Darshana & Itihasa: The Civilizational Gaze

The statements which express moral, political, and aesthetic ideals are neither subjective nor objective. They are normative.  The subjectiv...

In his line, “The past is not dead. It's not even past,” William Faulkner is referring to the paradox of time. We live in the past, the ...

An exchange between Humphrey van Weyden and Wolf Larsen, in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf :  "But history tells of slaves who rose to ...

The fate of modernity is like the fate of Oedipus; it has been left to die of neglect at the mountainside on the orders of its Western fathe...

There are two kinds of men: the masses and the elites. The masses use their senses, instinct, habits, wisdom, and their sense of morality an...

“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictio...

While communism is the movement of people with an empty belly (the starving masses), libertarianism is a movement of people with a full bell...

“Modern philosophy has not yielded any remotely acceptable picture of man. The thinkers of the Enlightenment showed too little understanding...

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”—an Ancient Greek saying. The Gods do something similar to the superpowers that th...

History is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy because it tells you about the fragility of civilizations, and it is terrible because it give...

In his book Witness , Whittaker Chambers talks of “this sick society, which we call Western civilization,” locked in a deadly struggle betwe...

In a 1954 letter to Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr. expressed the hope that National Review would play a role in stopping the co...

Machiavelli sees history as cyclical returns, a succession of ups and downs. In The Discourses , he notes that customs and laws are necessar...

The utopian mentality is devoid of historical consciousness; it views the past as evil and oppressive and does not believe in stage by stage...

What if there is an Orwellian climax to the totalitarian turn that the world has taken in the year 2020? What if instead of fighting back to...

Nietzsche was filled with doubts about the future of civilization. In The Anti-Christ , he writes: “Mankind does not represent a development...

In Volume Six of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Edward Gibbon contemplates the possibility of barbarians from the...

Hobbes was horrified by the idea of life in the state of nature. He depicts the state of nature as an environment in which there is no prope...

The question that the philosophers have been trying to answer for several millennia is: What is man? The scientific definitions of man can b...

In his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy , Karl Marx writes, “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for ...

Religion is the philosophy of the masses, while philosophy is the religion of the intellectuals. This argument is made by Schopenhauer in hi...

A 206-word sentence by René Descartes:  “Notwithstanding this, I am in no degree desirous to lessen the honor which each of them can justly ...

Why are pop philosophers popular with the young but are discarded by the older folks? The answer is that when the young read such philosophe...

Ludwig Feuerbach’s assertion, “Man is what he eats,” has been interpreted in various ways. The vapid interpretation is that Feuerbach is ass...

Tolstoy has said that in his boyhood days, he was fascinated by skepticism to such an extent that his mind took flights of solipsism. Here’s...

All things have a quality and a quantity—there cannot be a quality without a quantity, and a quantity without a quality. This means that the...

We live in the age of totalitarian social hypocrisy. The masses are coerced to practice certain virtues, but those who preach these virtues ...

Donald Trump is an unarmed prophet. He is popular, it seems. But he does not have the backing of the American elite class, who know how to d...

Most people accept the banal notion that in a democracy political power comes through numbers. They naively believe that the politician who ...

“There are two ways of fighting: by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts. But as the first way often p...

In his Prison Notebooks , the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci calls Machiavelli the “precocious Jacobin” in whose work, The Prince...

Mathematics is fascist because it does not accept the ruses of dialectics. It is unacceptable that for every equation, mathematics gives the...

The decline of a civilization comes as a surprise to the political, intellectual, and financial elite who are thriving in that civilization—...

“What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that it is familiar.” ~ Hegel.  To Hegel’s statement, the old proverb “...

Rejecting the claims of the British utilitarians, Nietzsche said, “Man does not seek happiness; only the Englishman does that.” Nietzsche’s ...

When a civilization is facing a great crisis, two types of personalities have to take initiative—the warriors (the politicians or men of act...

Hegel philosophically confronts the problem of prefaces in the Preface to his book The Phenomenology of Spirit . The preface, Hegel posits, ...

Like the insects which throw themselves into fire because they are mesmerized by light and heat, the Western liberals are throwing their nat...

In  Ecce Homo , Nietzsche contemplates the paradox at the heart of his Zarathustra: “The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is...

The multinationals are not private companies; they are “quasi-private” companies. They symbolize political power—they are part of the global...

The five objectives that Stephen C. Pepper tries to achieve in his book World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence :  1. He rejects skepticism an...

“The death of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War mark the moment when the men of thought and the men of action began to take different paths...

In The Laws, Plato invokes the figure of Zeus Herkeios—the guardian of the household and the protector of thresholds—not merely as a domesti...

Politicians and their crony intellectuals have been trying to reset humanity for ages. But every attempt leads to an outcome different from ...

In the prologue to her book The Human Condition , Hannah Arendt notes that speech is what makes man a political being, but the sciences use ...

The chicken and egg oscillation cannot be overcome. We will never be certain whether the rule comes first or the event. The rules of moralit...

Heidegger begins his book Being and Time by talking about the historical interpretation of the way “we in our time” have become disoriented...

The political heritage of the Enlightenment is utopian, for it was built upon three abstractions that were less concepts than illusions: uni...

Modern politics is a civil war. In good societies, the civil war does not get too violent; in bad societies, it is too violent. Those who fa...