Nietzsche was my first love in philosophy. The first book of his I ever read was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I read it, and was deeply addressed by what it said, not long after I first experienced my own vocation — that is to say my own calling, from the Latin for just that — to philosophy.
Read moreDeserting the Desert
If we were to look for a fitting image of today's already global but still spreading desert of death, we would not find it in the mushroom clouds above nuclear explosions such as those that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the United States bombed them to bring about VJ-Day. We would instead find a fitting image of today's ever growing desert in such images as the icons for Microsoft or Apple, Google or Facebook, Walmart or Amazon.
Read moreArt After the Holocaust (1)
Art—at least that art that has been purified of all artifice and flashiness, all grandiloquence and gaudiness—can call us back from the sort of forgetting of ourselves that shames us, and into the sort of forgetting of ourselves that honors us. It can call us back from forgetting ourselves negatively and into forgetting ourselves positively—back into forgetting ourselves precisely by honoring our obligations, and paying what we owe.
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