Mart-deBlog

Restriction is what our Zeitgeist lacks. Moralizing voices lack. We do not know how to restrict and what to restrict. We even ask ourselves: 'Do we have to restrict, or can we have MORE forever?' Everyone simply enjoys whatever is within grasp... This is the LOW live.

The true difference between ANIMALS AND HUMANS is that humans can restrict themselves. The true difference between animals and humans is that humans can have meaning in their lives. Restriction and meaning are two sides of the same coin.

The word 'dog' has meaning because I restrict the usage of the word 'dog' to dogs only. When I use the word 'dog' for cats, the word loses some of its meaning. When I call everything 'dog', then the word will be meaningless. When we act immedetialy towards everything in reach, our lives will be equally MEANINGLESS and we become equal to animals... And we eat animals because they do not have their own meaning..!

We travel when we can, because we want more experience. We study everything, because we always want more knowledge. We fuck WHENEVER AND WHOEVER we can, because fucking more gives more pleasure. Our time is growing with meaningless travelling, meaningless knowledge and meaningless sex... Our times are hollowing. Lives are losing their meaning everywhere around you. You see BEAUTY (as the expression of meaning) bloating up and losing its form, with ugliness growing on MTV, ugliness on the streets and the growing FORMLESSNESS in the people you know... And we wonder why we miss God so much. Why we desire Christian Politics and envy the passion of Muslims...

SO! Why do you not fight for your human life? Never call an enemy your 'friend', never use 'love' for physical pleasure. Spend time with true friends only, have sex with your true love only!

And it is so dissapointing: those who do not understand beauty, purpose and meaning... It is so good to be human, why waste it because the empty life is easier? Bare your teeth and defend the meaning in your life, meaning is all you got, NO?

People's slaving to desire is INFECTIVE. When you open yourself to the animality, to the life that always absorbs, to the life that moves along with the surroundings; it will suck the meaning right out of you. These temptations are the leeches. We have to be so careful to avoid these craving leeches that set their venomous teeth in your flesh!

God was the source of meaning before, now he is GONE. We lost God because we lost restriction. NOW, capitalism devours the weak first, like spreading black water, drawing people closer to animality, while they eat and fuck without restriction... BUT we can create meaning, just as we created God before: restrict and differentiate, create your own commandments, and things will become meaningfull through this delineation.

One quest, one holy grail, one cliché ideal: "master restriction and become an artist of meaning, create your OWN meaning of life. Inspire others, give meaning to their lives, if you can. Live your personal religion."

The genius of Nietzsche was wrong only HERE: ascetism does not deny the Will, it is the very thing that drives us, as we do things because they have meaning. Meaning makes humanity strong, not weak. Nietzsche lost his own meaning, became crazy, simple and unable to act. The philosopher became a donkey because he tried to create his God-like Zarathustra without affirming the art of denial.

People hurt people with empty words, empty deeds. The statue is created by what is carved away; but nowadays, our streets - and our personalities - are filled with formless LUMPS OF AMASSING UGLY ROCK. Does not the statue have more meaning, more beauty than the formless rock? So, we must carve away the low life. Carve away that animal. Separate earth from heaven. You must create our boundaries, make them clear and strict. Carve, prune, deny yourself! Or BE LOST.

For a whole semester I studied the Florentine Renaissance, the Divina Comedia of Dante, Leon Alberti and Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Boccaccio and Machiavelli, etc. etc. In the final week, ECLA organized an excursion to Florence to see all the stuff for real, meaning days completely filled with lectures on the art, history and politics at the many attractions of Florence. The first couple of days I was not really feeling it, Florence felt like a zoo, full of tourists who need to see the big names once in their life. The atmosphere in the streets is cramped, suffocating and a constant mirror of your own touristhood. But after some days there was a turning point, with an early train we went to Assisi, a little mediaval town where the Franciscan order originates and the biggest Fransciscan monastery can be found. St. Franciscus preached the purity of faith and a denial of all worldy goods. It sucked me into the right mood. Coming back to Florence my experience was different, I reconstrued my experience of Florence from the artworks, frescoes and unbelievable architecture. Until the constant herds of tourists were not even part of the city anymore and I found my way through the quiet backstreets. The last days become extremely intense with my idea of Florence pulling me into the great artworks. I saw Giotto discovery of the human psyche through the expression of our body and Brunelleschi's insight into the emergence of complexity through his simple architecture. I saw the radiating layers of movements in Leonardo's sketches and Michelangelo's triumphant struggle against matter. I saw the many aesthetic visions interwoven in the desgin of the Cathedral and the conretization of God in the many frescoes that historically branch out in the poetic expressions of Dante's pages. I saw Florence as one ought to see Florence.

Sequal to:
Applications Oxford Cambridge Leuven

I am rejected by all the three institutions that I applied to: Oxford, Cambridge and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. However, the KU-Leuven has offered me the chance to do an abridged Bachelor of Philosophy in one year, after which I can enter their Master.

Of course it made me feel quite shitty for a day. I need the time and chance to penetrate through the history and current knowledge of philosophy, to be able to do what I want to do with my life. Becoming an academician is the easiest and most appropiate way but it is extremely hard to secure a spot, and Oxford or Cambridge would have helped me greatly. Naturally, I want to be good, but clearly, being rejected is a sign of lacking quality. I am not moving forward, rather I am moving a year backwards. Also, I have a huge student-loan that I used to pay for an almost entirely worthless Bachelor of Science. Not only did I waste money on learning the minutest details of cell chemistry and mathematical modelling, I wasted energy and narrowed my character down to a blind strive for success. For three years, I closed myself off to an unrestrained and developing relation with girls, family and friends. Three years of ice-cold stasis. In vain I tried to resist the influence of academic bitterness, deadenings abstractions and petty elitism. Well, life punishes me now and in my eyes rightheously so, for I have never been so stupid and disoriented in my whole life.

With the rejections, my life slowly starts to reorient itself, becoming more meaningful the more I realize the outcome. I will spend next year building a broad and strong foundation on which to continue my education. I can break through my fake contempt for the Dutch language and culture. The plan is to stay for at least two years in Leuven, doing the BA and MA and if all goes well, I will learn ancient Greek and I will be free to write my thesis on the subject that really interests me, logic and metaphysics. I know so well that Cambridge and Oxford would have been an unbelievable paradise for my philosophy education but a down-right hell for who I am. Many years ago, I had the supposed potential to enter an esteemed Gymnasium, however I went to the Waldorf School (Vrije-school) instead, which proved to be the perfect environment in all possible ways. Now I will again take a - hopefully - healthy detour and I have the feeling it might be for the best.

Some time ago I was asked how it is possible for me to defend superficial and cliché statements; given my character as someone who pretends to hate the static normativity of mainstream opinions and despises dogmatism in general.

It is exactly the hate for dogmatism that can cause the occasinal defence of apparently simple views. Having been in a supposedly intellectual environment for years now, it still strikes me how often the origin of 'a more intellectual' opinion is the simple reaction against mainstream ideas, sometimes simply to demonstrate one's elevation while copying the intellectual environment. Surely, there is as much dogmatism on the street as there is in the many ivory towers. And thus it becomes interesting what superficiality exactly means? And what it means for an opinion to be deep? Being deep could mean that you really know what you are saying. But do we ever fully know? Superficiality sometimes means overgeneralization. But doesn´t a difficult abstract thought refer too almost everything. Philosophy is full of generalization, does this make it superficial? I do no think so.

For me, a deeper thought can be roughly defined as something experienced more intensely than a superficial thought. When we are influenced by mass opinion, we rightly say that we are probably being superficial because there is only acted, theatrical vehemence in the thought and the superficial opinion does not derive its meaning from our individuality. For example, ´the islam is bad´ is superficial when it is not embedded and consistent with your complete worldview and, more importantly, when it is not stated with authentic conviction. Some people hardly have a personal worldview, not even an unconscious one, and are therefore doomed to skim over the surface of life. But take the apparantly more intellectual view: ´judging different cultures from the viewpoint of your own culture is ignorant´, this is similarly superficial when the meaning of this statement is not intensely experienced but learned as a logical necessity imposed by some textbook. Something is lost when you recognize where someone's opinion comes from, it becomes simply boring and empty. So it is all about the foundation of what is said: is it your surrounding context, some empty logic or your personal history and individual mindset? Now your thought can be similar to the majority´s and yet have conceptual roots running deep into the meaning of your experiences. Could something be truly deep when you need a never-ending book that is both biographical and reflective to explain why and how you mean it?

Of course this is all a stub. There is so much more to say. For one, I am unsure whether superficialty is a bad thing or good thing necessarily. Superficialty can be a way of life, and as such there are so many ways of being superficial. Deeper people can be heavy, over-suffering and disconnected from society, as I see clearly in my own weaknesses. Superficial people can be boring and desperately empty, yet fast and part of world. It can be wonderful to live on the surface instead of underneath it. Still, I indeed pretend to hate superficialty, but even more so I deeply hate the people who grow stuck in either superficiality or depth. In my opinion, we should all strive to take things from the surface down along its deep roots, while also climbing up from the depths to bring something hidden to the surface. I think it is morally justified to despise people in whom-, or those character traits in which, either of these movements is lacking.