• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: war

Globalization was never inevitable

26 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Globalization was never inevitable

Tags

20th century, 21st century, Brian Mulroney, Canada, COVID-19, democracy, Donald Trump, Economist, European Union, George W. Bush, Jane Jacobs, Kofi Annan, Margaret Thatcher, Russia, Tony Blair, Ukraine, United States, war

Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

Continue reading →

What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, anna kw, Bill Clinton, G.W.F. Hegel, Iraq, Ken Wilber, Margaret Thatcher, New York City, Nicholas Thorne, Nikki the Hegelian, Plato, Ronald Reagan, Thrasymachus, Tony Blair, war

My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

Continue reading →

You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism

21 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Bertrand Russell, democracy, George Boole, Helen De Cruz, Judith Simmer-Brown, Nathan J. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, United States, war

The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discussed a recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher” – not because there are so few such jobs out there and you’re taking them from people who want them more, but because the time you spend on such a career is supposedly abdicating a larger political responsibility.

Continue reading →

Of perpetually vulnerable subjects

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

20th century, Aśvaghoṣa, Glenn Wallis, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Margaret Thatcher, Rick Repetti, Ron Purser, Ronald Reagan, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), war

The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What is that supposed to mean? Modern meditation is frequently described as “neoliberal” in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which Purser coedited, and especially the closing essay by Glenn Wallis (which responds to a thoughtful defence of mindfulness by Rick Repetti in the same volume). Wallis’s piece is a good illustration of how a concept with some legitimate and meaningful uses can get bandied around so casually that it becomes completely specious. Here is Wallis:

You don’t have to look too closely to see that Mindfulness’s most recent progenitors are, of course, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I mentioned earlier, Mindfulness has the same DNA and was raised on the same values that undergirds today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure (acceptance, resilience, self-help, etc.). So, of course Jon Kabat-Zinn [the creator of secularized and medicalized mindfulness meditation] cozies up to corporate CEOs and American military generals. (Wallis 499)

Continue reading →

The light is coming

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Deity, Happiness, Health, Hope, Judaism, Politics, Rites

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Charles Taylor, Christmas, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Francesco Sizzi, Hanukkah, Joe Biden, United States, war

Tomorrow is the winter solstice: the shortest, darkest day of the year. After that, everything will slowly start getting lighter and brighter. And never in my lifetime has that felt like more of a perfect metaphor.

Christmas is perhaps the festival that most obviously commemorates the light in the darkness at this time of year, but it is not the only festival to acknowledge the darkest days and prepare for the light. Hanukkah is a smaller part of the Jewish ritual year than North Americans typically make it out to be – it is not nearly as important as Passover – but it is a real Jewish festival of light at the darkest time of the year. So too, Westerners mark a new year beginning just as the old year is at its darkest.

All these events happen every year. But this is a year like no other.

Continue reading →

A Buddhism very different than the one we think we know

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Pleasure, Politics

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, H.L. Seneviratne, Justin McDaniel, Mahāvaṃsa, rasa, Sallie King, Śāntideva, Sri Lanka, Stephen Jenkins, Steven Collins, war

Weterners who have studied Buddhist philosophy and ethics, even when we have done so at length, are often thrown for a loop when we read the Mahāvaṃsa. This text – one of the most historically oriented texts in premodern South Asia – has been a central part of the Theravāda Buddhist canon for over a thousand years, and played a central role in creating the very idea of “Theravāda” Buddhism.

It also looks very different from the Buddhism we constructive Western Buddhist scholars are accustomed to thinking about. Continue reading →

Bedtime for Minerva?

24 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, 21st century, Communism, Francis Fukuyama, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Napoleon Bonaparte, United States, war

Hegel has a famous phrase in the preface of the Philosophy of Right: “Only with the falling dusk does the owl of Minerva start its flight.” (Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.) The idea is that a historical era can only really be comprehended when it is complete: “Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready.” Only then is Minerva or Athena, the Roman and Greek goddess of wisdom personified as an owl, able to fly.

Hegel-and-Napoleon-in-Jena-1806It’s a powerful image, but seems strange put up against Hegel’s own life and practice. Hegel famously finished his most celebrated work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, “in the middle of the night before the Battle of Jena” – just as Napoleon was moving in and conquering the town of Jena where Hegel lived. Hegel gave the manuscript to a courier who rushed across French battle lines to bring it to the publisher. That hardly seems like the dusk of a historical era – more like its noontime, the bright light of day. How could Hegel be doing philosophy then? Continue reading →

The theology of Christmas carols

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Christianity, Deity, Emotion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Edmund Sears, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, kitsch, Milan Kundera, music, theodicy, United States, war

I will be taking a break from blogging over the next few weeks’ holiday. When new posts return in January, they will be on a biweekly (or fortnightly, if you wish) schedule: every alternate Sunday rather than every Sunday. I continue to enjoy writing Love of All Wisdom and intend to keep doing so, but as I have tried publishing more conventional papers, studying computer science and teaching a course on top of my day job, the weekly schedule has been too hard to sustain. I hope that alternating weeks will make it easier for me to continue engaging in the wonderful exchanges of ideas that have taken place here.

In Canada and the US today, the Christian aspect of Christmas is likely most noticeable in the music. There are of course a great number of English-language Christmas songs with little or no Christmas element (“Jingle Bells”, “Deck The Halls”, “Frosty The Snowman” and so on). It is increasingly common to hear only these songs played in public places. But one may quickly feel something missing here. Certainly some of these songs are grander than others; it would be a difficult task indeed to argue that “Deck The Halls” is no better a work than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. But even so, there is a certain depth that is missing from them.

By contrast, many Christian carols engage with some weighty theological questions, especially that most significant of all questions for monotheistic believers: theodicy, the problem of bad. If there is a God – specifically, a being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent – how can the world be so full of terrible things? Continue reading →

Hegel after Hegel (I)

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, atheism, Communism, G.W.F. Hegel, identity, James Doull, Karl Marx, Ken Wilber, Ludwig Feuerbach, war

I’ve been spending some time lately with James Doull‘s last essay, “Hegel’s Phenomenology and post-modern thought”, and also with his closely related address on “Heidegger and the state”. (Both are in Philosophy and Freedom, the only published book of Doull’s writings.) Doull’s project in the Hegel essay is in a sense meta-Hegelian: to situate Hegel‘s thought in a philosophical history, as Hegel himself would do with the thinkers before him.

So the first parts of the essay tell the story of premodern and modern Western thought as it leads up to Hegel – a fine exegesis. But it’s the latter part of the essay that gets really interesting. For of course the history of philosophy went on after Hegel – and how should a Hegelian deal with that? Continue reading →

On celebrating the death of an enemy

08 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Compassion, Death, Friends, Gentleness, Happiness, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

≈ 62 Comments

Tags

George W. Bush, Harvard University, Jim Wilton, Linton Weeks, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nazism, Osama bin Laden, Pamela Gerloff, S.N. Goenka, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, United States, war

The momentous yet mixed results of this week’s Canadian election were overshadowed on the global scene by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Though the first event riveted me more, the second has more philosophical significance – or rather, not the event itself, but the reaction to it.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy? Continue reading →

← Older posts

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on Philosophy as psychedelic practice
  • Amod Lele on Why philosophy must cross boundaries
  • Nathan on Why philosophy must cross boundaries
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on Philosophy as psychedelic practice
  • Nathan on Philosophy as psychedelic practice

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience nondualism Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (15)
  • Applied Phil (344)
    • Death (42)
    • Family (50)
    • Food (19)
    • Friends (18)
    • Health (28)
    • Place (32)
    • Play (16)
    • Politics (210)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (44)
  • Asian Thought (441)
    • Buddhism (317)
      • Early and Theravāda (133)
      • Mahāyāna (131)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (97)
      • Confucianism (60)
      • Daoism (21)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (142)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (42)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (15)
      • Vedānta (41)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (7)
  • Method (267)
    • M.T.S.R. (150)
    • Metaphilosophy (174)
  • Practical Philosophy (408)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (50)
    • Emotion (178)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (30)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (12)
      • Grief (7)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (96)
    • Foundations of Ethics (120)
    • Karma (44)
    • Morality (76)
    • Virtue (171)
      • Courage (6)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (11)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (24)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (36)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (137)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (43)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (377)
    • Consciousness (19)
    • Deity (73)
    • Epistemology (133)
      • Certainty and Doubt (16)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (30)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (32)
    • Metaphysics (109)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (72)
    • Supernatural (52)
    • Truth (60)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (486)
    • Analytic Tradition (99)
    • Christianity (158)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Eastern Orthodoxy (3)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (59)
    • French Tradition (50)
    • German Tradition (92)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (121)
      • Epicureanism (25)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (22)
    • Islam (41)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (10)
    • Judaism (35)
    • Natural Science (98)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (174)
      • Economics (42)
      • Psychology (71)

Recent Posts

  • Why philosophy must cross boundaries
  • Philosophy as psychedelic practice
  • After mystical experiences
  • Is Asian philosophy footnotes to the Buddha?
  • In memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2009-2024 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2009-2024 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.