The most pernicious sort of otherizing is feigning respect for cultural difference to justify the other’s practices of violence, oppression, and injustice — in short, this is an imposition of this new age of particularized politics.
The one who does not have the ability to be cognizant of the strictures imposed on their thought by their own epistemology is not to be trusted, and it must be said that it is possible to have such an awareness even if one is unable to, due to a paucity of intellectual tools and historical contingency, rectify those limitations.
The usurpers of the holy cities will cower under the fury of the Lord — false kings.
Religion is not the property of any authority but the properly individuated man.
Establishing new precedents on reasonable, ethical, and well-considered premises is a thoroughly divine act.
Shostakovich could only be happy in a wistful way: Piano Concerto No. 2.
Disagreement is the pillar of any healthy society.
To follow a positive commandment without any sense of the ethical ethos underneath is intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
Fundamentally unserious people destroy beauty.
If a statement or action is fully disambiguated down to its principal premises and motivations, one can reasonably answer the question of whether the Lord would be pleased with such a statement or action. Hence, legality or social appropriateness does not automatically equate to a moral good; inner and subjective dimensions of any human activity are always fully open to divine adjudication.
If a dispute is to be resolved by means of law, the overall moral conditions, the webs of collective good-faith, have already been sufficiently degraded to not be viable.
The Quranic structure lends itself to a new ethical theory more suitable for the era of techno-politics — to develop such a theory would require the delicacy of a master painter — a cause yet to be pursued in full.
Unbridled scientism in matters of historical inquiry is fatal — it treats the terrain of space-time as angular objects rather than textured topography.
One may not believe it but often the weak, too, become supremacists to compensate for their deficiencies — this streak of authoritarianism precludes any genuine possibility of the creative unfolding of one’s divine potentiality.
I have seen the holy rainbow over the squared desert and there remains no need to return.
Religion is not often corrupted by accretions of history, for there is divine effervescence in all epochs, but it is often deracinated by an agentive overzealousness.
The only authenticity in matters of faith and policy is that which reduces harm and suffering, even at great personal cost.
Once so little of one’s life remains, there is no desire or longing for anything but the promise of non-existence.
There is very little tension in Mendelssohn — divinely dulcet.
The degradation of the Muslim was nothing but the natural design of the divine that enabled the agentive malfunctioning of self-determination and an inability to clearly understand the nature of time and its relation to universal existence.
Omnibus perpensis, justice is the only true variable.
People wish to discard the very concept of rights due to the “hypocrisy” of dominant powers that abuse such notions; that is one efficient way to barbarize the self by letting a contingent conception of rights distract one from genuinely partaking in the creative activity of working within a framework of the universal archetypes of rights.
Music was thoroughly divinized by the European masters.
To pass off issues of practical consequence such as sovereignty to God, as a hermeneutically sealed ether, is a crime against the divine reason in man.
Coercion has no legitimate normative orientation in the epistemic conditions of modernity.
Most conundrums, anxieties, and problems reduce in their cognitive severity if one is able to live comfortably in indeterminacy.
People sneer at functional purposes and definitions of phenomena without pausing to contemplate the ironic fact that functionality serves a function.
One would be mistaken to think that some syntactical arrangement of words that is loosely defined as “prayer” is a metaphysical genie — prayer is an experience, not a construction.
Time compression is the result of sense and intellect being compresent without being interpenetrated, so much so that there is no perceptible difference between the two.
Death is a great blissful release of the soul.
It is wise to tie one’s sense of joy to one’s sense of one’s own expanding and contracting agency over external goods: objects and states.
Speak to the sky in propria persona, and then there might be the possibility of losing self-awareness.
The Devil calls one towards the perception of privation, whilst the good Lord calls towards the perception of satiety.
Mr. Erland Cooper is a proper modern master, who understands when the division between the inside and outside needs to be collapsed.
In this post-cosmological world, very little exists outside the self and its limited connections with certain other humans, certain visible aspects of the state, and the broader technological world; in such a world, there is little sense of the charm of existence itself.
There is little to no possibility of engaging in what is often described as “to observe or study people or societies on their own terms,” however much one tries to do so on the premise of some naive sense of restoring agency, for once one has decided to enter into a participatory relationship with an object of study or examination, one has entered into a wholly new epistemological realm, whose rules are decided not by the subject or the object but by an incalculable number of variables, hidden or visible, that elude any sense of righteous and moral positioning; certainly, if one refuses any sort of analytical objective and only retells an existing position, then there is no harm in making such prophylactic statements, but then such a statement is meaningless to begin with as it a priori assumes the existence of subjective impurities. At the other spectrum of this is are the old-school, certainly unfashionable, and also decidedly cavalier attitudes of certain people who massacre their object of study through such forceful impositions of epistemologically incompatible modes of analysis on their objects of study that there is often nothing of value left in the aftermath; for instance, if one takes the number one as a quality and another takes it as a quantity, no amount of painstaking work is going to bring about any sense of congruence.
A new form of cultural imperialism is the glorification of particulars as a means to understand the weak Other, in want of rescue, in need of the shared civilization of goodness — and what does the Other do? The Other praises universals as if it were 1457; the Other wishes to be essentialized, despite the sociological reality of complex differentiation, but the agents of this new cultural imperialism cannot even distinguish between fact and aspiration — this new imperialism seeks to “understand” the Other, whilst the Other has little interest in being understood — as long as the Other cannot lay claim to universals, there can be no “mutual understanding.”
In one there is the One.
Sometimes, modern people wish to be so reasonable that all speech is nothing but apophasis — there is nothing there.
A skeptic is wise until he is not.
One who cannot universalize is not autonomous — he is thoroughly impotent — of course, the quality of universalizing is another matter altogether.
The constitution competes with the scripture in a race towards the sacred.
Tautology is disgraced as a mode of practical reason until one realizes how prevalent it is.
The nineteenth-century reassertion of the man was, in some way at least, the consequence of the accumulative suffocation of collective history — that is, if the spread of time is viewed exclusively as an organic, life-giving force emanating forwards.
Twist it, turn it, twist it — a sudden swerving, left and right, wash it all by hand, out shall come the pearls fit for a new age — con fuoco.
If one is employed in a vocation that is by definition premised on the function of analysis, then often its practitioners will forgo common-sense explanations for extravagant and convoluted answers.
One should not lament about things such as the sovereignty of God while the sewage is leaking out onto the streets — in any case, the new forms of technological sovereignties, in their textured layers, would be invisible to these sorts even if one were to gesture at them with a pointy finger — the emergence of new technical geographies demands a radical rethinking of the epistemological resources at hand to reconceptualize fundamental categories in light of such shifting terrains.