On Our Two Extremes in Literature

Regardless of age, sex, or background, we are more or less conscious of our contingent life. Shakespeare once made his famous Gloucester say as follows; "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport..." (King Lear, Act 4).

One extreme response to this uncertainty in the form of literature was verbalized in many ways as Romanticism in the 19th century. De Lisle Adam's (French writer, 1838-89) young Count Axel, for example, persuaded his beautiful runaway nun Sarah to kill themselves in denial about the stupidity of life in his age, claiming, "As for living, our servants can do that for us." The opposite extreme of this is found in Meursault's insensibility to the ultimate "indifference of the universe," who was fully characterized by Camus in his 1942 book, "L'Etranger" (in a sense the world neither cry nor wry at our death at all). Few people mull over death and we usually stay too blunted to perceive the uncolored indifference--war is a paradoxical exception.
Nonetheless, as Colin Wilson has mentioned in "The Outsider" in 1956, these extreme cases--a mental (and thus physical) suicide, or a halt of cognition and emotion--are both tragedies of our mentality, given that we may proceed a bit further from where we are now. Today we know both suffered from the unbalance of our mind and body that is segregated from more judicious regulation in society. We now face up to see that these are not a mentality we cannot overcome. We are not mental aliens. We can regulate ourselves in contact with our persistent behaviors and percipient environments, even though we still rack up these extremes. ao

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On Our Two Sexes

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) lived his life in 19th-century Germany. Although his thoughts and philosophy is very hard for us who lives in 21th-century Japan, and it is too dense to understand, recently I found an interesting verse delivered by Zarathustra (1885), "The happiness of man is, ' I will.' The happiness of woman is, ' He will'" (p. 1174 in Kinddle). This line has apparently been understood as a controversy of men's (or his) insolubility in women, which I do not like to participate here. In addition, the snap judgment of his would be subject to criticism from feminist theory and politicalization in many ways than one. Incidentally, however, there is no denial of interpreting this idea from the point of view of natural science. Male sex drives. The strength of man comes from his weakness, want . Further, men simply believe that hiding their weakness must lead to their own happines...

KARA'S TEAR REVIEWED Kara was an anomalistic artificial intelligence which emitted a desire to survive. Yet, in the real world (2019), nothing is evidenced whether the machines' feeling, as well as animals, is authentic. Having seen this exquisite short film (2012) again, my interest is not in ‘AIs’ that will sooner or later threat us but in the human who will no wonder do an impact exactly when the Wreck Havoc occurs. Men tend to think AIs with IC tips are a threat (like humanoids) because they will become wiser than us in the near future. Contrary, the more realistic tipping point might be in our brain (e.g., right temporoparietal junction, rTPJ): the human social skill, shortly, our fallacious compassion for AIs. How many people will soon become more compassionate being against the increasing ‘AIs,’ as of that in the censor in this short film? The truth is, Japan has already witnessed many such cases in elderly welfa...

CHANGE!

Kurt Lewin is a founder of dynamic collective power (group dynamics) operating on individual's subtly wavering behavior, mind, and life-space. His equation of behavior, B = ｆ (P, E), which was a hypothesis created by his thorough investigations, tells us that B (behavior) is nothing more or less than a function of the P (person) in their E (environment). This is a beginning of social psychology. A sincere reflection on empirical study was made by this evocative psychologist; “There is no theory without practice and no practice without theory.” However, the entire process of practicing and theory making might have never been fulfilled without his belief about people, i.e., they can CHANGE. ao

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