Highways have always been special places for me. Most of the time, I wasn't under time pressure, and rarely did I have to get from point A to point B by a specific time. Rather, highways are travel routes. I find myself in transitional states there, a kind of no-man's-land with endless possibilities. That opens up spaces for thought. Often they are simply empty. The brain is busy with [...]
I live in a hyper-complex society. I already notice this in political and social issues that no one can really grasp in their complexity anymore. We can cling to principles such as justice, equality, freedom, consideration, sustainability, etc.. But when it comes to the specifics, it becomes difficult. Should I stand up for myself in a conflict [...]?
During meditation, I often watch my thoughts, let them come and go and try to slow them down. Thoughts come and go, and often I don't understand where they come from and why they are replaced at some point by a completely different thought. What chain of associations is at work here? These chains of thought seem to [...]
I've always had stomachaches with an atomistic worldview. We learn in school that the smallest building blocks of the universe are atoms. Now physics has advanced, and we talk about protons, electrons, positrons, quarks, and strings, etc. … But the core idea remains the same: the world is composed of the smallest parts of matter. This is [...]
One of the most serious misunderstandings of recent generations is the confusion between economic and political theory. It seems to be almost a consensus that capitalism is understood as a political theory. There may be many reasons why capitalism needs to be understood politically. There are certainly also reasons why capitalism is often thought of together with democracy. For many [...]
I love complexity, but sometimes I also like radical simplification - to get some clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migration of peoples, the history of art can be sketched in woodcut form as the history of ideas: In medieval art, stories were told visually - mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people [...]
Black holes are a mystery to us. I am not a cosmologist and deal with black holes in a popular scientific way with a philosophical interest. They mark a limit to our imagination. Gravitational force influences space and time, says science. Concentrated at one point, it compresses matter to its pure substance, squeezes atomic nuclei and electrons together to form a mass [...]