We have never been humans – no human has ever stepped on the surface of the earth. However, since their first symbolic utterance mortals started to walk on the earth, naming (i.e. conferring being to) what lives and what dies. Possessed by symbolic language, humans are the only mortals, the only animals who experience in…
Category: Death
Endemic Pandemic Pandemonium
SPANISH VERSION HERE A devastating plague dominates Thebes. Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, first intervention of the chorus, vv. 158-215) has its people call on the gods: First we call on Athena, deathless daughter of Zeus, / and Artemis, earth upholder, […] / and Phoebus [Apollo], the far shooter, / come to us now […] / Our…
Post-Nihilist Meanderings on the Shores of Mythology, Tragedy, Poetry, and Enigma
It wasn’t long. It only lasted four hundred years. But the beautiful thing is that we can assist to its birth and death. The beautiful thing and the sad thing. It first surfaces in Homer’s Iliad, and it dies with Aristotle, in Aristotle. Strangely, we can presence both events. Yet we can only understand the…
Oedipus Rex
Duplicity. “When Oedipus speaks he sometimes says something other than or even the opposite of what he thinks he is saying.” Yet “the ambiguity of what he says does not reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more profoundly, the duality of his being. He is double. He is himself a…
Herákleitos (Heraclitus) // Carlos
Heraclitus is the first philosopher from whom we have a large collection of fragments, all likely pertaining to a book about which, nevertheless, we ignore many things(*). We have encountered him twice so far: First, when examining life’s autopoiesis (**). Secondly, when analysing the Greek gods in poetical perspective and the relation between the ephemeral…
Of Poetry, Gods, Heroes & Mortal Things // Carlos
The Greek gods are a matter of poetry. First, we know of them through the verses of various Ancient Greek poets; eventually poet-philosophers, but poets in any event. Secondly, their very presence – ultimately, their very being – makes sense in poetic terms alone. In other words: talking of the gods meant in Ancient Greece…
On Nishitani’s Notion of Nothingness (Sūnyatā) // S&C
Nishitani on Nothingness // Sofya What Keiji Nishitani intends to think in his famous essay Shūkyō to wa Nanika (What is Religion?), originally published in 1961 and translated into English in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness, is beautiful in a way. Firstly, he proposes that all life and non-life form oneself’s being. Nishitani quotes Miso Kokushi:…
Omar Khayam on Life and Love at the Antipodes of Hinduism and Buddhism // Carlos
This is a post on life and love as portrayed in the poetry of Omar Khayam; and, additionally, on a major difference between the spiritual worlds of Iran and India. Allow me to start by saying that, unlike many Westerners since Anquetil-Duperron had the Upanishads translated in the 18th century, I have never had the…
Death through Music // Sofya
I have never experienced anyone’s death. Fortunately none of my relatives or friends have died and I have neither seen nor felt people dying. Before listening to the fourteenth and last fugue in Bach‘s incomplete The Art of the Fugue, published posthumously in 1751(*), I could understand, but never experience, someone’s death. And then with…