Xenophanes combines his theology with fierce polemics against the immorality of the gods of Homer and Hesiod, and with a penetrating refutation of anthropomorphism. If they could paint, he says, ‘horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle’; for ‘the Ethiopians say their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that they have light blue eyes and red hair.’ Men have made their own image into gods. All these things are ‘fictions of the earlier people’ which should not be repeated. The break with tradition is accomplished. Xenophanes’ criticism of Homeric religion could not be outdone, and it was never refuted.
Futility. Futility shapes the world. History is a story of futilities, progress is a sequence of futilities. “Development!” says the futurist. “Loss,” says the rebel. “Hangover!” shouts the moralist from the back row. “Failure,” says the angry rebel. “Time is grey,” he says. The Creator’s failure is an introduction to the era. (...) Who was supposed to know? Good people from all over the world came together. Teachers, writers, and migrant workers huddle in trenches… young soldiers desert their units. What beautiful songs they sing! Brave children are history’s favourites, so it seems to them, and they wave white flags with silver horned crowns.
And they lose.
Coups are crushed. Anarchists are piled into mass graves on the Great Blue. Communists, beaten back from the isola of Graad, retreat to Samara and become a degenerate worker’s state ruled by bureaucrats.
Sayfa 34 - Unofficial English TranslationKitabı okudu
How did the French Revolution contribute
The political impact of the French Revolution on Germany was profound and ultimately irreversible. There is more ambiguity about its effects in other spheres. Economically, the French continental blockade against England probably did not last long enough to be of much help to Germany’s economic development. While the preconditions for later economic takeoff were established in the abolition of a variety of feudal restrictions on trade and labour mobility, the Napoleonic Wars probably on the whole retarded immediate economic development except in the Rhenish provinces directly administered by the French. Culturally, it is usually asserted that the Wars of Liberation served to turn the cultural nationalism of Herder into a new political nationalism. Yet this is probably overstated: there were only the most limited, partial stirrings of a political nationalism at this time, with local loyalties arguably very much more important.
Sartre believed that all individuals have an essential freedom and that people are responsible for their actions, their consciousness, and all aspects of their self. Even if an individual wishes not to be held responsible for himself, according to Sartre, that is a conscious decision, and he is responsible for the results of his inaction.
Based on this notion, Sartre explains that ethics and morals are subjective and related to an individual’s conscience. Therefore, there could never be any type of universal ethics or morality.
The body is the closest that we come to touching any kind of reality. And yet we have the desire to flee the body: many religions are based entirely on disembodiment, because the body brings with it mortality, fear of death. If you accept the body as reality, then you have to accept mortality and people are very afraid to do that….
—DAVID CRONENBERG
Finally, seducers are completely amoral in their approach to life. It is all a game, an arena for play. Knowing that the moralists, the crabbed repressed types who croak about the evils of the seducer, secretly envy their power, they do not concern themselves with other people’s opinions. They do not deal in moral judgments—nothing could be less seductive. Everything is pliant, fluid, like life itself. Seduction is a form of deception, but people want to be led astray, they yearn to be seduced. If they didn’t, seducers would not find so many willing victims. Get rid of any moralizing tendencies, adopt the seducer’s playful philosophy, and you will find the rest of the process easy and natural.
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