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And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Furious Activity

Be patient in misfortune, my soul, for all thou art suffering the intolerable; 'tis sure the heart of the baser sort is quicker to wrath. Be not heavy, thou, with pain and anger over deeds which cannot be done, nor be thou vexed thereat, nor grieve thy friends nor glad thy foes. Not easily shall mortal man escape the destined gifts of the Gods, neither if he sink to the bottom of the purple sea, nor when he be held in murky Tartarus.
- Theognis of Megara (1029-1036)

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Lessons for Posterity

Share not thy device wholly with all thy friends; few among many, for sure, have a mind that may be trusted.
- Theognis of Megara (73-74)

Saturday, December 3, 2011

A Secular Search for Meaning in the Heart of Universal Humanism

Exhortations to virtue?... or mischief?
Those interpreters who see Antigone as the proto-Christian figure are right: in her unconditional commitment she follows a different ethics that points towards Christianity (...)- why? Christianity introduces into the global balanced order of eunomia a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to universality (of the Holy Spirit, or today, of human rights and freedom) - I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order.
- Slavoj Zizek, "Living in the End Times"

Equality of access bypassing/ trumping social orders of "rank" and thereby undermining all notions of 'authority', be they by nature derived from education, experience or birth.