BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: PHILOSOPHY

For MAC BICA

SPINOZA

Spinoza
Knows a
Thing or two
About separating false from true.
**

Any day above ground is a good day.
                          Bob Dylan
**

SIMONE WEIL ON RIGHTS & OBLIGATIONS
 
“We should not focus on rights, she (SIMONE WEIL)  
argues, but on obligations. Obligations (devoirs) 
precede rights; rights are situational and relative, 
obligations are metaphysical, absolute, and eternal. 
How do I know what my obligations are? An obligation 
arises from the very fact of encountering another 
human being. If I encounter a starving human being, 
I  am not in doubt: I offer food. (Food and eating 
are the chief metaphors she uses to describe what 
it means to respond to a need. For me, these metaphors 
become a reminder that the woman who wrote this was 
slowly dying from starvation.”

Toril Moi. “I Came With a Sword” (a review of The 
Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by 
Robert Zaretsky (Chicago: Chicago University 
Press,2021)
***

OPINIONS ARE NOT THE SAME AS IDEAS

“An how terrible it is not to have any opinions! 
You see, for instance, a bottle, or the rain, 
or a peasant in a cart, but what is the bottle 
for, or the rain, or the peasant, what is the 
meaning of them, you can’t tell, and you couldn’t, 
even if they paid you a thousand rubles.”

Anton Chekhov. “The Daring” translated by
Avrahm Yarmolindsky in The Portable Chekhov.

**

“If God dropped acid, would he see people?”
                              George Carlin
**

“You’ve gotta love livin’, baby! Because dyin’ 
is a pain in the ass!”
                               Frank Sinatra

**
FLIES & THE THINKERS OF ANTIQUITY

To the thinkers of antiquity, a fly’s life had 
cryptic origins. With scant knowledge of how 
flies metamorphize from larvae into adults, some 
classical philosophers reasoned that the insects 
emerged through ‘spontaneous generation ‘ out of 
fires, rotten meat  and organic refuse; life 
springing forth from  nonliving matter.”

Rebecca Giggs, reviewing Super Fly: The Unsuspected 
Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects 
by Jonathan Belcombe. The New York Times Book Review
 (Sunday, July 11, 2021)
**

STRANGE THINGS I WONDER ABOUT

I wonder 
of a map decided to go somewhere –
Wd it follow itself?

Louis Phillips

***

OCCAM’S RAZOR

 

The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that 
the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one 
- - or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: 
Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, 
if you hear hoofbeats “think horses, not zebras.”

    
Michiko Kakutani.  New York Times (February 16, 2010)

**
TO BE OR NOT TO BE -- THAT IS THE QUESTION

The 1982 novel “Deadeye Dick” by the popular author 
Kurt Vonnegut mentioned the following piece of 
graffiti:
“To be is to do”—Socrates.
“To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra
**
 
EPISTEMIC OPACITY 

“Whether or not people actually understand where 
their fruits and vegetables come from, Levinovitz 
says, we think that we do -–and are disturbed when 
that changes. The philosophical term for this is 
epistemic opacity. “When you imagine you know how
something works, or where it comes from,
that’s  comforting,” he added. “So when you 
hear that an apple was genetically modified,
it’s like, What does that mean? It’s alienating.”

Jennifer Kahn. “Learning to Love G.M.O.S “ in
The New York Times Magazine (July 25,2021), 
quoting Alan Levinovitz, a professor of  
religion and science atJames Madison University.

AND LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, WISDOM PASSED ON FROM
ONE GENERATION TO THE NEXT

"...what person over the age of three would want
to wet his pants in public? This is why you will 
never forget these words, which were the last words
which were spoken to one of your friends by his
dying father:'Just remember, Charlie,' he said 
'never pass up an opportunity to piss.' And so the
wisdom of the ages is handed down from one 
generation to the next."

Paul Auster. Winter Journal (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 2012)