walther prager and philosophy

Natural conspiracies

2013-05-15T18:48:00.002-07:00

The existence of a conspiracy is primarily testified not by a common design for doing secretly one thing with a false appearance, but by the simple fact that some people act together.

When two persons meet and act together, it is supposed that each of them left out his or her individuality. But who could really do this?

Since the individual nature of a person means her existence as such, any claimed renouncement is in fact a lie.

The difficulty of living with such a lie is released by using the lie against someone else than the persons who claim their alliance.

For instance, it is a common image that the real lovers love each other more when there is an enemy or hindrance with which they should fight.

When the alliance or the group is greater, the lie which keeps the people together will have a greater enemy, too.

Nonetheless, any personal lie concerning your own individuality, for instance, when you suppose that you are more than an individual animal and build yourself a high ideal, feeds itself with the feeling that most of the people are your enemies.

No questions about sources

2013-05-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

When are we interested in discovering the source of information?

When we have to do with usual sources of information, people generally use to take the source into account. But their effort is minimal, sometimes a simple look, without any similarity with the serious or tedious strive for discovering something.

We attempt to discover the source only when the process of discovery make us to belief that we have a privileged status of finding what is concealed to others.

Because it requires a less effort, many prefer to abandon their own effort of discovering the sources of information and to receive the explanation offered by those who claim they discovered it.

If those self-claimed discoverers want to be believed they don’t need to offer elaborate explanations, but only to show that all their hearers are privileged by receiving the information.

In this way, we can explain why the religious believers do not try to discover the sources of their faith. Since they believe that they are privileged or chosen, the pleasure of discovering is already consumed.

Whimsical communication

2013-05-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

When you ask someone for hearing you, it is involved a real characteristic of speaking and hearing.

Since it is a sign of someone’s bodily constitution, the voice cannot be purified from all traits of personal corporeality. And the hearing cannot do this, too.

Therefore, when the voice is meant to be heard by somebody else, the traits of at least two impenetrable personal bodily constitutions are clashing each other.

From this point of view, there are not many chances of communication. And for this reason, we often tolerate the verbal conflicts as parts of communication, since their absence would affect severely the common and false belief that humans are in a continual state of communication.

In fact, the real communication is possible whenever two men succeed in ceasing to act in virtue of their individual bodily composition. And since we are our body, it should be ceased the very fact of being ourselves. Though it is a strange supposition, it is always appealed to when we speak to others looking at them and thus filling ourselves with the image of someone who is different than us.

To ask for being heard follows the same pattern, but in the opposite direction. We pray others to accept of being filled with us, and only thereafter to pay attention to our words.

If it is rather a rare experience to ask for being heard, it is more habitual the desire of being loved by others and the communication can be viewed as an experience of love.

But as in the love affairs, the communication is always endangered by the whimsical attitude of the partners.

Well Done Thing

2013-05-11T17:39:00.001-07:00

A well done thing spreads its wellness beyond itself.

Because the very meaning as a positive value is something as an extension of the qualified work or thing outside of the limits of that thing or work. Meanwhile, a negative qualification is intended to keep the thing in its limits, so that it could not touch us.

If that well thing or work is done by us, we grow together with it.

When other people do not recognize its wellness, we have reason to belief that they are frighten to receive among them someone who may put them into shadow with his greatness.

On the Moral Guiltiness

2013-05-11T15:47:00.001-07:00

It is so frighten to be morally judged by others not because they would have right, but because those who are judged tend to belief that they are anything else but a subject of judgment.

The tendency derives from the common social practice of making by speaking a step out of us each time when we meet someone else, since our public appearance cannot be the same as our private self-perception. And the judgment is a form of bringing us forward in the same way.

Moreover, when we make that step forward, we play the same game of dominance which is involved in the judgment of those who want to prevail over us. Even if we have the most peaceful intentions of sharing our belief with other people, we need to put other people’s words aside in order to be heard our own.

Therefore, when we are negatively judged, we feel we lose a game started by ourselves. Furthermore, we easily think that other people judge us for a real guilt.

In fact, the moral guilt or its lack cannot be really put forward by anybody, since it is something which belongs to that area from which we don’t get out in the public space. And a guilt which is not in the public space should have a different meaning. Maybe, it is a simple malfunction and not a guilt, nor a sin.

Meaningless words

2013-05-03T17:28:00.001-07:00

When the love is celebrated by poetry and spiritual words, it is probably the sign that the weight of two conjoined bodies cannot be carry on by the lovers.

In spite of the heights of the bodily pleasures, a love affair between two people sets both of them to the ground, since they can find each other only on the same ground. And all the things which lay down reveal their weight.

Differently, when it is a single body, it may avoid the feeling of its weight by moving beyond or beneath itself. Beyond, when the body is pulled to spiritual activities and beyond by seeking for preserving its health.

But it is sure that the body has a weight which always has influence on our life. Our spiritual impulses are tempered by the feeling of its weight, while our care for the body becomes futile when the weight of the body proves to be too great for being moved away from its constant decaying.

If we understand all the words of love as means for fighting with the weight of the body, their meaningless should be interpreted in a positive way, because they express one of the few human experiences of a straight fight against the bodily existence.

For instance, we will discover in those exaggerate words uttered by lovers that the humans wish for denying their existence into the world, since such words mostly imagine a state where nothing is important except the love itself. Reversely, we will discover that our body can be perceived as the whole world.

Beautiful time

2013-04-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

It hardly could be said that life is compounded of beautiful and ugly facts or events, since these two are rather criteria for considering things. They have not clear meanings in the case of things and we must imagine that there would be totally unclear to establish such values to a changing and composite reality as it is a life event.

In spite of this difficulty, we often live as if it would be required to qualify our life events as beauty or ugly. From the preoccupation for improving our home to those for achieving great ideals of love or wisdom, the labels ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ conjoin our endeavors, mostly when they have not come to an end yet.

Moreover, while many human activities cannot reach a definite attainment, the two labels are used for instilling the false impression of an end, be it positive or not.

Surely, they do not represent the values of the events, but our own implication into them. A so called ‘nice’ or ‘beautiful’ time expresses the fact that we increase our personality by living it, while a ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ time means that we lost some parts of us in that period.

We often prefer to think of our bad time as something we totally overcame, so that we can build another time using our whole personality. When we cannot succeed in renouncing to it, we tend to make responsible for our ugly time the things and persons from our past. They will seem ugly to us.

Since our lives are compounded of other things and persons, this is partly true. They could not be really ugly, but it is true that when we waste our lives with bad times, we allow to other things and persons to intervene too much in our life. On the contrary, the feeling of a beautiful time is mainly a personal experience.

Loving more than ever

2013-04-14T17:27:00.001-07:00

It is easy to forget any person you met long time ago.

And to forget her means that you cannot imagine how she could be a part of your present.

The slight and random memories do not revive her in your life.

They only give birth to words about her, which are detached from the context of your present life.

Being so, they have no significance for the current life. But beyond the current life is its general meaning, even if something as a general meaning of life is just a matter of futile questions.

For this reason, the persons who are remembered seem to say something about the meaning of your life, not only about your past.

More than ever, you are ready to see them as ones who modified your entire life, in spite of the permanent belief that you are its master. As a part of the human longing for understanding life, you also may love them more than ever.

Words becoming actions

2013-04-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

Almost everything a man does is more powerful than him.

His loneliness does not really allow addition. Man is in his breath, and a single breath can be added only to another breath. He cannot be more than him when he does something in the world, but he only let the world to show itself through him.

Still, his loneliness is concealed by language. We can speak about our life by including the world which does not belong to us.

And language is the way by which he uses the results of a long history of human attempts to get out from loneliness by addressing to other men.

Though without others’ support, an individual still can claim that his acts belong to him and he will not feel alone, if he has the power to use the language.

But when he does not speak to anybody, he feels that his words are only attempts to conceal his loneliness. Then, it takes birth the feeling that what he does is futile, too. Therefore, he prefers to stay under the shelter of the words and to use them as if they would be actions. The lonely words take the name of an action: prayer, thought, poetical creation etc.

The danger of comparison

2013-04-10T15:24:00.002-07:00

Many human activities keep their value as long as they are not compared with other activities.

And not because we may find that other activities are more important than the one we do. The comparison mainly opens the field of the multiplicity of all human affairs that always contradicts the continual and justified belief in our individuality.

For this reason, the comparison is felt as a personal danger and we prefer to use it only for judging others’ activities.

The individuality belongs to us, not to our activities. Though with marks of individuality, we act in a comparable way. For instance, we love, think, speak, and die like others. Only the strong personalities impress deeper marks of individuality upon them and provide the comfort of knowing that they can return to these marks whenever their activities fail. The return means to confidently search for other personal resources for doing new activities.

There are fewer chances to such return for those with a weaker personality. Therefore, they strive for making their activities more personal than they can be and to hinder the possibility of being compared. They usually try to do this by living in the public eyes. They use the comparison to show that their activities are more important than others’.

But once they call the public to testify their individuality, the danger of comparison has been already done. Those many eyes are identical to the multitude of other’s activities. Thus, a public person is received by other people as one of their activities, and not as an individual person. Public persons are identified with an activity of entertainment. Consequently, they will live just for being an activity for other people, in spite of their desire of expressing their individuality.

Preparation for sincerity

2013-03-18T15:52:00.001-07:00

The words used in direct orders are the only ones about which we can be sure that they are efficient.

It can be supposed that the birth of language was caused by the need of giving orders.

And maybe there is right to say that our actual long speeches which claim to be communicative or to share information with others conceal in fact the desire of giving orders.

When we keep silence and speak only to ourselves, it would be a way of giving orders to us. We easily accept to receive orders from ourselves, so that the words we silently speak prove to be more efficient than those we address to others.

So efficient they are, that we become enclosed in our inner discourses. Therefore, we cannot be something else than our words and we forget the habit of using them for deceiving our intentions of giving orders. In this way, the silence teaches us the sincerity. But such sincerity is not well received by other people, who are rather accustomed to be gently lied.

Meaning of life for a while

2013-03-15T17:47:00.001-07:00

If the life as a whole cannot have a meaning, we live many short periods of time about which we are confident that they have one.

Our confidence is not expressed through words, but by the purposive concern to fulfill all the goals of a certain period of time. And if the life had a meaning, it should be lived more than expressed.

When we add a long reflection on the meaning of such limited episode of life, it might appear the thought that that episode is actually meaningless.

But when we add just a short reflection, the meaning of a present episode of life only spreads to the next one, forcing its beginning.

Those who succeeded in accumulating a long series of episodes without long reflecting on them cannot be stopped of seeing a meaning of life even when the series is interrupted.

For the habit of living meaningfully makes someone to imagine that his or her entire life has a meaning, too. The power of that habit proves to be so great, that we are ready to believe in dreams and hopes which falsely represent a meaningful future of our life.

Regrets for lost ideals

2013-03-11T16:50:00.001-07:00

It is always hard to discover who is responsible for the fact that someone’s life has not attained his expectations.

The dreaming mind which establishes ideals of life is far from the real life. And the notion of responsibility belongs to the real life as like as the real conditions of existence which cannot be seen while we conceive ideals. For talking about responsibility, there must be identified a fault in the real life.

If we look to the real life, the most common reason for which the personal ideals are lost is the social life. We cease to be interested in achieving our goals because the world of other people is never interested in paving the way for those who live only for their own ideals. They put hindrances to someone’s individual ideals especially when they love him. Who could admit that his beloved to be lost in his individuality?

And again love teaches us that the social relations are finally mindless experiences. Nonetheless, the act of living is mindless, too. Therefore, those who lose their ideals because of the social life stop the work of their idealistic mind. According to a positive interpretation, that means that they simply live their mindless life. And nobody can be judged for living, nor the people who attract someone to live with them.

If someone regrets the losing of his ideals by identifying responsible persons or by blaming himself, we can easily discover that his regrets conceal dissatisfaction with the life as such. And such dissatisfaction is always tempered by onward living.

Theoretical explanations

2013-03-08T07:52:00.001-08:00

Even if we are reared and trained with theoretical explanations of physical things, the readiness by which we accept them should stem from a common attitude towards surrounding things. Namely, it should be an attitude similar to theoretical insights.

A condition for such an attitude is that of finding the objects of knowledge unmoved and unchangeable, as they are in the theoretical explanations. But when we find them so, they are not objects of knowledge, but rather causes of our boredom.

Being bored by the same objects, we do not think of them, but of ourselves. The great questions about life and self raise as consequences of the long periods when humans meet the same objects. And the impossibility of finding satisfactory answers to them imbues us with feelings of enmity against those same objects which provoked our states of doubts. Thus, the best recipes of leaving the states of boredom suppose the abandonment of the same things for meeting other people or things.

If we return to the theoretical explanations of physical things, we might observe that they also cause boredom to many of us. Though, it is a different sort of boredom. The prestige of theoretical explanations does not allow us to deny their importance for turning to ourselves, nor to dismay the explained objects. We are just kept silence for hearing and repeating them, sometimes with the risk of living an unquestioned life.

Egoistical love

2013-02-28T15:56:00.002-08:00

An egoistical view of your life time requires both to live for following your interest and to not allow the loss of any moment of your life without using it on your behalf.

The last duty is harder to be fulfilled. Because we are those who alien us from living for ourselves oftener than others. We are those who lose our life time and, as an excuse, we even come to say that our personal life means the possibility of losing the life time through leisure.

Because of such a hard demand, we often prefer to abandon the first one too, though it is easier, since the egoistical interest defines our individual nature. Thus, the altruist purposes are sometimes followed with the eagerness of an egoistical passion, since we know that they save us from the duty of living for us.

When we do not chose to live for others because of our impossibility to live for us, our love and compassion are exposed more to disturbances caused by the egoistical feelings which were never intentionally abandoned. And we fall in love or we love our parents and children before we think about ourselves. As a consequence, all of them are always threatened by egoistical outbursts.

The Seer

2013-02-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

A seer could not really teach us about our present life, because life is not an object of sight.

We rather see all things through our life. And it is futile to try to discern the influence of our life on the things we see, since such attempt is also a part of our life.

Nonetheless, our life intermingles itself with others’ lives. Therefore, we are often concerned about how they see us.

But we are scared by the possibility of being seen by them through their lives, especially when their lives are more precious than us.

However, most of the time, we are scared by the fact that others may see us according to their lives which are more limited than ours. And not because we are proud of our lives, but because we know that people usually involve only a limited part of their life in seeing others’ lives.

Differently, a seer has the virtue of seeing us without doing this according to his life. In fact, the seer has no identity, since he claims that the power of seeing the future is a gift.

Even if our emancipated culture dismisses the appeal to seers for guiding our lives, we are often inclined to give such prestige to the persons who claim their authority over us. And it is frequently an error.

Old world

2013-02-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

When we grow older, the world seems older to us.

And it is not a subjective view. Because the world itself is always new thorough the processes of regeneration and always old in what it has unchangeable.

And the last aspect of world inspires us in perceiving our own degradation by aging without the despair of being continually closer to our own disappearance. Because what is unchangeable into the world shows up in a gentle way, in spite of the common images of the unchangeable nature as a set of laws (physical or divine) which would order the changeable things by force.

What is old sends out of it the new forms of life without any brutality and break with the past. Because the new forms have not in them that human desire of changing the past order from which they derive. Their smallness and fragility rather express the gentle and even playful manner by which the old nature confirms its continuity.

As a consequence, the disappearance of those new forms does not express the victory of the old nature over the new forms of life. It just shows further what the new forms were meant to express: that the old nature is not contradicted by them, as it would be the case if they would constitute new lasting entities.

And still, when humans think about their end, they forget the common and gentle acceptance of aging as a natural process. They become worried about their death. However, we do not wish for a continual life because we feel ourselves as being different from the nature which generated us, but because our thoughts and words oppose by their living and lasting nature to the old lasting world.

Technical illusion

2013-02-24T16:14:00.001-08:00

Technical things and natural environment are both essentially insensible to our existence.

And both accompany all of our life.

The first leave us the impression that we can put under our control something different from us.

On the contrary, the second finally teaches us about our impossibility to dominate the nature to which we belong.

For this reason, the technical illusion of domination easily prevails in our lives. And a great illusion ceases to be felt as an illusion.

Nonetheless, the insensible nature which dominates us becomes more and more powerful in the background of our ongoing technical illusion. Because the habit of dominating makes us unprepared for approaching whatever comes from the nature.

For instance, the illness or death shakes us with the violence of a sudden encounter with something totally strange to our nature.

Thus, the technical things prove to be not only insensible to our existence, but also harmful, in spite of their reputation of being useful.

Morality with open windows

2013-02-22T20:01:00.002-08:00

Any moral institution, be it religious or secular, has open windows, since the problems of human life cannot be stopped in spite of its wish for offering to humans an abode outside of the troubles of living.

Moreover, the morality may amplify such problems by making their adherents to observe them deeply in order to classify them as good or bad.

Therefore, the adherents to a moral system strive both for reaching a moral life and for feeling that their option provides them an abode against life troubles.

And because the second goal is inaccessible, it is replaced by two misconceptions of morality. The first is to exaggerate the value of moral principles (the foundations of the moral institutions) and to overlook their application into the real life. The second is to consolidate the walls of the moral institutions by emphasizing the differences between their adherents and other humans.

The life is death

2013-02-18T05:24:00.000-08:00

Silent and devoid of any meaning is death.

But not more than the moments of the present time, about which we can speak only after they passed away or before their appearance. Also, a moment will mean something or it meant something, but it simply is in the present time.

Therefore, we might say that the life is death and the death life.

Since the life is constituted by moments, we may say that death is its core. But life is more than that: it is the totality of interpretations we provide while we gather those moments. We do not clearly discern such interpretations and they confound themselves with simple facts of life.

The interpretations keep themselves on the surface of life, but we naturally prefer to live our life only superficially. The body teaches us to do this: the external surface of skin is more important for us than the vital organs.

Death has not a proper time, in which we could determine a present moment. Thus, though it is blatantly silent and meaningless, those features cannot be pointed out as parts of its core.

On the contrary, the core of death consists in interpretations, not interpretations of moments, but of its void. They are disparate and strange, since they cannot belong to our facts of life as it is the case with the present moments.

Therefore, the ghosts give signs to be interpreted in popular myths and in our dreams. Even the consciousness of death is merely a strange interpretation, though it is related to a clear truth.

Infinite endurance

2013-02-14T19:05:00.001-08:00

How many times could we endure failures?

In most cases, infinitely.

The decisions for suicide are significantly less and they often concern a particular failure. Because suicide is rarely the result of a rational analysis of the meanings of a series of failures.

We endure them infinitely, because they are received in that part of life in which we cannot see an end.

It is the natural part of life and according to it we incessantly live through the beats of heart which always put away any pause or delay. Meanwhile, the spiritual part is that which can anticipate the numerous endings in one’s life and finally the end of life.

The failures are felt in this natural part of life, because it is accustomed to carry on the slowly process of physical degradation with no revolt. Therefore, we usually take a failure as any other decrease of physical strength.

Food and Sleep

2013-02-12T00:53:00.002-08:00

Maybe the idea of a future salvation of the world has a meaning for humans because of their daily habit of searching for ways by which they can be saved from the hostility of the world.

Thus, we daily save ourselves especially by eating and sleeping. The meals and the sleep are always placed in the future of a day and we know that by experiencing them we finally do an unquestionable thing, since there is a biological strong belief in the rights of the body to eat and sleep.

And though the bodily conservation is our own preoccupation, it is perfectly concordant with all the cosmic processes which provide the preservation of the world. The world ceases to appear to us as a hostile place, since we share its interest in self-conservation.

Nonetheless, they are only weak attempts of salvation. Because we never can achieve the final goals of these daily activities. By eating we want to make the world to disappear by consuming it, but we fail to do this. By sleeping, we hope to disappear into the world, but it is again the same when we awake.

Significant life

2013-02-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

The question ‘What is happening with me?’ does not naturally arise in your closest present. Though, that question and the possible answers to it would be necessary for understanding your life as a significant history.

Thus, the history of a life is possible to be told or written only if there are such significant present moments in one’s life. It results that such a history is best written by others. For doing this, they should exclude the way by which the protagonist of the history felt his present time.

When someone wants to live in a significant way, he must overlook his closest present, too. He must pay attention to his past and future. The guiding questions would be ‘What did my past tell to others?’ and ‘What will my future tell to others?’ Because if he considers his present time, he knows that nothing from his past and future can tell a thing to his meaningless actual moments of life.

Strong poverty

2013-02-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Maybe the thought that you do not desire material goods is harder to be carried on than the unfulfilled desire of having them.

Without the desire for material goods, our usual conduct in the world is seriously affected. The contact with the world is always stronger when it involves our business for sharing a part of it. So, it becomes weaker when we are not longing for material possession.

A weaker contact requires to be compensated by a stronger way of living by ourselves. We are forced to cast out a great part of what is different from us, but interferes with our lives. And there are many things and many persons, too. The power we find in such assumed loneliness is as natural as the naturalness of the way of living for possessing material things. For showing this, it is suffice only to mention that we die alone.

Sometimes, the poverty makes someone to lose his or her desires for material goods. In these cases, we will meet poor and strong persons, in spite of our custom to see them being poor and weak. Nonetheless, their experience of loneliness makes them more skillful in discovering how others simulate philanthropic feelings.

Self-defense

2013-02-08T17:50:00.001-08:00

The animals have a spontaneous movement of self-defense. Even when they attack for their defense, such a movement implies a retreat in themselves under the form of a curvature of their body.

A human being curves its body, too, when it is threatened by a physical aggression. The backbone takes a bent form; the head bows; the hands are withdrawn near the body; the legs lose the vertical position.

But the most frequent threats of human beings in actual societies have a psychological nature. And the modern societies do not admit the retreat in yourself as a means of self-defense.

It is generally agreed that a successful self-defense of a threatened person should be supported by objective facts. The threatened person must demonstrate her possible psychological injury by presenting objective data in her defense. Any demonstration means to explain yourself to others. You should deliver yourself to them and, thus, you are far away from the natural self-defense as a retreat.

There are at least two consequences: the lack of a natural self-defense makes the human beings more vulnerable to psychological aggressions, because nobody can defend you better than yourself; the aggressive retorts used as means of self-defense are not limited by the movement of retreating in yourself and they become harsher than they naturally should be.