“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 18, 2011

“Impersonal and Individual”


Riffing on Reggie Ray's words below, Buddhism describes the essence of us not as nothing at all, but as something “impersonal and individual.” Ahh, that's nice.

Now to my OOO ears that sounds awfully like an object: withdrawn, not-me, yet unique. This is the basis of my essay OOO and Buddhism. It's also the basis for Kantian beauty: as I wrote a while back, no wonder Schopenhauer became a Buddhist.

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