Philosophy Archives - Maier Files Series Tidbits and Articles-

The Sign in the Window

The Outer Court — Fifth Degree “Let their rule hold not through me!” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Live Not by Lies, 12 February 1974 In October 1978, in Prague, the playwright Václav Havel finished a long essay and dedicated it to the memory of the philosopher Jan Patočka, who had died the year before after a series of police interrogations. The essay could not be printed in Czechoslovakia. It circulated in typed copies, passed from hand...

Crescent Moon and Star

It was Rodin who stated that “Man never invented anything new, only discovered things.” Although it’s correct to say that certain symbols have been man-made for a particular purpose, it’s just as correct to argue that everything is somehow inspired by the natural world around us, by the forms of nature, plants, animals, the elements. Even a reaction against the fluid forms of nature is usually inspired by a desire to offer an alternative. Occasionally...

Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature

The paradox of the love mystery

The writer Aventinus stated that the Minne and the Minnesingers did not have anything to do with love and constant courting. That’s not entirely true. There are many enigmas and paradoxes concerning the Troubadour movement and their theme “LOVE” in the middle ages. They propagated the quest for selfhood, the birth of the individual. And the individual’s love is discriminative, personal and specific. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created...

Do you know what time it is?

Do you know what time it is? That question may perhaps be asked a lot more these days than ever. In our clock-studded modern society, the answer is only a peek away, therefore we are able to “blissfully” partition our days into ever smaller sized increments for ever more neatly scheduled jobs, assured that we will always know it really is now 7:03 a.m. Contemporary scientific revelations regarding time, however, turn the question indefinitely frustrating....

Gerardus van der Leeuw, The Dutch Mystic Who Dared to Transcend

Who is the fairest of them all?

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. So began...

Projekt Nornir

We take it for granted that the past is fixed and time is linear. History always happened the way we remember it happening. But how do we know for sure that that’s the case? Otto Maier started to work on a project called “Nornir” in the 30ties and 40ties. To understand project Nornir and its goals you need to step into a forgotten old Germanic worldview and its concepts about Time and Destiny … Many...

Giordano Bruno and Heresy

Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist feeds it with a stream of electrical impulses that exactly simulates the experience of reading...

Lost in the world

Lost in the world. As an instance of nature, man is only a reed, liable to be crushed at any moment by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident, no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction. As a thinking reed, however, he is no part of the sum, not belonging to it, but radically different. Disproportionate: for the res extensa...