Philosophical Sketches

I see no God. I only see what I mean by ‘God’. My words never rigidly referred to anything. You may say that my perceptions are contaminated with human concepts. But such a view implies that there is the world out there my perception comes short of. Here is the better way of putting it. My perceptions were never contaminated; the idea of contamination is a blither. We simply have two names for the same thing, ‘perception’ and ‘expectation’. The separation of these two names arises only when one wants to enforce his perception on others. What one is after is not truth, not the ground of certainty, but validations, or submissions. O, beautiful Phosphorus, the morning star! You devised the language of semantics to hide your selfish motives, to blind (enlighten) my eyes. You tricked me into believing that the utterance of the word, ‘reference’, has a logical function. You gaslit me with the possibility of knowledge, of morality, and of the meaning of it all. You s...

Comedy is not as universal as tragedy is. It is not necessary for one to find humorous what another finds so. The taste of humor varies not just from one culture to another, but really from one individual to another. The same could of course be said of tragedy. But there are at least two reasons why humor is the more urgent topic. First, the discrepancy in humor (for different cultural, social, political, or religious backgrounds) is by and large much wider than that in sadness. It is harder to explain to someone from a different culture why something is comical than why it is tragic. Second, it is rather difficult to offend anyone by over-dramatizing anything. Often, if one does not know the social cue, pretending to be empathetic is the safe way to go. In contrast, one slightly offbeat joke is enough to offend everyone in the room and thereby instantly relegate the joker to the outcast status. Comedy is where the problem of diversity, tolerance, and understanding takes its starkest f...