Eric Marschall World

TheKnightAtTheCrossroads-Victor-Vasnetsov

Sciences; a Critic to their Reductionism

On 19 November 2021

Introduction

What is left for the human sciences to do in a world where technology and hard sciences have now taken over the domain of knowledge? Ever since Galilei laid the foundations of the scientific method, moving life further and further away from the field of research, science has made great strides by imposing itself in many fields of human knowledge. First with physics, then with chemistry, although biology has achieved a different status, in the end, it too has become a science, with a defined method and field of research. The last bastion of the Lebenswelt (world of life) had seemed to be psychology. But it too ended with the great revival during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Let’s take a step back now, to get a complete picture of what was previously meant as science. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, therefore around 400/300 BC. C, but this was also the case for centuries to come, science was defined as the stable knowledge of something. Mathematics was distinct from the sciences, there was no real method, and indeed up to Galilei, and indeed up to Newton, to quote some important physicists, the scientist was a philosopher of nature; we are in a different position from that which today and also in the previous century the sciences advocate.

And today that fewer and fewer people are interested in humans, science has seen great development and great interest on the part of people. Physics is called certain knowledge, chemistry the same, even in the soft sciences, we can have a certain idea of certainty. While in politics, in ethics, in art, the idea of truth has failed, everything in that field is subjective, labile, subject to many disputes, and with a form of almost privacy of ideas. Everyone has their true idea, and so it has to be. The time of the common ideal, which existed in the Christian, Communist, Greek era, has failed.

Nihilism has taken hold in that no one can define the good, no one can make sense of it, find it, and so ends up that moral nihilism moves into every humanistic subject, but this is erroneous. Everyone closes in the idea that everything is subjective except the sciences, that everything human is determined by the subject, forgetting that the subject is however immersed in this world that they say is physically true.

The sciences are based on a discourse of phenomena; what appears, already in the etymology of the term, there is a sort of negative meaning that should make us reflect on the much-desired presumption of accuracy of the sciences. It is believed that the sciences as engaged in research on phenomena are true, everyone can experience scientific proof, it is stable, as the term itself says science, episteme, stable knowledge. While in the field of the human, often concerning the subjective, the private apparently, everyone closes themselves in nihilism and complete relativism, forgetting that since the time of the Greeks the truth was not only of science, but also of the human, there they were Ideas, Forms, and so on, which contained the truth.

I do not mean here whether a domain of the sciences is right or not, but I would like to show why art, religion, literature, history, and finally philosophy, are all fundamental for human knowledge and how not are separate from physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences.

Fake consciousness and symbolism

Many, especially those who study philosophy, will have heard of the masters of suspicion. They are three historical figures, three important “philosophers” in their way (quotation marks are used to indicate that not all of them have been professional philosophers), who have been placed under this label by a recently deceased French philosopher: Paul Ricœur.

The masters are opposed mainly to Descartes and Husserl, but also to Fichte and anyone who uses consciousness as a foundation. Let’s start with Descartes, who perfectly encapsulates the spirit of conscience as not overshadowed: for Descartes the data of conscience are certain, conscience is a ground of certainty. If I think of glass, I think of glass. If, on the other hand, I have something in front of me that I call a glass, I cannot be sure it is a glass.

Let us now name the three masters who have put conscience in crisis: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the third manages to subsume the other two, for this reason, we will rely almost exclusively on the Viennese psychoanalyst. Why did they put conscience in crisis? Marx showed how our consciousness is distorted by the superstructures of our society, Nietzsche instead how they are a function of the will to power, and finally Freud how the unconscious is involved.

Freud showed that behind that pure consciousness there is false consciousness. Let’s take the classic example of the Freudian slip: it happens that two words are mistaken for each other. It seems harmless, but once we have interpreted the discourse during an analytic session, we realize that that linguistic slip is nothing more than an action of the unconscious. The slip happens when the desire takes over, we find something that can fill it and we say it.

We think of Oedipus, which Freud analyzes and takes up with both hands, even giving him a fundamental role in his psychoanalytic system. Oedipus in the story of Sophocles accuses someone of the plagues that are rampant in Thebes, but in the end, he realizes that he was the cause of everything. Oedipus felt calm, clean in his conscience, but he realized that in the end, he was to blame.

How can this become important for sciences such as physics and chemistry? Freud gives another example: before Copernicus, the sun was thought to revolve around the Earth. Despite all the scientific discourse that proved otherwise it took some time to accept this, but why? Because it went against our desire to be at the center of the Galaxy. Some might say that it was a problem of religion, but we must also say that God is a guarantee of superiority for us men: believers are superior and the man himself among the beasts is superior. The same thing for Darwin who was immediately pointed out and it took time before his theory of evolution became accepted and often even misguided to give an idea of a superior race, thus passing on the opposite side of the coin.

As we often see, things are not accepted because they are contrary to our unconscious volitions, or sometimes they do not even come to mind because they go against those volitions. We are human and we are limits, the unconscious limits us as beings capable of grasping the truth of the objects around us.

How can we now go against this false consciousness, and consequently false knowledge? We cannot take refuge behind the idea that there are no facts but only interpretations, first of all, due to its internal fallacy: is this proposition a fact, therefore there are some, or an interpretation, therefore we cannot attribute to it a meaning of truth? We follow Freud’s method: he used Sophocles’ King Oedipus to understand what now takes the name of the Greek tragedy of the same name: the Oedipus complex.

The question arises: would Freud have ever been able to understand such a thing if it had not first been written in poetic form by someone? We may not know, but as we well note, art provides particular access to this type of human, interior, psychological knowledge. Art discovers the symbols of man, as well as religion and literature.

But what are the symbols? It is difficult to say, by definition, we could say that they are containers of interpretations, as Ricœur roughly understands. Symbols can contain various interpretations and allow us to discover the man.

Let’s take an example: the symbol of the sky. The sky indicates the above, the gods, an ethereal place, the good as different from the earth and evil, the spirit, and so on. We can therefore study ourselves through these symbols.

Thus Freud through Oedipus the King understands that there are symbols of the Father and the Mother who are an antagonist and an object of desire forbidden by the “pact between brothers”. By discovering these symbols, discovering things that would otherwise be hidden from our consciousness, we can better understand ourselves and the possible bandages that the preconscious places in front of our eyes.

To the hard sciences this serves to continually remind us that we are human and we have biases, we have bandages, glasses that often make us insert things into the world that in reality are not there.

Now that we have given a role to these symbols, and we have given it to them concerning man, the same one that formulates passable scientific theories of truth or falsehood, the time has come to talk about some forms of human production in which we can discover them.

Reading Hegel‘s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, we notice how the last three forms are: art, revealed religion, and finally philosophy. So let’s take these three as three great forms, trying to understand how important they are also for our modern world which is increasingly moving away from the human to end up in the technical.

Art

Now, as the first way to discover the symbols of the human that we need to be able to criticize our claim to pure conscience, we encounter art. I do not want to pretend to be able to provide a function of art in this short essay, not even to insert art in a specific moment of a Spirit, but only to analyze art to the extent that it allows us to discover symbols.

Let’s start by saying that for Freud art is sublimation. When Freud analyzes Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa, in his essay on Leonardo he encounters difficulties that make us understand the role of art as a means of analyzing symbols.

The Mona Lisa is Leonardo’s way of recovering the desire of the mother who abandoned him as a child, and in which he overcomes the same desire. In the figure of the Mona Lisa, in the artistic expression of the figure of the mother, now sublimated as expressed and made conscious, and in the way in which it allows the memory of the forgotten mother, Leonardo overcomes desire itself, accessing a sublimation.

Symbols are sublimations, they are containers of various interpretations and are therefore accepted and rationalized forms of desire that are expressed in figures with a certain fixity. Not only through artistic expression do we express ourselves as subjects, but we also sublimate our desires, we express human symbols that allow us to better understand ourselves as conscious subjects.

Oedipus himself allowed Freud to better understand the human psyche and to give many explanations regarding our claim to the truthfulness of conscience and rationality.

Art becomes a precious way to vary reality, to better understand ourselves in those varied realities. Ricoeur speaks of metaphors as having heuristic potential. The wave of light, the term wave, refers primarily to the waves of the sea, but if we only take the wave motion we can use it to understand light, which has little or nothing to do with the waves of the sea. For Ricoeur, the metaphor is not only an artistic and poetic means but also a way to vary the world, to be able to understand it better.

For other eminent philosophers, such as Schelling and Heidegger, art not only has a content of truth but should even be considered the truest of forms. Now, we must not go so far as to support this in this essay, both because explaining the reasons for it would take time, and because it is not the purpose, but it is good to indicate that it is not so obvious even among rational figures as philosophers often should be, that science is the greatest form of truth that man can attain.

Having concluded this brief passage on art, let’s now move on to another field, namely that of religions.

Religion

Another field from which Freud draws a lot is religion, in particular the Christian one, and in particular from Christian stories, the Old and New Testament. What are the reasons? They are similar to the previous motivations relating to art, but to show them we make an example inherent in Freudian topologies.

The superego behaves like a good and loyal father. The Super-ego at a first analysis always observes (omnipresent), scolds, and acts as a model of final life. As we see from these three purely phenomenological definitions, or how it presents itself to the conscience (of the analyst in this case), we immediately notice the parallels with the figure of God, and consequently of Christ.

God is the one who gives rewards once life is over, God judges and sees our every act, God, in this case, his incarnation or in any case his Son, depending on the type of Christianity, acts as a model of life.

Furthermore, according to Freud, the superego is formed on the model of that of one’s parents. The term Father that we find in the Scriptures seems somewhat strange, as in the Greek religion there are no references to the fact that man was the son of the god Zeus for example. The term Father, therefore, refers to a man’s conception of the father figure, and religion for Freud are stories in which that vision can be explored to a certain extent.

The God-Father is none other than our father, who is shown as superior, comforter, as forbidden and as an end, basically it shows how religion is an expression of the Oedipus complex and the formation of the super-ego of man.

However, without there having been a religion, perhaps we would never have come to be able to understand everything about our mind, and consequently to be able to begin to operate in every field a critique of what formulates the equations, the scientific models, or conscience.

Philosophy

The last of the three but not for its greatest importance is philosophy. We can’t give her a role right now, but we can begin to explain some of the roles she was given.

For Aristotle (For some advice on Aristotle’s book), every science must take its presuppositions from another science, or they must be self-evident. Again for Aristotle, the science that has the highest and most general presuppositions is philosophy, the study of things as they are.

Husserl instead in the years around 900, took philosophy and in particular phenomenology, as the science that must deal with every science. Everything is subordinated to the phenomenological study, that is, of how natural phenomena present themselves to consciousness.

Let’s go into even more detail. Let’s take scientific proofs for example. They certainly start from some assumptions, but this assumption must be investigated. The axioms of mathematics need explanation, and logic, or for psychologists, psychology, is the science that deals with that too.

As we can see, philosophy deals with the general, and to a certain extent investigates every field of research at its roots, trying to demonstrate its presuppositions, purposes, motivations, even investigating the methods, for some years now the philosophy of science has taken steps.

As we can see, philosophy detaches itself from the symbol and directly investigates thought as thought. If for Hegel, philosophy is the last science, and if for Hegel philosophy always comes later, when everything is now over (Minerva’s famous owl that arrives when the sun has set), then it could be that the maximum moment of philosophy is yet to come.

When everything is scientifically discovered, philosophy will have to question. Or whenever everything is discovered, philosophy will have to take its place and question everything, perhaps as Socrates intended.

Conclusions

As we have seen, the field of sciences is taking hold, but the time has not yet come to abandon all other forms of the human, and in particular, we have seen how philosophy could find its meaning both in every moment of discovery, but even when all is discovered, to question everything again.

We should perhaps stop making too many distinctions between what is human and what is scientific. Yes, they are two distinct forms, but they both deal with bringing something to light, and each form must be taken into consideration, without abandoning them and allowing them to be overwhelmed by other forms.

If, however, science and technology have taken hold, the time when the arts, religion, and philosophy will be gone forever is still far away, and perhaps it will never come if we try hard not to make it disappear. When during the twentieth century and decades before, science made giant steps, authors of the caliber of Proust and Joyce revolutionized literature, and beyond. The flow of consciousness has also allowed developments in philosophy and psychology, Proust’s memory, how he was able to access memories, have given rise to ideas for anthropology, psychology, and so on.

All this because every form of knowledge is a form of man, in the end, it is always us who form scientific theories as if to express feelings on a blank sheet of paper.

It makes no sense to put one science above another, each science and each form of expression has its specific task, and they all have the same general task to some extent. We still perhaps do not know what these are, but we can well notice how each is important, and I hope that with this essay we have at least partially understood the reasons for this.

Journey Towards the End – Part 1

By ericmarschallworld

On 10 December 2021

In Short stories

Introduction

A long journey, starting from the light and ending in the darkness of the deep space, where no one has ever been. Knowledge, curiosity, consciousness, all the things that make a human desire to live that journey till the end, may led up to something orrendous.

That’s the first part of the journey of a space crew, that will try to found out what are in the depths of the universe.

Journey towards the end

The star Lanar was sinking below the horizon, but the light from Pukar was still illuminating the surface of Deteker. Dante was seated on a rock split in half, the desert stretched below him, and in the distance, in front and behind him, some of the great bubbles still showed their artificial lights. Dante’s helmet was connected to a small oxygen station. There were many around the globe, to allow you to welcome the spaceships, walk outside the covered area, or just escape from that metropolitan chaos.

Dante took out of his pocket a small photograph depicting three people: him, his mother, and his father. Both had died of old age; it happened in the less urbanized planets that people still died at an age of less than a hundred years. He would have liked to be a writer, he had tried for many years, but even if he managed to sell, he could not survive on the few pennies that the confederation now gave to humanistic activities. By now every government financed and encouraged scientific or engineering research, the rest was pointed out like crap, and removed in advance from the working spaces. His father was a great reader, writer, humanist, he still thought he could return to a world where science and literature go hand in hand, and Dante, by his choice, had continued to dream of that world and still dreamed of it.

Unfortunately, he had to find ways to survive, and certainly, the war would never be lacking in the confederation, which by now was slowly crumbling: small groups were being created, each of which was subject to a purely extremist and stringent ideology: who was not like them was pointed out as different, removed, but the same thing often happened between them as soon as someone moved slightly or did not respect every canon of the ideology. They were all under invisible flags, however, after a while they crumbled by themselves, and fell back into the hands of the confederation, only to wait for the arrival of a new group.

Mercenaries were well paid, and Dante was considered one of the best, but there was one thing he was famous for not killing. Dante did not want to do it, he wanted to keep a shred of humanity, maybe he was wrong, maybe killing was better than handing those people over to an ideological group, which in all probability would have tortured them. Maybe he was just a coward, but he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to get his hands and soul dirty. His goal was to write about people, not to kill them, to understand them, not to annihilate them, and the murder would have wiped out all his chances of writing clearly about the people around him. While he was thinking about these things he imagined his parents, perhaps with a slight smile, as they looked at their son who, with all of himself, was trying to keep humanity in a world now made up of machines and money.

In his mind, he heard his father’s voice, and a tear rolled down his cheek. Below him, however, he began to hear noise spreading in the desert, and slowly looking up, he saw a large spaceship land right in front of him. The thrusters were kicking up a lot of sand, and the wheels were just starting to land on the ground. It was strangely large, not usually seen like that on these outlying planets. Completely gray, opaque, very simple in its figure. The main hatch opened and lowered the descent that would bring the crew down.

“You must be Dante, the famous mercenary,” said a man opening his arms and walking energetically towards Dante. He was tall, with a physique that showed under his leather jacket and his Sector A Federation military pants, known for his military might and fearless soldiers; in the war for the creation of the confederation they had easily defeated sectors B and C with half the men of the adversaries.

“Are you Captain Denver?” Dante asked as he approached.

“In flesh and blood,” he said, shaking hands with the mercenary. “Now, before we start the negotiations, why don’t we go to town to eat something.”

The mercenary agreed and entered the ship. It was very spacious inside, but there were no other people to be seen except those who had come out. In addition to Captain Dante he had seen a woman and two men, and even passing through the corridors he had not seen any signs of other people. “We can go,” said the captain, sitting in his chair in the center of the cockpit. During the voyage Dante noticed some tics that Denver had: he often scratched his arm, he shattered his teeth together without making it too noticeable, sometimes he stamped his foot on the ground, and each time the woman seemed to notice and approach the captain to make him notice that she was close to him.

They reached the harbor, parked the ship, and got out, still there were no signs of other people. Dante began to think that it was strange to have such a large spaceship for so few people: the only explanation was that they had to make a very, very long journey.

They walked to an inn, took rooms, and sat down at a table to eat something. “Well, Dante, the time has come to tell you what I hired you for,” began the captain. After taking a good sip from the mug of beer he said: “We will go to the center of the universe!”.

“What does it all mean,” Dante replied promptly. “Those of the confederation have not yet arrived and you hope to reach that place”.

“Don’t yell at the captain,” grumbled one of the two men.

“Calm down Donovan, it is normal that he is frightened by this enterprise of ours, but I would like to remind you, Dante, that there is a lot of money at stake, and above all, you would be the first to reach that place, you would go down in history”, said Denver.

“Not to mention what might be there, it would be a magnificent discovery for science,” said the second man.

“Dr. Peker, Ph. D. in physics and astrophysics, not to mention his breakthroughs in group theory. We talked about it for a long time, and finally we found a way to get to that damn place,” the captain said.

“And what would Doctor Peker do?” Dante asked directly to the scientist.

“Well, you see, there are some black holes near the center our plan is to use one of the black holes as a catapult to reach the center avoiding the fields of the other ones”. The way he said it was that of a madman: there was a certain euphoria in his words, a strange tendency to want to test whether his theories were correct.

“And what do I have to do with it?” Dante asked Denver.

“Is it true that you are one of the best pilots in the galaxy?”

“Someone told me about it, but I don’t think I am,” Dante replied.

“Maybe not, but you are one of the few mercenaries who can boast of that appellation, and above all, you seem willing to do many things for money.”

Dante paused for a while to think. The money they had agreed to was high, and by negotiating more it would surely have raised the pay slightly, but that mission was complex. He had with him one of the old soldiers of sector A, but above all a renowned scientist, perhaps it was worth it. He had no money with him, but hearing about that place, the fame he could have, who knows, maybe with that fame he could become a writer, he could change the world with that name of his, the stakes were too high and it intimately touched the possibility of realizing his dream. “I accept,” he replied in a low voice, not very convinced of the mission, but convinced by his motivation.

“Perfect,” replied the captain, spreading his arms in celebration. “Now, let’s talk about the route to take,” he said, pulling a large map of the sector they were in from his backpack.

“We should refuel on the last available planet: ‘Hercules’, it will take ten days to get there and then another thirty to reach the center of the universe,” Peker said, tracing the route with his finger.

“We already have some supplies, but we will have to buy more things at Hercules to make sure we get to and from safe and sound,” Denver said.

“We know from recent studies that the center should be located here,” Peker said, pointing off the map. “According to a scientist, Esener, who calculated the expansion speed of the universe with great precision, and thanks to the radiation of the oldest stars…”, the bewildered faces surrounded the scientist, “in short, it should be here, but we will surely see it from the black holes that we will find near the center”.

“Are you going to the center of the universe?” Said a man sitting next to them. He looked quite young, with two still lively eyes and a few wrinkles under them.

“Exactly,” Donovan replied.

“Don’t go”.

“And why shouldn’t we go?” Said the woman who had not yet introduced herself to Dante.

“Beasts lurk in that place, I heard sounds, I saw the crew of an allied ship disperse into the void, they were all dead.” He stared into space as he told that story, as if those images were still in front of him, as if time hadn’t healed his wound at all. “Don’t go!” The man yelled, turning many people around the inn.

“We will go instead,” said Denver, “we can’t back down, now the spaceships are fast, if we find something we could run away.” He had a high-sounding tone, very convincing and when he spoke he managed to instill a sense of security that did not go unnoticed. Dante could see it in the crew’s eyes, they were convinced only because their captain was convinced, but what would happen if he wasn’t?

“You are fools, the beasts will kill you, I saved myself because I was still far away, but I heard the roars, they spread in the fog”, after the sentence he screamed.

“Sir, stop it,” said the innkeeper, ordering him.

“Anyway, you must not go there,” he concluded and then paid and left, under the gaze of the crew and other people who had inevitably overheard the conversation that had just ended.

“He was definitely crazy,” the woman said.

“You’re right, Ayn,” Denver said, looking her in the eyes.

“We must not fear anything, there are no forms of life in open space, it is impossible that they can survive in that environment”, the scientist said convinced, but Dante had noticed a certain concern, a doubt, a human fear of being able to find facing unknown beasts, won only by the human desire to know and discover.

“Then it’s decided: we’ll go to the center of the universe anyway,” said the captain, raising his mug, and toasting with everyone else.

Dante was still not convinced: that man did not seem crazy to him, he seemed gone crazy. What he had seen must have made him like this. There was no evidence of the existence of the beasts, as far as he knew they could move all over the universe, perhaps he would never have encountered anything like it even wandering around the galaxy. Yet he was worried, he never wanted to be faced with such a vision. But there was that dream, that damned motivation that was able to drive away the rational fear, motivation that he could not fail to see realized in his imagination. He already imagined what he could do once he got back, he knew they were just fantasies, but it wasn’t an impossible fantasy, and it was enough for him not to back down.

After having rested for the night in the inn and having bought the necessary things to support the voyage to Hercules, they all entered the ship. The eyes were low, Denver’s speech had not completely convinced the spirits of his crew, but no one had pulled back.

“A.C.B. turn on,” said the captain. The starship’s lights went on, many screens marked coordinates of nearby asteroids, internal and external temperatures, oxygen levels, and much more.

“Sir, we’re online,” said a robotic voice that came from a multitude of places on the ship.

“Nice artificial intelligence,” Dante said as he approached the captain.

“Get used to it, you’ll have to drive this ship yourself,” Denver said.

Dante did not object and sat in the command chair. In front of him was raised a screen with all the important data for navigation: coordinates, gyroscope, angles of the thrusters, fuel, gravity fields, and finally the speed; the spies, on the other hand, were on a screen near the arm of the chair. He had never driven something like this, but he wasn’t frightened by the novelty, on the contrary, he was attracted to it and couldn’t wait to try out how that spaceship worked.

“You can do it yourself or you want a hand,” Denver said sarcastically.

“A.C.B. starts the main engines and sets the destination for Hercules”. The mercenary had not been intimidated by the captain’s defiant gesture.

“Done sir,” replied the software.

The ship lifted off the ground and after successfully stabilizing, the wheels re-entered, and they could begin their journey. Dante seemed to have no problems, the route was not difficult, there were no asteroids in the vicinity according to the A.C.B. scanners and according to the data released by the confederation, but sometimes it was not possible to identify with certainty the position of the rock masses that were shipwrecked for the universe.

The first five days were peaceful: they sailed in the morning, had lunch and stayed still for a few hours, left for the afternoon, and stayed for dinner until the following morning. You could not tell the time with the sun, but the human habits were those, and everyone had to sleep for at least seven hours in order not to go crazy and be ready for the day. When they were stationary, A.C.B. thought about keeping the ship stable, once stopped it would not have had to move according to normal Newtonian mechanics, but sometimes the approach of some planet in orbit, a nearby meteorite, some other object, could disturb the stationary position of the spaceship.

By now Dante had begun to know the members of the group. Ayn was the captain’s wife, she seemed caring towards her husband, but she still had a strong character, which often did not hesitate to go against some of the captain’s decisions, such as sleeping for only six hours instead of seven, or smaller rations of food to save supplies for times of real need. Donovan, on the other hand, seemed very attached to Denver, as Dante understood, they were old friends, when they were still at war, they were both in Sector A’s army, and Denver’s courage must have helped Donovan a lot in overcoming many difficult moments.

Peker, on the other hand, was very silent, but Dante had managed to understand one thing: he was crazy. He had a cynical way of talking about people, almost as if he considered them mere tools for science. However, he was a genius in name and fact, he could immediately understand the data on the screen and make predictions with them, he had many hypotheses for when they would arrive at the center of the universe, a refined and error-free way of speaking, and finally a great simplicity in explaining complex things, although when he didn’t fully know what he was saying he tended to make it as complicated as when they were at the inn.

He also discovered that A.C.B. stood for Artificial Conscious Buddy. It was an experiment that Perker had also worked on, but that had never given positive results, ending up in this spaceship bought from Denver for the voyage. The project had to try to reproduce a conscience through the study of friendships, A.C.B. had to be a friend for those who made long journeys alone, and above all, it had to try to understand if it was possible to reproduce a conscience in a machine, a conscience that could be a friend of someone.

On the sixth day, during the afternoon, an alarm went off on the front screen: “approaching asteroids”, it could be read in large letters that emanated an intermittent red light above the dark blue screen.

“The forecasts did not give any asteroid clusters nearby,” the scientist said.

“It looks like it’s going to be a busy trip right now,” Denver said.

“Just take a wider loop or wait for them to pass,” Dante said.

“Impossible. The group is extensive with a high enough density for the area it covers. Staying still is not a recommended solution”, said A.C.B.

“So let’s dam the group of rocks”, replied the mercenary.

“No, we don’t have that much time, there are worse forecasts for the next few days”, thundered the captain approaching Dante with a menacing air.

“It would be madness, we are too far from any habited planet, if we were hit now it would be the end”, replied the mercenary.

“Beyond Hercules there are worse predictions, and arriving on the tenth day is the only way not to make them come true. If we do a maneuver now we will lose a day of travel”.

“It will be enough to wait even when we are in Hercules”.

“Go through those asteroids now.” The captain had screamed with all his voice in his body. A vein could be glimpsed under that tuft of hair that had fallen on his forehead from the brusque movement he had made to emphasize his imposition. His wife had looked at him worriedly, while Donovan was looking angrily at Dante, who could not help but continue among the asteroids.

He proved to be a very good pilot and organizer: when an asteroid approached them he was able to pass under or over to avoid the collision, sometimes he had to pass between two rock masses, and it was all possible thanks to the calculations of A.C.B. When lunch arrived Dante was not with the others, he was still driving, he knew the asteroids wouldn’t wait for them to fill their stomachs before they arrived, nature never waited, didn’t care about its humans. It was the same for dinner and the night. The asteroids were only cleared by 3:00 am, when everyone was asleep. Dante got his four hours of sleep and punctually made himself found in command for the following day, when the navigation was more peaceful.

The captain seemed proud of his choice, but Dante was not happy at all with that despot, and also a despot without motivation for his orders. His behavior was not normal, nothing was normal in that mission, not even the fact that such a large group of asteroids had not been identified and communicated in time. He felt something strange, something beyond normal concern, like an intuition, a vision, a horrible feeling of danger that was becoming more and more tedious and close.

Am I Human?

By ericmarschallworld

On 9 December 2021

In Short stories

Introduction

The eternal question of the identity of a human being. Now robots seem more and more capable of looking and behaving like humans, they’re creators, but what are the differences between them? Now we can still see them, but as they progress in capabilities, are we really sure we could distinguish each others? In this short story I’ll try to make some points, following the stories of the characters, regarding what makes human a human.

Here’s another of my short science fiction stories

Am I Human?

The electronic newspaper marked the date August 3, 2245, the scorching summer heat was dampened by the cool artificial air. It was the year of the Dr-45, a particular robot that no one had yet tried to create due to resistance due to ethical principles. It was rumored that the robot could solve any disease by recommending suitable drugs. Medicine had already reached unimaginable peaks for years, so much to allow the cure of any existing disease, it lacked only the ability to be able to diagnose with maniacal precision the possible physical or mental illnesses. A Dr-45 was installed in the city of New Manhattan, an artificial island located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The name was given to honor the union in the search for atomic bombs during the now distant world wars. It was a place that was usually used to carry out experiments, putting men and technology in contact to evaluate how they interacted with each other.

In that city, people had lined up to witness the prodigy of technology and science. The waiting room was spacious, fully lit, and completely white. It was full of people sitting in blue armchairs, intent on writing, talking, discussing, updating, but this was all done on phones, people didn’t talk to each other, they didn’t want to. Occasionally a nurse would come out of the small door leading to the robot, and utter the name of the person who should have entered. There were people of all kinds: two mothers, one with a daughter, and one with a son and daughter, an elderly lady, a little boy who had probably just come of age, some male and female workers still in their working clothes. work, and so on.

Then there was a writer, sitting in the corner of the waiting room, reading a book on an electronic device. Now and then he raised his head showing his big eyes and full lips. He looked around for a while, then focused on someone interesting, and then his face fell back down on the book he was reading. He was dressed in home clothes: a white shirt, and pants with white sneakers, dirty all over the place. Beside him was a well-dressed gentleman with a brown leather briefcase and a tag that said: Mr. Jeffer, in large letters. He looked like a banker.

The writer observed him from time to time: he looked at his slicked-back hair, his tie loosened after a long day’s work, his shoes polished so much that they became white from how much light they reflected. Then the writer threw his head back and walked away with his torso to look at the figure in its entirety. Now and then he muttered: “a robot, yes, yes”. And his face fell on the book again. He did it with many, but no one heard him, or no one understood him.

The faces of the people were somewhat gloomy. They all looked towards the screen, chins flattened against their necks, the bones of their backs showing from their necks bent to the utmost of their physiognomy, their shoulders squatted, and their eyes dull, devoid of any vitality. But when they went out they looked like completely different people: the lady who had the child with her came in. She walked hunchbacked, but when she came out she looked completely reborn. Quickstep, lively eyes, impeccable walk, so much so that a doctor would have complimented her seeing the perfection with which her back was and she placed her feet one in front of the other to leave that building with the child in her hand. Then it fell to that lady with the two children, and she too suffered the same fate. Then the workers, and everyone else. Whenever the writer saw someone go out he would look him up and down, and mumbled: “a robot, yes, yes”.

His name was then called, and he got up to come in front of the nurse. He was asked for the usual formalities and then he entered the room. In front of him was a machine with the appearance of a man. He wore a white coat that matched the color of his hair and beard. He wore glasses, and the eyes that were under them looked real, not to mention the strategically deformed nose completed with some imperfection to give the appearance of a man, and finally, the chapped lips that were filled now and then with cocoa butter to moisten them. “Good morning,” said Dr-45.

“Good morning to you,” said the writer. “I’m here because I feel sad,” he added, looking at the robot in front of him.

Dr-45 turned around, grabbed a scanner, and held it up to the writer’s head. He started it from the hair and went down until it reached the nose. A red light covered the patient’s face. After a while on the screen behind the scanner was written: “2 antidepressants”, with the addition of the abbreviation of the drug to be prescribed. Dr-45 opened a shelf and handed out the medicines that were prescribed, making an appointment for a session the following week.

After seven days the writer returned, nothing had changed, he was still sad. Dr-45 scanned again and found the same thing as the previous time. “Sir, we should then offer you a behavioral cure.”

“What is it,” the writer replied promptly.

“We found that you have a more serious problem than expected, we should try to work on your behavior and restructure it to allow you to live better.”

“Okay Doctor”.

“You’re the first one to have this problem. I advise you to try to work on yourself, go out more often, make new acquaintances, expand your data ”. The writer thought that that word: ‘data’ was just like a robot, but in the end that was it, he couldn’t do anything about it. They made an appointment for the following month.

“Good evening,” said the writer, crossing the threshold of the doctor’s office for the third time, who promptly took out the scanner and checked the patient’s situation.

“Sir, your problem hasn’t improved at all, we should take immediate action with an operation,” he said.

The writer did not flinch at accepting his situation. Two armed men came out of the door and, passing quickly behind the writer, passed a contraption in the shape of a pistol over his head, causing him to collapse to the ground. He was devoid of signs of life, his skin cold, his eyes closed, and the noise of circuits emanating from his body was annoying.

The doctor sat in his chair, letting those two uniformed men do the work. He took out his notebook and wrote:

“September 10, 2245, Robot experiments have yielded decent results. Many people have not noticed that they are in the presence of robots, and robots have not noticed that they are in the presence of people. The diagnostic device works flawlessly on people, but the assessment of the nature of the individual still leaves something to be desired; the parameters of distinction between man and machine have yet to be carefully evaluated and researched. Dr. Andrew Finnegan”

Thus ended this day of his work. He would come home drunk again, surrounded by doubts and questions about the difference between man and machine. He walked the streets trying to distinguish them from each other, but there was nothing to do: the further we went, the more the difference diminished. He wondered if the robots were advancing or if perhaps they were going back, but that could not be answered at the moment.

He knew that robots lived on that island, he also knew the physiognomy of some of them. Their identity was based on their artificial construction, their core identity identified over time by a continuous being a machine. However, it was interesting to see the same entity for a long time without signs of aging, or improvement. That “writer” hadn’t changed at all, he could well see it too. Perhaps the only difference he could see was precisely the voluntary growth, the desire to improve as a being.

Stopping at the bar, as usual, he drank a drink to try to curb his questions, but in reality, he knew that questions and paranoia would arise anyway, alcohol could only slow them down. Now that he was starting to notice it, even the bartender hadn’t changed one iota since he first walked into the dump. His head was already starting to spin, at that moment he would not even be able to recognize what was in front of him. Was the human ability to distinguish his fellow men so labile that it collapsed when confronted with something that had a human physiognomy, but a mind made of circuits?

Staggering, with his hand running along the walls of the houses to be able to stand up, he began to walk. The faint light of the street lamps illuminated the sidewalk. One step after another he was slowly approaching home. His gaze darted to meet that of the few people who were still awake. Many have been robots, but how could he have known at that moment? And if it hadn’t been on that island, where he knew there were robots, where he had a high guard, an eye ready to grasp the details; if he had instead been in America, England, France, Africa, or who knows where elsewhere it is taken for granted that we have people like us in front of us, what would he have done? Perhaps he would have gone mad worse than he was doing now.

He reached the door of the house, and as soon as he reached out to put the key in the lock, he saw it blurred, he could not notice the details of the epidermis, the small spaces from which his hair came out, the small streaks of the skin, the imperfections, nothing at all, and again began to doubt even himself. He entered the house, lay down on the bed, and in the silence of his existence he thought: “Isn’t that ironic? We want someone equal to us, we want to play God maybe. Or maybe we want to understand ourselves trying to go to the limit of human construction ”. He touched his skin, looked in front of him, looked inside his soul, and feeling he felt he added: “After all, perhaps the only difference between us and robots is that disgusting and nauseating feeling of existing.” Discouraged by his limited existence and self-understanding, he ended his day whispering as he turned off the light: “I think, I am, nothing more.”

Corpses and Nothing more

By ericmarschallworld

On 8 December 2021

In Short stories

Introduction

In a world that revolves around science only, where technology governs the lives of everyone, where does the human will begin? And is there any type of free will in a world like that? If Orwell in 1984 shows how a totalitarian society could impact the individual, making him dull nihilistic, and only a corpse among other corpses, I would like to show how all of these views of a dystopian society, could impact the life of a singular person. Someone who is a victim of that type of society, someone who is dull, nihilistic, someone who barely bears the name of a human but that is nothing more than a corpse, that move thanks to nature’s laws among others being condemned to his same fate.

Technology and science are truly one of the best characteristics of man, among others, but they made our lives better, with fewer diseases, more space to explore, more possibilities, but again, if not balanced well might make our corpses. Science, or to be precise, hard sciences, do not need our own will or our qualia, they need to study us as corpses, something made of atoms, that move among other things and interact with them as a thing, not as a human.

Now, this view is surely provocative, but I think it might help to grasp the point and the problem: we do not need to destroy the sciences, we need them, we only need to be more aware of ourselves as humans and not only corpses.

I think that the advancement of technology, that empirically makes us corpses, if not balanced by the awareness of our lives as human beings, might make us corpses, but this time, that and nothing more.

Corpses and nothing more

The clothes turned in the washing machine at an incessant rhythm, repeating the same movement over and over in a monotony that was reflected in the life of human civilization. Now and then a small sound made one of the empty people sitting up waiting to finish the laundry get up. The neon flickered from time to time, constantly bothering my orbs not to mention that harsh noise that had repeated itself four or five times, and that had finally ceased deafening me.

Throughout the world a strange sense of estrangement had taken hold, making everyone more and more lonely, in unbridled solipsism that left very little room for altruism or values such as empathy and kindness. Everyone looked after his interests, only the actions regulated by nature or culture that coerced a certain degree of interpersonal relationships persisted.

Parents still took care of their children, raised them, and looked after them until they came of age, at which time the youngsters reached the climax of that dullness, ending up leaving home, living a life awaiting death alone, because of how they had been educated.

Each relationship had become conventional, devoid of that real passion that some still remembered having existed many years ago. People looked into each other’s eyes, without however recognizing that in front of them, they had a person like them, and not a mere mass of flesh and bones, or as scientists preferred, a mass of atoms.

To my left was a wiry gentleman with a thick beard and a pair of oversized glasses. It was particular how his head fell forward every time, and every time, as if he never learned, he lifted it, looked around as if he did not even remember where he was, and then went back to dozing to make the time pass faster.

Now and then I talked to people, they told me about their days, about their children, about work, but I didn’t know anything about them, what they wanted from their life: their fears, ambitions, emotions, thoughts and conjectures, their personalities, singularities, nothing at all, yet I had been talking to those people for decades.

Nobody was interested in these matters now. Everyone was careful to outlive themselves, nothing more. The others were just in front of us, but there was nothing inside those bodies, we couldn’t know. They were there in plain sight like mannequins who managed to move, but since we started looking for something, perhaps a soul, we hadn’t encountered any of this, leaving us in constant dread of emptiness inside the bodies of people.

“Sir,” said a voice on my right. A blonde woman with full lips, a slender and well-formed body, with a voice with an Australian accent. “Do you call the police?” She said pointing to the body lying in front of my feet.

It was a bloodbath, the body was riddled with shots, four or five to be precise. His gaze was empty, it was a lot of flesh, nothing more. What could have made me think that he was a man and not a mere animal, or a strange biological being created in the laboratory? How was I to know if there had been a life inside him, or if he hadn’t always moved for causes before him, in an incessant passage of time that had led him to his necessary end? Where was the man in all this?

In front of him, another figure like him brandished a gun in his hands, holding it firmly enough to show the veins on the backs. His teeth were gritted and the muscles in his neck showed a feral tension. He had fired several times, but no one in that room had moved.

“Yes, I’ll call it”. I picked up the phone and called the police. It was cold outside, I realized it when the police walked into the room. The killer hadn’t moved yet, but why should he have moved? Had he killed off life, or had he just shot a body? Where was the difference?

The police took it away just as my washing machine ran out. I had to go around so as not to get my shoes dirty with that corpse’s blood. I took my clothes and went out, I could no longer bear the stench it had begun to emanate.

The others were still inside, waiting for their laundry. The lady had pulled a bottle of alcohol out of her bag and had started to gulp it down. I saw her throw up before the sliding doors closed behind me. Then he staggered when with an absent step he went to check his washing machine.

The neon light cast shadows across the city in the middle of the night. The smoke in the little cafes on the side of the road always made me cough, and the chatter I heard was always the same monotonous conversation. The noise of cars and footsteps, however, always made me relax, it reassured me to know that I was nobody amid everything, but this led to madness for others.

In front, to the side, and behind me, a crowd of bodies followed a rhythmic pace without exception. All well lined up huddled, and even if a small exception had shown itself, it would have been devoured by that shapeless mass that did not want to change in the slightest, wanted to continue to live in customary uniformity.

“Tip, tap, tip, tap.” Incessant shoes beat on the ground, in a hypnotic rhythm, in an existential torpor, where everything followed an incessant cadence, a complete absence of individuality, a mass that included everything, where the individual had little space, where people did not exist anymore, only bodies, part of a great whole.

We ceased to find the other through the body, and now, we have been left with empty souls ourselves while wandering in this world.

Alice in Wonderland, Bloody Mary and the Mirrors

By ericmarschallworld

On 7 December 2021

In Essays

So, as we all know, mirrors have been used often in horror films, in books like Alice in Wonderland, in urban legends like Bloody Mary, but why? What goes into our mind when we place ourselves in front of a mirror and look at it? Mirrors have always been a sort of mysterious place. Even in the ancient Greek legend of Narcissus, he tried to reflect his image in the water, and then he drowned, trying to reach for the beauty he saw in it. What’s so magnificent and alluring about a mirror, and besides that, what’s so scary about them?

Behind ourselves

One of the things that come to mind is seeing behind yourself. Normally we do not see behind us, we are vulnerable, weak when our attention is placed in front of us. However, if we look in the mirror we can see behind us, but the fear of being attacked from behind turns into anguish, the anxiety of being attacked precisely because we know we can see. We could see someone behind us, we could meet his gaze, in short, being able to see behind only helps to be able to see one’s fears in the eyes have a direct vision, rather than not being able to see anything in the absence of the mirror. The fear of not seeing is replaced by the fear of seeing something, of making eye contact with that something. And if in seeing an empty space in front of us we are calm, in seeing an empty space behind us through a mirror we immediately feel anxiety. It almost seems as if the fear of not seeing begins to produce images of something, but it is used as an object to be afraid of seeing behind. There is a kind of division and dividing pattern in our thoughts: fear of not seeing that creates something to be afraid of seeing.

Ourselves

The primary characteristic of mirrors is that of reflecting light, thus allowing us to see. Right here lies a second fear: the tension in possible discord: the fear of not being as one imagined, the fear of seeing oneself different from what one imagined. We usually do not see our faces, but we have some sort of idea of how we are, and maybe the realization of that discrepancy between thought and reality might be what gives us that added sense of discomfort while looking at the mirror. The distortion of our image, as we see in some media, might be the reflection of this thought of not being how one has imagined.

Space

When we are in front of a mirror we see a space that extends behind us, but that extended space is “contained” in a “flat” object with no depth. Perhaps this very space contained something tiny, this idea of the extension inside the mirror, helped Carol produce Alice in Wonderland, and perhaps by bringing it back to the television screen, it helped to produce the idea for the movie The Ring. The fear of that unexplored space inside the mirror adds to other fears.

Conclusions

This could conclude this short train of thought involving the hidden meaning of a mirror. I don’t know whether these ideas have some sort of basis in reality, but maybe from a phenomenological perspective (how the information is present in our consciousness), they might be relevant to understanding how some novels, films, or else, were born, and what psychological meaning they could have.

Individualism: is it Wrong?

By ericmarschallworld

On 6 December 2021

In Essays

Introduction

Today we hear more and more often that being individualistic is wrong, that it is necessary to be more altruistic and that deep down we now live in an age where there is nothing but selfishness. But is this really how we have to go on? Is it that wrong to be an individualist? How does individualism collide with selfishness and altruism? Are they so irreconcilable?

Individualism and egoism

First of all, it is necessary to eliminate what I think is a common prejudice and an error of superficiality: egoism and individualism. Now, at least in Italy, I notice that the term egoism is often used as a synonym for individualism in common parlance. A person is often referred to as egoistic when speaking conversationally, but is rarely referred to as an individualist; the whole is instead reversed in more learned conversations and with a higher language, where the term individualistic is preferred to egoistic. However, we must not be wrong, they are not in fact synonyms.

The term egoistic derives from the Latin word ego, which means I, while individualistic concerns the individual, which we could also consider as an instance of the conscious person. The term egoistic wants to bring the self – therefore the single person is understood as a person defined as selfish and not the single person in general – above others. An egoistic person wants to be superior to another person. The individualist, on the other hand, wants to be superior to the group, but not to the other individuals he treats as his others, but whom he considers individually and not as a group.

Now, that the term egoistic has taken on a negative connotation, it becomes understandable when viewed from this point of view, as it cannot be reconciled with being altruistic, which instead does not seem to be contrary to the term individualistic.

Individualism and altruism

Altruism derives from the word alter, other, therefore it promotes the superiority of the other over the individual. Altruism is then not the opposite of individualism, but of egoism, while it seems that altruism and individualism are compatible, that there are no deep and rooted contradictions in their semantics.

Imagine an individualist or a person who puts the single individual above the group, what do we find contrary to the definition of who promotes the other over himself? Nothing, as being individualistic does not mean being selfish, egoistic. A true individualist recognizes something that unfortunately seems to be forgotten too often: that another person is another individual, an alter-ego, therefore it too is part of individuals.

So we can say that it is possible to be individualistic and altruistic at the same time when we realize that being individualistic only means putting above the whole individual and not the group formed by individuals.

Individualism and ideologies

We are now at the nerve center, which may be difficult for some people to digest, but I will try to do as much as possible to make it understandable. From what has emerged, individualism collides with ideologies. Ideology is a cultural function that arises above the physical structures of society, a superstructure, something that is recognized by individuals at the level of cultural significance.

However, ideology arises as a builder of groups, united precisely under the same idea, but then the individual underlying the group is lost, which is not compatible with individualism. As we know, ideologies can have a good function of grouping, of recognition under the same banner, but they must be kept at bay, and it is only possible when the individual comes out of that magmatic and changing chamber of ideological functions. We often notice that ideologies change over time, they are subject to semantic mutations, but their name remains the same. The communism defined by Marx is not that of Lenin or Trotsky and much less that of Stalin, but the term communism is always used.

Ideologies tend to lead to superstitions and prejudices (Ricoeur). It is undeniable that if we saw a Communist today we would treat him differently than seeing a person wearing simple clothes. It is the same with every group function. We are human beings and unconsciously we have prejudices, as we are born in a culture, we are Dasein (Heidegger), we are thrown into existence with prejudices, and we can certainly try to subjugate them to our conscience, but we know well that the unconscious is superior in size and power to the miserable Conscious.

How then can we solve these ideological problems? We must place the person, the individual above the group. In this way we maintain ideologies as we cannot do without them, we can do nothing but have unconscious prejudices, but we must also remember that if we continue to judge people for ideologies, we are playing the game of the unconscious; instead by placing the individual above the group, we can at least reduce those unconscious functions that do nothing but feed prejudices, create factions in conflict with each other and eliminate the single person in favor of belonging or not to that ideology.

Conclusions

We see well that we cannot remove ideologies as social functions, we cannot eliminate prejudices, we can only appeal to the attempt not to fall into the games of the unconscious and to promote the individual as the focal point of social and personal judgments. It does not mean that we must not discuss, speak, analyze ideologies, they will always exist, and must exist as they can be useful to group people, but we have to continue to promote the individual to not fall into uncontrollable prejudices and factions. It does not even mean falling into anarchy, anarchy is political and economic, here we are only talking about interpersonal relationships.

Individualism does not clash with altruism, so we must also try to maintain a certain level of altruism in our behavior, so as not to make individualism an egoism again.

Le Monde: 5 Books from 100

By ericmarschallworld

On 5 December 2021

In Book Advice

Le Monde, a famous French journal, and the retailer Fnac, in 1999, made a poll asking people what book sticked in their memory. And a famous list of 100 books has been made in this way. Now, many books are particular for the French taste, but in my opinion, many of them could be considered the books everyone should read, or at least try to read.

I am no expert indeed in literature, nor any other particular subject, but regarding some of the books I’ve read from the list, I would like to share 5 of them that I consider great books.

1 Albert Camus – The stranger

I can clearly see why this book took the first position of Le Monde’s list. One reason might be that it’s French, we cannot lie to ourselves, but another reason is that it’s a masterpiece. The book is not long, around 120 pages, and follows the gestures of Mersault, a young man but with a very strange point of view in life. It’s Absurd view, that somewhat is similar to Absurdism, shows how there are no values in our world, everything is not given and everyone must create his meaning. The acts that he does in the book are clearly provocative, and should let everyone think about moral, and ethics, to see if there are values or if not. Camus was not a mere writer, but also a philopher interested in the existence of human.

2 Franz Kafka – The trial

In third position we have a book from a German writer. I can remember the first time I read this book. It gave me a strange sensation of anger, melancholy, arrendovolusness, regarding the character and society in general. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the main character K. – it’s written like this to point at the author himself, Kafka – is a simple man that one day gets accused of something he didn’t know. He will follow the case but not really pay much attention to it. He loses hope, he continues to live during the case, but not truly, as he has never done. This book not only should reflect upon the judgment and the absurdity of our society and relationships with others, but even make us uncomfortable in reading it, just to feel the same sensation of the author and the character. A discomfort that produces anger, but not enough to make you stop reading, and not enough to make the character more interested in his case.

3 Antoine de Saint-Exupér – The little prince

The famous tale of the Little Prince fascinated many generations of children and adults giving it the fourth position of Le Monde’s list. This book has a strange characteristic. Its shortness and the accessibility of the themes he considers, but not the shallowness of the work, make it a book that has no age. The themes are central from the young age to adulthood, and never grow old. This book not only should be read one time – it’s even very short, around 60 pages – but every year. As we get older we see everything different in the book, every theme sounds different, every character too, everything gets different each year we pass, but not the question that this book proposes to us.

4 George Orwell – 1984

In the 22nd position, we have one of the classics of dystopian novels. The book pictures a futuristic dictatorship that uses technology to control people. Everyone loses interest if not in the things that the party tells them. The news is controlled by the party, they know of the war, but is there one? It’s a great novel that was liked by many, the writing is really good, and it’s captivating to follow the thoughts and actions of our main character.

5 James Joyce – Ulysses

Carmelo Bene once said that after this book no one should have written anything. Even if he was known to be a strange and controversial figure, he could be right in part. This book, that took the 28th place of Le Monde’s list, is usually considered the first stream of consciousness book. The new way of writing that does not let the rational take place, that lets the pen flow free on the paper, and the mind wanders without judgment broke the usual way of writing and even of being in the world. The books revolve around one single day, and not so many characters but I think it shows the way our minds work when not in a more rational position, our true view of reality without many rational or points of view, just the simple perception of our thoughts. The book is really difficult, different, and long to read, but it might be a great read to do once in one’s life.

Deism: Between Religion and Science

By ericmarschallworld

On 4 December 2021

In Essays

Être_suprême_Peuple_souverain_République_française

Science or religion?

Deism might be a great solution for the long-lasting debate between religion and science. On one hand, religion tells us that the answer to all lies in a God, that usually, if we at least consider the religions of the west, can interact with our world, with miracles, or in Christianity even by incarnating in a human.

Science, on the other hand, finds truths by empirical observation, by the use of experiments, maths, and everything that can be proven by other humans and experienced by everyone; contrary to the truth of religion that usually cannot be experienced by everyone.

We could say, even though that might be a simplistic distinction, that science is immanent, and religion is transcendent. Immanent means internal to the being, while transcendence means outside of the being. Being less philosophical we can say that the former means in this world, while the latter means from another world – usually superior.

I think that the concept of God, or simply as First Cause, won’t go away very soon, or it won’t even go away. God cannot be demonstrated nor undemonstrated. We can’t say anything about it because we don’t know what we are looking for. If we search for a First Cause we must assume there is one, or else we cannot be here now.

Thomas Aquinas said that we cannot know the essence – what makes a thing that thing – of God because it’s transcendent from our knowledge. But for Thomas, we could say if God exists, but there’s something subtle in his explanation.

The famous five theses for the existence of God all end with a formula that usually goes like this: and that’s what we call God. He was aware that believing in God was only faith, he only gave the logical argument for the existence of a Superior Existent.

In this way, we can say that something exists as a Superior or First Cause, but we don’t know its nature. So, what can science say against logical arguments like those of Thomas? I think nothing. As children, we all have thought about what came before that thing, and before that, and so on, ad infinitum. We must end somewhere, we are here, after all, we must be caused by something.

That First Thing is the cause of us all. And the nature of that thing is only given by faith. Faith is believing without proof. Does science have proof against the idea that there’s a cause for everything and that a first thing must have existed? No. So regarding this thing, science is a faith as religion.

Deism

Now that we have laid down this distinction we can start to talk about what deism is. It’s usually considered a form of religion, a rational religion that accepts the existent of a superior being, that we should not picture as a man with a beard, or someone who has some sort of consciousness but only as of the First cause of the universe and as something outside of our universe who had once organized it.

So what’s the best position to take rationally? Deism. The belief in Something that generated and ordered the laws of nature, something that’s not considered a man with a beard, something that does not interact with us, something we should not venerate, but a God to study. A God that has made the laws of nature, made matter, and so on.

The deist does not believe in the church or the Bible, is a religion that is possible only by reason. Logic tells us that there’s a cause for everything so there must be a cause even for us now. We see an order in the world, but the laws of nature are not created by nothing, because logically nothing creates nothing. Those simple thoughts simply follow logic, nothing more.

Deism is not something so strange or mystical. Many scientists, even in recent times, considered themselves to be deists, because thinking rationally, is the best position to take – all in my opinion. But again, faith is not something strange and everyone could give a different meaning to that First Cause.

Classics: Why Should You Read Them

By ericmarschallworld

On 2 December 2021

In Essays

Introduction

Let’s be honest: what’s the point of reading Crime and Punishment, In Search of Lost Time, or simply The Sorrows of Young Werther? Why can’t I read a book that has just come out fresh from publishing, perhaps with a good plot and interesting themes? So why the classics if I can still have a good read with a book released this year?

First of all, it is not very sensible to say not to read books that have come out now, if that were the case even Dostoevsky would not have had that little fame to be able to support himself. The question is another: why the classics? That’s all.

They are old books, often with difficult and distant languages, with different cultures, especially if an Englishman reads a book by Tolstoy, it will seem to him a different, strange, and perhaps even incomprehensible civilization. And that’s not the point. The point is to understand what these books have that made them so important, and why should we read them?

Why reading the classics?

I can still remember the first time I read The sorrows of young Werther. It’s a book from 1774, so around 250 years ago. There’s no doubt that Goethe is considered, and was even at his times, a genius. But apart from this, why is that book still so important for me?

I think it’s really simple, if we want to be somewhat shallow. Goethe was human as I am, as everyone who could read those books is – as far as we know nowadays. Some universal meanings can touch everyone’s heart. Why is Crime and punishment considered even a philosophical book? Because it carries with him a lot of concepts and problems of our nature that everyone finds familiar with.

Those books have survived the proof of time, they are still here, still read by many, and everyone in a way or another feels something when reading them. Many cannot explain what they feel, why they feel, it’s just that something clicks in their mind, and they recognize that there’s something in those words.

There’s something about us, not only about Goethe, Proust, Hesse, or even Dante, but something more human, and deep, that we can only express using literature. Is something we cannot say using maths, or science, I think is something that truly manifests how deep is our being, how strange it is, and how there’s something that cannot be expressed clearly, but only with stories, something that we can understand but not truly grasp.

Those books have some valuable concepts that even the authors could not explain if not by showing them in the characters or events of their novels. I don’t think that Goethe had the words to say what he was somewhat already knowing, something deep and unconscious that he could not explain if not by the means of Werther, if not by showing to other people that. People then could feel that, could understand that there was something, something that still attracts them nowadays, something that makes those books classics.

What to do if you want to read them?

Those books take a lot of time to read, not only because of their volume – we shouldn’t lie to ourselves, many of the classics are big books – but because of the density of the words. A line of Dostoevskij carries with it a lot of meanings, a lot of thoughts, it is set well within the novel, and it helps with the understanding of the characters and ourselves. A good make someone think reality, just as someone says that art should make you think.

Now, after all we have said, there’s a catch. What if someone is not prone to reading them. What if someone feels obliged to read Ulysses, well the answer is simple: he should not read them if it must be a burden.

With time I think everyone will grow the sensibility to grasp that something, or maybe some classics are not meant to be read in a particular moment by a particular time. Try to be open-minded, and to try some of them, you will feel repaid after.

5 Books for Romantic Souls

By ericmarschallworld

On 22 September 2021

In Book Advice

Romanticism is a cultural movement that develops during the mid-18th century but reaches its peak during the 19th.
It is based on the expression of emotions, a vision of existence based on infinity, on nature, on feelings, on beauty, in opposition to the old enlightenment and rationalist movements of previous centuries.
Some books embody this spirit, and here are 5 books that could make all the Romantic souls living in our time have a pleasant time.

The sorrows of young Werther
It goes without saying: it is the quintessence of romanticism. Goethe in his most famous novel, constructs the romantic, passionate character, a lover of fine arts, but with a tragic story and a rejection of his existential condition. The story is based on a few characters, but each one is characterized in its way with great depth, without forgetting that what most of all we will love and learn about is the young German Werther. The book is very short, about 100 pages, but each of them will leave you attached to the words of the text.

The betrothed
Let’s move from Germany and move on to 19th century Italy, still held by the Germans. In his most successful novel, Manzoni outlines the great story of two young people, Renzo and Lucia, who would like to get married. A young Spanish gentleman, Don Rodrigo, wants to prevent the wedding to marry Lucia himself following a bet. After the denial of the marriage, the two betrothed separate, traveling through the streets of seventeenth-century Milan, and in the peripheral areas of it. The book has about 700 pages, full of characters, each of which with different ideas and personalities, but above all, each character shows us an ideology, they all have a precise meaning and position in the novel. If you are ready to embark on a great Italian story then this is the right novel for you.

The flowers of evil
Now it’s up to France, with a book of poems. Baudelaire embodies the spirit of a Bohemian, and his most famous work does not take long to follow that vision of the world. Street poems with the theme of prostitutes, themes of alcohol, loneliness, the misunderstanding by others of the poet himself, and then move on to higher themes with a strong symbolic and evocative value of images that are just waiting to be understood by the reader. If you are looking for a romantic poetry book then you will appreciate these poems

On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Let’s move on to philosophy and go back to Germany. In this collection of letters, Schiller explains his ideal of a beautiful soul. A soul that is not only animal or mental but a complete soul, which can appreciate the beauty and which has completed a path of aesthetic education that resumes that of ancient Greece, even passing through play as a form of education itself. Although it is a philosophical book, the thought is easily accessible to anyone with an easy and pleasant style to read, without too many systems or complex ideas that would require extensive study before being understood. If you are looking for a non-fiction book to enter the world of romance, and which does not extend to many pages like the magnificent writings of Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, then it is for you.

Pride and prejudice
We conclude with England and with a female presence. Austin in his novel criticizes the whole patriarchal system of his England, without failing to criticize other aspects not strictly linked to the patriarchal ideal, but simply linked to the aristocracy of which he was a part. All told and shown through a love story that has fascinated millions and millions of young people and adults for years. The book has 400 pages, but they are pages worth reading in my opinion.

We conclude the list here, I hope that the books presented have been taken into consideration, as I believe that Romanticism is truly one of the most interesting and full of revolution periods in European history from 1000 to today.