I wrote about the history of clouds!
"From Aristophanes to Amazon Web Services, from Wordsworth to Snowflake, from cloud worship to cloud computing, the Western mind sees God’s dignity in distance and abstraction."
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Zohar Atkins
@ZoharAtkins
Rabbi. Thinker. Poet.
Podcast: Meditations with Zohar
Torah @ Etzhasadeh.substack.com
Philosophy @ Whatiscalledthinking.substack.com
Zohar Atkins’s Tweets
Great thread arguing that the serpent thinks humans are just beasts and tries to bring us down a peg. Another tragic possibility is the serpent wants to be a human, but can’t. The snake is clever yet ruled by passion. He could have been great, but for his self-destructive envy.
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The aesthetic critique of atheism — that it’s cringe — is ironically quite Nietzschean.
Meanwhile the belief that the truth itself is cringe and the insistence that we embrace it anyways is quite Schopenhauerian.
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my best investments to date have been in founders that are sincerely religious
building anything new relies on believing in the transcendence of ideas.
atheism, in addition to being cringe, is essentially a flat refusal that ideas can be powerful enough to change the world.
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Hegel's philosophy of history is the concept of Hysterisis in Physics, but applied to culture.
You can't be in the Zeitgeist and grasp the Zeitgeist at the same time.
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Over-generalizing is an error in judgment that visits the righteous and the wicked alike.
It knows no demographic distinctions, no tribal loyalties.
It is an ambient condition visited on all thinking beings, an externality of eating from the tree of knowledge.
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The GPT Prayer:
Lord, give me the intelligence to automate the things I can automate, the serenity to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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The GPT Prayer:
Lord, give me the intelligence to automate the things I can automate, the serenity to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Elias Canetti says in Crowds and Power that Judaism is a locked Twitter account and Christianity is an unlocked one.
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What is modernity and when did it begin? Will it end? What's next? Why has "theory," which started with Plato, culminated in QAnon? I discuss this and more with Jay Tolson, editor of the wonderful Hedgehog Review.
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Are philosophers normal? I go back and forth on this, as does the history of philosophy itself, but conclude that they (we) are not, and that that's OK.
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Are philosophers normal? I go back and forth on this, as does the history of philosophy itself, but conclude that they (we) are not, and that that's OK.
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Language is a labyrinth, Being the thread that guides us through it.
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Philosophy is the study of questions we don’t know how to ask.
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Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin & others describe philosophy as "the study of questions we don't know how to answer."
I'd modify that slightly to: "the study of questions we BOTH don't know how to answer AND (falsely) believe we've already answered (or don't need to)."
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PloughCast📢 talks with , a rabbi and philosopher, about vows in Nietzsche, in other philosophers, and in the Jewish theological tradition.
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From the depths, Job cried out, “How can you let bad things happen to good people?” Out of the whirlwind, Charlie Munger answered, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.”
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From the depths, Job cried out, “How can you let bad things happen to good people?” Out of the whirlwind, Charlie Munger answered, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.”
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More than the soul needs to down-manage the ego, the ego needs to up-manage the soul.
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A sense of achievement is a great first step to a sense of meaning which is a great first step to a sense of transcendence which is a great first step to a sense of achievement.
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The dialectic between haste and therapeutic leisure has been codified by Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. In Kahneman’s terms, the people need type 1 thinking to leave Egypt and type 2 thinking to conduct a seder.
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There are actually two Exodus stories, one involving haste and one involving leisure. Avivah Zornberg, Rav Hutner, and Daniel Kahneman help us understand.
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Heidegger for Execs:
Ontological is blue ocean
Ontic is red ocean
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Misread Keynes as Kanye.
Gonna start referring to him as Yne.
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I have a theory that when the cost of capital goes to zero, pride in not reading books goes to the moon.
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The God of philosophy needs definition.
The God of poetry needs a name.
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On the transformative power of language.
An essay in honor of Daf Yomi’s completion of Tractate Nedarim.
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Overheard in Silicon Valley: Meditation is like conducting a 360 where you are the organization.
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"Some books cannot be taken by direct assault; they must be taken like Jericho."
Ortega y Gasset
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My main critique of ad hominem argument is that the guy who invented it was a jerk.
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A fragment means:
Heraclitus: All is flux
Pascal: Only God knows
Nietzsche: That's just your perspective, man
Hölderlin: Isn't it ironic?
Kabbalah: The world is in exile
Schelling: FREDOM!
Levinas: We are responsible
Whatsapp: Quotable Content
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Ironically, the philosopher who foresaw climate change is Heidegger, and the philosopher who foresaw birth dearth is Arendt.
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My Sunday column: Five Rules for an Aging World:
nytimes.com/2023/01/21/opi
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The history of Western Theopolitics in two quotations:
“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
“Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended to God.” (Lessing)
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My main critique of ad hominem argument is that the guy who invented it was a jerk.
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"Cleverness without moral virtue is knavery."
~ Leon Kass, in podcast "The Tame of the Shrewd" with
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One of my favourite songs is we didn't start the fire, by billy joel. I've always wanted there to be a version updated for the last 3 decades. So I wrote one.
Enjoy!
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Thanks to for a wild conversation, ranging from self-help to podcasts and the conditions of ethical knowledge
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“God reveals Godself to us through poetry and the essence of poetry is naming—finding words that don’t simply describe or point, but bring to life, finding words that don’t simply refer to a referent, but awaken a relationship.” Great stuff as usual.
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Exodus is about the saving power of poetry.
etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/the-redempti
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Exodus is about the saving power of poetry.
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Great episode of Meditations with interviewing about his new book Life is Hard, public philosophy, the academy, and ’s Sexy/Bureaucrat personas.
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