Essays
Deconstructing The Ugly Shoe Trend
You can’t miss the rubber layered, dimensional, color clad, chunky boulders for platform shoes clomping down the streets, with its more expensive, luxury labeled counterparts making the runways. What would remind one of a Portland punk-raver’s Buffalo platforms or a Mid-western middle school geography teacher’s orthopedic shoes ten years ago—and even last month—is now the new high fashion symbol: the chunky ugly sneaker. The new orthopedic shoes with a high-tech edge are most popular in the designer versions, made by Balenciaga, Yeezy, Gucci . . .
A Eudaimonic Business Model
A fundamental source of wealth is human labor. Labor, or work, is just a necessary evil. To the employer, labor is simply an item of cost to be reduced to a minimum or ideally eliminated altogether with automation. The neoclassical economic structure sees a laborer not as a human being, but as a unit of cost. In many cases, labor is a disutility to the worker, who would rather spend his days browsing the travel section at the local used bookstore, daydreaming about slimy aloe Vera infused limbs and . . .
Going Further: A philosophical essay on Descartes, Hume, and Kant
We live in the era of the artificial. Everywhere we look, the poison of the synthetic has tainted reality so that it is no longer comprehensible; fake news, plastic surgery, visual culture, consumption, leisure, bureaucracy, institutional religion, fad diets, false advertisements; total sensory overload mayhem. So I have two options. Which do I choose: ignorance or knowledge? The present generation is all too willing to submit to the seemingly omnipotent currents of chance, imposed by some invisible mastermind . . .
Spinoza's Positive Eternity
The particular struggles against the boundaries of the whole, asserting that its self-determined margins are the only container worthy of its sublime contents, the essence of its selfhood. But the whole retorts that adherence in the whole is a condition of being a particular; the selfhood it longs for only exists in absolute isolation where it sacrifices its particularity to be an only. The whole needs the self as the self needs the whole; for a whole without its parts is an empty container. Nothingness is a vacuum filled . . .
Eichmann and his Fanaticism
The fanatic is the deluded dreamer without the dreams. Even if he once had a dream, whose thought filled him with enthusiastic love, the force of his enthusiasm surpassed that of his love, grew strong enough that it no longer needed its beloved. The fanatic becomes driven solely by the feeling of passion because with his dream, his object of love, went his thinking as well. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt examines the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem, where he was found . . .
The Rational Leap of Faith
In this essay, I will analyze the role of the rational leap of faith in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals against the mathematical Spinozist system to show that though their metaphysical conceptions of the human being are different, their manifestations in the world are largely the same. Kant’s rational leap of faith was based on the intuition and experience of autonomy as much as it was on the need for its existence if anything in human life is to have value . . .