Stardust Fallout

Consider for a moment the four great settings in which the fundamental values of human existence are played out: truth, beauty, justice and love. All four of which, whatever the materialists say, remain fundamentally transcendent for the particular individual, for you and me, as for everyone else.

—

Luc Ferry on the transcendent. 

I agree that truth, beauty, justice, and love have always been transcendent. To root them in biology, or history waters them down to the point where they mean nothing. 

… I will say that the cross of materialism is that it never quite succeeds in believing what it preaches, in thinking its own thought. This may sound complicated, but is in fact simple: the materialist says, for example, that we are not free, though he is convinced, of course, that he asserts this freely, that no one is forcing him to state this view of the matter - neither parents, nor social milieu, nor biological inheritance. He says that we are wholly determined by our history, but he never stops urging us to free ourselves, to change our destiny, to revolt where possible! He says that we must love the world as it is, turning our backs on the past and future so as to live in the present, but he never stops trying, like you or me, when the present weighs upon us, to change it in the hope of a better world.

—Luc Ferry on his main difficult with the materialist. It is a valid point no?

… no one can be reasonably convinced any longer that this teeming and disruptive evolutionary impulse, this incessant movement unconnected by a common project, leads infallibly towards what is better… For the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going. Its powers of transformation and, if need be, of destruction, are by now unbounded, but like a giant with the faculties of an infant, they are totally dissociated from any capacity for reflection…

—

Luc Ferry on our great emphasis on “technics” and our loss of our ability to discern whether or not we should. 

Chilling: for the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going. 

The difficulty is not so much that globalization supposedly impoverishes the poor in order to engorge the rich, as ecologists and alter-globalists suggests, but that it dispossesses us all of any purchase on history, and divests history itself of all purpose. Dispossession and directionlessness are the terms which best characterize it - in which respect again it fulfils perfectly, in Heidegger’s eyes, the philosophy of Nietzsche: a body of thought which assumed, as no other has ever done, the complete eradication of all ideals at the same time as the logic of historical direction.

—Luc Ferry on how blind globalization points to a lost of destiny and direction. Heidegger’s main critique of Nietzsche’s work. 

VID: Some beautiful time lapse from a volcano in Indonesia. 

In this sense, we could say that in today’s world of globalized capital which places all human activities in a state of perpetual and unending competition, history is moving beyond the will of men. Competition is becoming not only a form of destiny, but, what is more, there is nothing to suggest that it is moving in the direction of what is better. Who shall seriously believe that we shall have more freedom and be happier because in a few months the weight of our MP3 players will have halved, or their memory doubled? In accordance with Nietzshe’s wishes, the idols are all dead: no ideal, in effect, animates or disturbs the course of things, only the absolute imperative of change for the sake of change.

—Luc Ferry on how competition has become the blind destiny of humanity. 

No amount of effort can save you from oblivion

—Kurt Cobain

If there is no longer transcendence, or ideals, or possible escape into an elsewhere, however ‘humanized’… then it must be at the core of this life on earth that we learn to distinguish between what is worth living for and what must be allowed to perish. It is here and now that we must learn to separate forms of life that are failed - mediocre, reactive, weakened - from forms of life that are intense, grandiose, courageous and rich in diversity.

—

Luc Ferry

D’J Evolution Unchained. Who gets to decide who are the forms of life that are intense, grandiose, courageous? The strong do of course! They now have a reason to be cruel.