I Nietzsche claims that the way in which we picture the world affirms or denies what we are ready to put in it, in short, that our representations rely on a pre-representational basis, inasmuch as we see what we see depending on how we are inclined to value it. In other words, he underscores the…
Category: Humanism
If God Loves You, It Means He Is Your Enemy: On Savage Thought and Christian Non-Sense
I. On Different Types of Oneness – and Their Danger Christian universalism is epitomised in these two passages extracted from two of Paul’s letters: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal…
Cruelty and Tenderness among Extra-Modern Peoples
Extra-modern peoples are often viewed not only as materially underdeveloped, politically immature, and culturally uneducated, but also as being fundamentally cruel. We cannot discuss here all these accusations, which tell more about those who pronounce them than about anything else. But there is one we would like to examine here: the supposed cruelty of indigenous…
A Simplified World // Sofya
Hypercomplexity. It is hypercomplexity we are in need of in both ontological and epistemological terms—that is to say, in terms of our descriptions of what things are and of how we should study them. For we have lacked it for too many centuries, since Aristotle (and later Boethius, followed in this by the medieval Christian…
Little Stories from Malawi // S&C
We had a chance to visit Malawi in July 2019. We travelled there to learn about the environmental-justice initiatives put forward in various villages by the Lilongwe-based NGO Youth for Sustainable Development (YSD) over the past eight years—practices that have effectively enabled such villages to recover their pre-colonial agricultural practices and thereby strengthened their economic…
Capitalism’s Five Pillars // Sofya
Its immense complexity notwithstanding, it can be said that capitalism stands on five major pillars on which I would like to briefly write here. These pillars are: private property, human exceptionalism, rationality, progress, and hard work(❖). Private property In order for it to exist, capitalism must, in the first place, appropriate land. Colonists in North-America…
Humanity and Cannibalism as Problematic Notions // S&C
The crocodile-man from Papua New Guinea whom you see on the picture below is more similar to a crocodile than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. In turn, this cat-man from the Amazon rainforest is more similar to a jaguar than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. Finally, this…
When the World is Nothing but Dust // Sofya
A Question of Mentality Mentality is what makes people see, accept, and think some things conceivable, but not others. It is the basis of people’s thought, something they do not question—the condition of possibility of their ideas and actions. What is modern mentality? It is, among other things, what allows deforestation and the extinction of…