"This place makes me wonder," he asks, "which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?"
-Leonardo DiCaprio's Character in Shutter Island
It reminds me of Primo Levi's experience during the Holocaust when he said many of the good died quickly in the camps but the ones who were harder and more beast like lived and survived. A hard truth it is to think that the more honorable human is not the consistent survivor in life but rather the trivial and tedious human. The one Kierkegaard calls "Philistine".
"He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Samuel Johnson
Only by forgetting… can one live –Nietzsche
Religion not only was necessary for the human animal for its explanatory power but also for its power to suppress existential anxiety. To be smug about reality.
Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they "constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real."
"It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair."
-Kierkegaard
-Leonardo DiCaprio's Character in Shutter Island
It reminds me of Primo Levi's experience during the Holocaust when he said many of the good died quickly in the camps but the ones who were harder and more beast like lived and survived. A hard truth it is to think that the more honorable human is not the consistent survivor in life but rather the trivial and tedious human. The one Kierkegaard calls "Philistine".
"He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Samuel Johnson
Only by forgetting… can one live –Nietzsche
Religion not only was necessary for the human animal for its explanatory power but also for its power to suppress existential anxiety. To be smug about reality.
Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they "constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real."
"It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair."
-Kierkegaard
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