The double look on complex dimension
Switch Charles Pépin makes a brilliant essay on How to Take Action. His advice can be summed up as follows: “Prepare to never be ready.” Certainties hinder action, disorient us if the course is not compliant. To decide is “to go there to see […] go there because we don’t know enough […] otherwise, we … Read more
The nature of mental objects Before answering this question, let us judge its relevance. Are lucidity and happiness comparable, opposable, associable? Certainly lucidity seems a brake on happiness, pointing to all the reasons to lack it. But are these concepts of the same nature? What is a mental “nature”? We admit that an emotion and … Read more
Early or lost? If I make a passion my job, I am forced to adopt the consensus that is at the heart of the discipline. I study it, deepen it, delimit it, support it with laymen. The profession is the collectivist pole of the discipline. The more I attach myself to it, the more I … Read more
“I don’t want to destroy the planet but I don’t want to be penniless either.” “I don’t want to put others at risk but I don’t want to get vaccinated.” “I support Ukraine but it poses the threat of nuclear conflict.” What do these sentences have in common? All of them declare an insolvent conflict … Read more
More realistic pessimists Depressive realism is the balance praised by political scientist Juliane Marie Schreiber. It takes up an agreed discourse: pessimists and their attitude towards the world are the most realistic vision. They are critical, empathetic, not very sensitive to bias. While optimists, always positive and in a good mood, overestimate themselves and blind … Read more
Self-love One of my most desperate ideas is: If our neural patterns make an entirely personal reality, the love I feel for a person targets the representation of that made by my mind, not the real person. Self-love. From an even more reductive point of view, groups of my neurons are “fascinated” by the excitations … Read more
What is courage? Is it only a matter of context? Not just. Even if we easily see cowardice everywhere, we know how to recognize the exceptions: those who will show courage in all circumstances. What do these resistance fighters have in common? Courage is a mixture: survival instinct, controlled fear, danger faced, idealized self. Things … Read more
When acts scandalize me, it is easy to fall into a radicalism that denigrates the perpetrator of these acts the simple right to exist. Cruelty, terrorism, perversion, psychopathic or bureaucrat insensitivity, idolatry, how can such individuals be part of the scene? My disgust easily extends to the one who tries to explain the origin of … Read more
Klan of Crude Cry vs the Brotherhood of Refined Prose Two schools, which I like to call: the Klan of Crude Cry and the Brotherhood of Refined Prose. The Klan venerates Dostoevsky and Henri Miller, who praises “the tacit pact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I’m not interested in … Read more
The retreat of the unknown What can make one aware of one’s ignorance? The unknown. The unknown draws a boundary to our individual knowledge. What if the unknown disappears? We are no longer faced with our ignorance. In our own eyes we become omniscient. Yet the unknown recedes and disappears from everyday life. The media … Read more