, which continues even beyond death, and the idea of being part of something much larger, within which the...
I grew up in the country where cars were invented. The roads and cars here seem safe, at least everything is done to ensure you are safe. Accidents are anticipated, risks calculated, potential collisions computed, and damage minimized through modular construction, or so they say. We want to be prepared for everything, here. This logic of safeguarding, risk calculation, and prevention is why I want to leave this country again. There is no room for the unexpected, this…
In Europe, we have an idea of Enlightenment as something where an individual realizes that he or she lives under externally imposed constraints. The goal then is to overcome these constraints and place oneself under a higher law. A light goes on and shines into all the dark corners, thereby questioning what has not yet been reflected upon and examined. This intellectual movement is described with the metaphor of light as a torch. The light of Enlightenment shines centrally into…
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