Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺
@im_Mateus_ • 14,426 subscribers
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Alan Watts poses a question that stops you in your tracks: "Suppose you are God, suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. You were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night, what would you do?" He walks through what would happen, step by step. At first, you'd fulfil every wish imaginable. "You would have all the pleasures you could imagine: the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams." You'd spend night after night in paradise. Maybe a whole month of nights. But then something would shift. Perfection would get boring. "You'd begin to think, 'Well, I've seen quite a bit. Let's spice it up. Let's have a little adventure.'" So you'd introduce danger. You'd rescue princesses from dragons, engage in battles, become a hero. And as time went on, you'd push further and further. Then comes the real turning point. Watts explains: "At some point in the game, you would say, 'Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming,' so that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality." You'd forget you were God entirely. You'd dream yourself into poverty, disease, agony not out of cruelty, but for the contrast. For the moment you wake up and realise none of it was real. "And you would say, 'Wow man, that was a gas.'" Then Watts delivers the punchline: "How do you know that that's not what you're doing already? You sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation it may just be the very dream you decided to get into." And his final line reframes everything: "If you like it, crazy; if you don't like it, what fun it'll be when you wake up." It's a perspective that doesn't dismiss suffering. It recontextualises it. What if the struggles, the uncertainty, the messiness of life aren't things happening to you, but experiences you chose for yourself? What would change about how you approach today if you believed you'd chosen this exact life on purpose?
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺607,409 次观看 • 3 个月前
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on why searching for your "true self" is a mistake: Žižek argues that the pursuit of a true inner self is ultimately misguided. Deep introspection, he suggests, often reveals only disturbing or chaotic fantasies. "Don't look for your inner self. You'll only find deep shit." Instead of searching for an authentic core, Žižek believes genuine personal growth comes from embracing an external mask, a chosen social role. "The only way to overcome yourself is to identify with your mask." To illustrate this, he references the 1960 Rossellini film General Della Rovere. The film tells the story of a poor man in occupied Italy who is caught by the Nazis. Because he resembles a famous resistance leader, General Della Rovere, the Nazis, who have already killed the real General, force him to pretend to be the General in prison to trick the resistance. But something unexpected happens. The man identifies so deeply with the role that he refuses to cooperate with the Nazis. He is ultimately shot publicly as General Della Rovere. Žižek calls this "good alienation." The man's "real self" as a poor beggar mattered less than his complete identification with the heroic persona. Through that total commitment to an outward role, he achieved a kind of moral greatness his "authentic" self never could. The takeaway is counterintuitive but powerful: true freedom doesn't emerge from endlessly excavating your private, internal world. It emerges when you prioritise your outward actions and commitments. When you fully commit to becoming something greater than what you started as. What matters is what you choose to embody.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺538,938 次观看 • 3 个月前
Former Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew on the fundamental difference between American and Chinese society:** Why do America and China see the world so differently? Lee Kuan Yew argues it comes down to one thing: history. "The difference in the core philosophy between the American and the Chinese... it's a reflection of your history." He traces America's worldview back to its origins: "You came over in the Mayflower. You were seeking religious freedom so much so that you refused to allow it to be taught in the schools. You believed in the individual as the creator of all things." That belief in the individual shaped everything that followed: "You captured the wild west. I mean, on horseback. New town, main street, you be mayor, I'm sheriff, you're saloon keeper. We build a gold rush town or cattle or whatever it is." And then came extraordinary fortune: "You have been immensely fortunate and successful. Two world wars left Europe in a shambles and you emerged as the undamaged technological and industrial power." China's story, Lee explains, looks nothing like this. "China has a completely different and a checkered history. 4,000 to 5,000 years of ups and downs. Long periods when there was no governments, anarchy, warlords." He shares a personal moment that brought this reality home to him: "I once had a Chinese masseur when I was in Beijing working my game shoulder and we were talking and I said during the war, Japanese time, what currency did you use? So Japanese currency if it's in Japanese controlled areas or other currencies in other areas. So I said how many currencies are there? Two, three? Says 14 or 15 depending on which warlord's area you're in." So how did the Chinese people survive centuries of chaos, when the state itself kept collapsing? "Why have they survived in spite of anarchy, disaster, floods, famines? Because there was a social network independent of government that sustained them. The immediate family, the extended family, the clan. You owed them an obligation. You cannot turn them away. That's how they survived." This is the philosophical fork in the road. America placed the individual at the centre. China placed the family. Lee describes the system Singapore deliberately chose to preserve: "If we keep those family bonds, those traditional life raft systems not dependent on the state, which places the emphasis on family, extended family, and then the government, and not the individual at the expense of the family and the state, which is the American system." He acknowledges what the American system produces: "So you have Bill Gates or John Chambers of Cisco... you look up Forbes or Fortune or whatever and 50 of the best and the brightest and the wealthiest. That's your experience. That's not China's experience." But the goal in Asia is different: "Yes, we also now want to try and get our little Bill Gates going, but in the context of keeping our society solid so that we will survive as a people." He closes with a sharp reminder of why these two civilisations may never fully understand each other: "You have never been occupied. You have only had one civil war. So you will never understand what it is." The takeaway is uncomfortable but worth sitting with: a society's values aren't chosen in the abstract. They're forged by what that society had to survive. Individualism is a luxury of stability. Family-first collectivism is the inheritance of centuries of collapse.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺186,574 次观看 • 1 个月前
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man on earth. He could have had any woman he desired. Been drunk and partying for the rest of his life. No one would have stopped him. He chose none of it. Instead, he spent his nights writing privately about his daily struggle to live better. Those notes, never meant to be published became Meditations. The foundational text of a 2,000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism. Here's what it actually teaches. At its core, Stoicism begins with a single, uncomfortable truth: most things are not up to you. Your relationships, your finances, your reputation, your body. You can influence these, but never fully control them. Even if you do everything right, misfortune can still find you. The economy collapses. Partners leave. Bodies fail. But here's where Stoicism flips the script. While you can't control what happens to you, you can always control how you respond. Your opinions, your actions, the position you take toward the world. These belong entirely to you. And according to the Stoics, that's where all your energy should go. This doesn't mean becoming cold or emotionless, a common misconception about Stoicism. The Stoics saw emotion as a deeply human characteristic. What they understood, though, is that it's not the emotion itself that determines your mood. It's the position you take toward it. When you learn to observe your feelings rather than be consumed by them, they lose their power over you. Emotions become like waves: they rise, they pass, and you remain standing. That shift in perspective changes everything. Marcus Aurelius lived this philosophy every single day. He had every reason not to. Each morning, before facing the demands of running the world's most powerful empire, he practiced what the Stoics called praemeditatio malorum, negative visualisation. He would mentally prepare himself for the difficulty ahead: "Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness." This wasn't pessimism. It was readiness. A mind that has already confronted difficulty isn't rattled when it arrives. He also carried memento mori, the constant reminder that life is temporary. Not as a morbid obsession, but as a tool to stay focused on what truly matters and let everything trivial fall away. And that, ultimately, is what Stoicism is about. We live in an age of endless distraction: notifications, opinions, noise competing for our attention at every turn. It's easy to scatter your energy across things you can't change and exhaust yourself in the process. Stoicism offers a quiet, clear alternative: point your energy toward what's essential, and release everything else. Marcus Aurelius had unlimited power, unlimited pleasure, and unlimited distraction available to him. He chose none of it and spent his nights writing about how to be better. That alone might be the most Stoic lesson of all.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺164,048 次观看 • 2 个月前
Alan Watts on why trying harder is often the worst thing you can do. Alan Watts identified a pattern that runs through the heart of Daoist and Zen philosophy, one he called the backwards law. The idea is simple and deeply counterintuitive: "When you would be strong, very often the best course is to be weak. When you would be powerful, the best course is often to withdraw." Most of us are conditioned to believe that the path to any outcome is direct effort. Want connection? Pursue it. Want strength? Force it. Want happiness? Chase it. But Watts argues that many of the things we most want in life are precisely the things we repel through our pursuit of them. He uses solitude as the clearest illustration of this paradox: "It's when you learn to love solitude that, paradoxically as it may seem, you are better able to get on with others." The person who needs company who cannot sit alone, who craves connection and hunts for it is often the most difficult to be around. Their need fills the room. It creates pressure. But the person who is genuinely comfortable with themselves? That ease is magnetic. They don't demand anything from the interaction. And so the connection forms naturally. This is what Watts means by the backwards law. Contrary things come from unexpected directions. The outcome arrives not through the front door of direct effort, but through the side door of letting go.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺70,377 次观看 • 1 个月前
Professor Jonathan Glover dismantles one of philosophy's most charged arguments with a smirk: John Finnis's research argues that the human embryo deserves full moral respect from the moment of fertilisation. His central claim being that all the genes are there. Glover's response here is not a counter-argument. It's a reductio ad absurdum delivered with a smile. "Now of course on this argument a tadpole or even a bit of frog spawn would count as a frog — because there all the genes are present." He continues, warming to the theme: "And if you're ever invited by Dr Finnis to go and see his butterfly collection, don't be totally disappointed if it turns out to be a jar of caterpillars — because once again, all the genes are there." And once more: "If after that he invites you to stay on for a chicken dinner, don't be surprised if what you get is scrambled egg." The joke itself does the philosophical work. Glover's point is that genetic completeness alone cannot confer moral status — otherwise we'd be morally obligated to treat caterpillars as butterflies and frog spawn as frogs. The presence of a full genetic blueprint tells you what something will become, not what it currently is. The distinction between potential and actuality is one of the oldest in philosophy. Glover resurrects it here not with dense argument, but with three images so vivid they're almost impossible to argue against. What makes a human being morally significant? What it is, or what it will become?
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺59,182 次观看 • 1 个月前
Daniel Dennett: You don't know your own mind as well as you think you do. In a 1993 Dutch documentary series, A Glorious Accident, philosopher Daniel Dennett laid out one of the most unsettling ideas in all of philosophy, the possibility that we are fundamentally mistaken about our own minds. We assume our minds are the one thing we have certain access to. Whatever else may be uncertain about the world, at least we know what we ourselves are thinking, right? Dennett argues this assumption is exactly what makes consciousness so hard to understand and so hard to challenge. He frames the core tension this way: on one hand, the mind seems like the most intimate thing we have access to. On the other, when we try to locate minds in the physical world as functions of the brain they seem to vanish entirely. "On the one hand we seem to know from the inside our minds… and then when we try to figure out how our minds exist in the world, how they could be a function of what's going on in our brains, it seems utterly mysterious." This is why we've never had a satisfying theory of consciousness, Dennett suggests. Not because we haven't thought hard enough, but because the very intuition we keep relying on that we have privileged, infallible access to our own thoughts may itself be wrong. Here he takes direct aim at Descartes. Descartes famously argued that while everything else could be doubted, the content of one's own conscious thought was beyond doubt. Whatever my thoughts are about may be false but what my thoughts are, and that they are mine? That, Descartes said, was the one certainty. Dennett's move is to reject precisely this: "Oddly enough, I'm claiming that he was wrong about that. The one thing he said was most certain I'm claiming that's not certain at all." We are, in some degree, fooled about our own minds. This isn't a claim that we're completely wrong about everything. It's a subtler and arguably more disturbing point: the seemingly undeniable intuition that we have transparent access to our own conscious states is, to some degree, false. We misread ourselves. We confabulate. The inner narrative we take for granted is, in part, a story we tell after the fact. Dennett spent his career making this case more formally, arguing that consciousness is less like a private theatre and more like a process of ongoing self-interpretation. If he's right, the question isn't just "how does the brain produce consciousness?" but "how does the brain produce the convincing illusion of transparent self-knowledge?"
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺42,194 次观看 • 1 个月前
Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin. In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history. His reasoning isn't just about biology. Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else. Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them: "The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical." That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper. What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up. The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺51,692 次观看 • 2 个月前
Richard Rorty on what it actually means to be a pragmatist philosopher: "Pragmatists say we should stop thinking in Greek terms." Not in terms of appearance vs. reality. Not mind vs. body. Not intellect vs. sense. Rorty explains that pragmatism, at its core, asks us to see ourselves differently. In the wake of Darwin, as what he calls "clever animals." "Nature called clever animals who find cleverer and cleverer ways of talking about what's going on and cleverer and cleverer ways of dealing with what's going on." That's it. That's the whole project. No penetrating beyond the world of the senses. No ascending from the body to the mind. No breakthrough moment where you finally cross from appearance into reality. Rorty draws a direct line between pragmatism and Heidegger's critique of what Heidegger called the "ontotheological tradition." The long Western habit of assuming there's some deeper, truer layer of existence waiting to be uncovered if we just think hard enough. Pragmatism says: there isn't. What we have are better and worse ways of talking. Better and worse ways of coping. And the job of philosophy to imoprove the human condition.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺37,722 次观看 • 2 个月前
Terence McKenna: "Culture is not your friend." Few thinkers put it as bluntly and few diagnoses of modern life cut as deep. McKenna's argument is simple and devastating: culture was never designed for your benefit. It was designed for the benefit of institutions. "Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions: churches, companies, tax collection schemes." The indictment doesn't stop there. Culture doesn't just fail us passively. It actively diminishes us. "It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture." What makes this especially sharp is the contradiction he exposes. We collectively understand that the individual matters. We "glorify the creative potential of the individual," we believe in "the rights of the individual," we recognise that "the felt presence of experience is what is most important." And yet we let culture pull us in exactly the opposite direction. "The culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It creates consumer mania. It creates endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of swirly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves." McKenna's critique isn't a counsel of despair. It's a call to clarity. Because beneath the machinery of false comfort, he saw something real: the actual resources exist to do better. "You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific knowhow, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradox." The paradox being: everything needed to build something genuinely good is already here. The obstacle isn't resources. It's leadership or the lack of it.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺26,553 次观看 • 1 个月前
Daniel Dennett on "deepities" the profound-sounding claims that are secretly empty Philosopher Daniel Dennett has a name for a type of statement that sounds wise but actually says nothing: a deepity. He explains it this way: "A deepity is an apparently profound observation that is ambiguous. It has two readings. On one reading it's obviously false, but if it were true it would be very important. And on the other it's trivially true." The trick is in the ambiguity. When you hear a deepity, part of your brain registers the trivially true reading and thinks yes, that's correct. But another part is reaching for the dramatic, important-sounding reading and that's where the illusion of profundity comes from. Dennett's favourite example, which he uses when teaching the concept to students: "Love is just a word." It sounds deep. Think about it for a moment and it feels like it's gesturing at something real. That love is intangible, constructed, perhaps even illusory. But Dennett dismantles it immediately: "Whatever love is, it isn't a word. You can't find love in the dictionary." That's the "use-mention error" confusing the word love with the thing love refers to. Once you put quotation marks around it properly, the statement collapses into something utterly banal: "love" is just a word. Well, yes. So is "cheeseburger." So is "word." The deepity survives only because we don't slow down enough to ask which reading we're actually accepting. Once you have the word "deepity," you start seeing them everywhere: in self-help, in politics, in philosophy.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺26,321 次观看 • 1 个月前
Thomas Nagel dismantles relativism in one paragraph. In a 1995 talk on reason, the philosopher exposes a fatal flaw at the heart of the relativist position: "Claims to the effect that a type of judgment expresses a local point of view are inherently objective in intent. They suggest a picture of the true sources of those judgments which places them in an unconditional context." In other words, the moment you say "all truth is relative," you've already made an absolute claim. Nagel sharpens this into a precise logical trap: "The judgment of relativity or conditionality cannot be applied to the judgment of relativity itself." The relativist wants to stand outside all perspectives and declare that no perspective is universal. But that declaration is itself a universal perspective. He then drives it home: "To put it schematically, 'everything is subjective' must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim including the claim that it is objectively false." The argument is elegant in its completeness. If "everything is subjective" is an objective truth, it defeats itself immediately because it would mean at least one thing is objective. But if it's merely a subjective opinion, it has no power to challenge objectivity at all. Either way, relativism collapses under its own weight. What's striking is how often this self-refuting structure goes unnoticed in everyday debates about truth, culture, and morality. The person who says "that's just your perspective" is quietly assuming their own perspective is the correct one. Nagel's point isn't that objectivity is easy to achieve, only that abandoning it entirely is incoherent.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺27,808 次观看 • 1 个月前
Hans-Georg Gadamer on Augustine, Time, and the Structure of Hope Gadamer revisits one of Augustine's most radical philosophical moves: the refusal to treat time as a sequence of three equal "beings." What makes Augustine's approach unusual is not just his conclusion, it's his method. He didn't treat the problem of time as an abstract puzzle to be solved from a distance. He brought it before God, interrupting his own argument with prayer, asking for help in the very act of thinking. That intimacy between devotion and reasoning wasn't decoration, it was the point. The insight it produced is deceptively simple. Past and future don't exist as independent realms. They exist only as they press into the present as memory and anticipation held simultaneously in the mind. As Augustine puts it: "We can only think of present signs of the future as being present, and we can only see traces of the past… as being present. Only that can we truly see as 'being.'" This is what he called the distensio animi, a stretching out of the spirit. Gadamer renders it plainly: that is what we call consciousness. The German word for the present, Gegenwart, sharpens this further. Embedded in it is gewärtig sein: to be awaiting, to be open. The present is not a fixed point. It is a posture of readiness that leans forward. Time, then, is not a container you move through. It is the structure of consciousness itself. The tension between what is remembered, what is attended to now, and what is anticipated. You do not have past and future. You are the act of holding them together. From here, Gadamer makes a move that feels almost offhand but lands hard. If consciousness is inherently stretched toward what comes next, then hope isn't a disposition some people choose and others don't. It's built into the architecture of awareness itself. Ernst Bloch was right to foreground it, Gadamer says, because it isn't sentiment, it's structure. "That is why I consider every pessimist a bit insincere; they wouldn't even be here if they didn't have hope." This isn't a rebuke. It's an observation about what it means to persist. To remain conscious is already to be oriented forward whether you name that orientation hope or not. Much of modern anxiety comes from treating time as a problem of storage. Holding onto the past accurately, predicting the future correctly. Augustine and Gadamer suggest a different frame. Time is lived through presence: the traces we carry, the signs we read, the openness we maintain toward what is arriving. Consciousness is the act of stretching across all three without collapsing any of them.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺34,817 次观看 • 2 个月前