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Is violence ever justice? Is coercion better than violence? Israel, Palestine, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Christianity, and the question of violence
What if there were no more physical violence but we agreed to argue, fight, or address conflict by other means? Would we not resort to espionage and trickery? Is that really any better than physical violence? But that is in the nebulous realm of international or interstate conflict. Imagine you stand face to face with your captor. He has not physically trapped you anywhere. Instead, he has coerced you through laws, rules, finances, relationships, and so forth. Shoot, maybe he’s plain smarter than you. So you’re trapped doing his will. Any little thing you do is at once what he asked—and then some—but not good enough. You sweep the floor,…
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A quick tip on meditating
Positivity of the kind used in meditation and perhaps Indian philosophy¹ is not just a pragmatic psychology but is grounded in a very powerful ontological position. I will briefly describe that position before sharing a tip on meditating. That position, nearly espoused by Hegel, and at times by Spinoza, is that only positive assertions can be true. More precisely “some things exist,” or “some sentences are true.” That is, more or less, a solution to the problem of nonexistence–for the most part, a problem that arises when we wonder what nonexistence is, what it is “not to be,” what existed before the universe if anything, or even theories of ontological…
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Hegel on free will and property, as told through translation notes
If you’re listening to that sentence, depending on which of the transcriptions I’ve italicized is correct, Hegel could be saying very different things about free will and what one does with it, or what it might do on its own...
