The Desultory Genesis of Existenz in Boundary Situations -- Karl Jaspers

I am in the world, but I can confront all things. Unwilling to engage in the world’s bustle, I have a chance to be in it and at the same time outside of it: in contemplative thought, if not actual existence, I can reach the Archimedean point that enables me to see, and to know, what is. With an independence that is astonishing, albeit empty, I even face my own existence as if it were a stranger's. I am myself, yet I seem to be outside my existing life; it is from out there that I enter the world to take my bearings in it, not just as a living individual pursuing particular ends in my situations but as myself seeking to know all things, seeking to know the whole whose knowledge is sufficient into itself.

This conquest of my own being occurs in absolute solitude. Whatever happens in the world is doubtful; everything fades away, my own existence included; but I stand outside the world and yet so closely before myself as if I were an isle of safety in mid-ocean, a place from which I aimlessly gaze upon the world as on a billowing atmosphere without limits. Nothing is of real concern to me, but I see everything, aware of my securely supporting knowledge. With my self-being thus enclosed, I am the universal will to know. Unshakably I view the positive objects of my valid cognition; their knowledge assures me that I am. The substantial solitude of one who knows universally, detached from any situation, is like the pure eye that meets no other eye and looks upon all things, but not into itself. At home in the solitude of its self-being, like a being dwindling to a mere point, this eye remains devoid of any content other than the calm of its vision. Si fractus illabtur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae, said Horace. "Should the world collapse, the pieces will hit an undaunted man."


full chapter http://www.kevinfinucane.com/university.edu/PDF
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Enter the Pessimist

From Civilization and Its Discontents

When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then—as a result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death—there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. One is reminded of the great poet’s [Goethe] moving arraignment of the ‘Heavenly Powers’:

To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us
To guilt ye let us heedless go,
Then leave repentance fierce to wring us:
A moment’s guilt, an age of woe!

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The Paradox of the Press

‘Objectivity is a legend, a myth’ –Abdul Sattar Jawad

Today I had the pleasure of attending Abdul Sattar Jawad’s lecture on the current situation in Iraq. He was the first man to publish a secular newspaper in English in Iraq and is the head of English Literature at Baghdad University. He is currently working as a visiting professor of journalism and literature at Duke University under the Scholars at Risk Program. He did not want to leave and come to America but many of his colleagues and fellow professor have been torn from their classroom while lecturing to be beaten and sometimes killed due to their religious views (or lack there of). Abdul could not return to his office at Baghdad University because it was being surrounded by religious zealots who threatened to kill him and almost did.

His message, as I received it, was something like this: America is a primary cause of the current and former state of Iraq. Intellectuals in Iraq welcomed the war and were glad to see Sadam Hussein out of power. He did not, on the other hand, approve of the subsequent actions of the US. Abdul thinks that America should have been much more forceful in the beginning. We should have kept an intense marshal law in place and played watchdog in every political process and progression. Our failure to do this is the reason that Iraq is now in a state of chaos which consequently lead to the bombing of Abdul’s newspaper’s headquarters.

What I found most interesting was his paradoxical view of free press. Abdul is obviously a major advocate of free press in Iraq, yet he also voiced a serious critique of American media and free press in general. He held that there is no doubt that the liberal media was a source of coercion in the UN’s decision to back off and let Iraq rebuild their own structure of government and society. Abdul held that first and foremost the Iraqi intellectuals desired new visions and ideas from America—not for America to back off and let Iraq be Iraq.

What are we to take from this? My thoughts bring me back once again to fear the double edged sword of ‘free’ press—although it is essential to present the people with the freedom, we should be weary of what they produce. The people are not always (perhaps rarely) correct.