Reflections on Love, Beauty, and Human Nature
Reflections on Human Concepts
Love: According to the author, love is a word often used but lacks meaning for many. Its origin lies in the twelfth century with troubadour poetry. This love is a special, rare feeling; great loves like Romeo and Juliet are exceptional. Love, in its late stages, faces extinction, requiring us to ‘invent’ a new kind of love.
Beauty: Defining beauty, a critical old doctrine suggests it should be viewed without lust. Yet, lust is life itself!
Stupidity: Stupidity, the philosopher says, is defined by those who know ‘sottises’. Living together requires forgiving and tolerating things we might not welcome. Forgiveness helps overcome the irritation or discomfort caused by offenses.
Cynicism: Cynicism is the antidote to the hypocrisy of belief. Every belief we accumulate becomes a prejudice, a bad habit. Life doesn’t need many beliefs, just three or four.
Cowardice: When we compare ourselves, we all become cowards.
Defect: A defect is the opposite and symmetrical to the word excess.
Money: The author doesn’t understand how some people despise money, which is so difficult to earn.
Epitaph: An example is given: According to egoism, the criterion that is not egoistic is blessed.
Skepticism: Skepticism is described with six aspects:
- Intellectual: Reasonable people look.
- Moral: The practice of sarcasm as a form of charity.
- Social: Never a hero, murderer, or politician.
- Political: Revolutions are not just prepared.
- Technical: It is time-sensitive, history…
- Literary: Skepticism is incompatible with literary poetry.
Ethics: Ethics is described as science, technology, and everything related to man and his environment.
People: When parliament uses ‘people,’ they never mean us.
Humiliation: We all feel humbled by different things. The author criticizes this.
Home: Someone said that the life of man is but a useless passion. Life ceases to be a useless passion when we think it is a useless passion.
Ideas: ‘All coincidence between my ideas and yours is just that: coincidence.’
Inferno: The author believes that Hell is a place of constant pain and punishment, and sometimes we ‘send’ someone there, assuming it exists.
Intellectual: Intellectualism is lost; nobody remembers what people like Erasmus did. It’s as if nobody remembers.
Interest: Women are used as an example in a situation that happened with a friend.
Justice: An example from newspapers in January 1963 is given, where two criminalists were released and sent back to Germany. The author disagrees with some aspects of justice.
Reading: John Carpenter feels there’s a fear of taking up a current book, a fear of ‘dysphonia into the whirlwind of everyday surprises and tragedies,’ caused by ‘neurosis.’ He criticizes educated people who flee from recent books, using the ‘excuse’ that literature should be understood in the past. Reading literature is not fleeing; it’s reading to understand oneself and others, our time, and the past.
Freedom: Men who live under a dictatorship don’t miss lost freedom, while those in democracies don’t realize its value because they are accustomed to it.