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Zohar Atkins Profile picture
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8 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I had fun using Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth to understand the story of Noah's ark.

Read on to discover what Elon Musk's SpaceX, @roddreher's Benedictine Option, and Foucault's "Critique" all have in common.

Tldr: Commitment > Optionality.

etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/time-to-land…
"Noah must leave the ark in much the same way that George Clooney’s character must stop flying in the film Up in the Air. The sea is pure optionality, a haven from the frustrations of actuality. But nothing happens at sea, and nothing endures in the air."
Noah from his ark, and George Clooney from his airplane, look down at us suckers, us “normies,” in our sclerotic smallness. But the sad joke is on them as they take themselves out of the human condition, thinking that they have made a life by becoming drop-outs.
"Whether one chooses the ark in the form of religious piety or political resistance or technological innovation or alternative living, the lesson of Noah is that we should not idealize the ark."

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More from @ZoharAtkins

Zohar Atkins Profile picture
8 Oct
IMO, Fukuyama is one of the greatest living thinkers of our time. He understood that profit maximizing alone would never satisfy us and that identity politics is inevitable—long before it was cool to talk about “identity”
The End of History makes clear in non technical terminology why Hegel and not Locke is the only route to securing liberal democracy. Nobody said it was easy.
His agonistic view of politics as being about “recognition” is spot on, and is embraced on both right and left.
Read 15 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
7 Oct
I agree with Antonio that creed is less important in Judaism than Christianity. I disagree that Christianity is about happy endings.

The power of the Incarnation imo is that God shares in human suffering.

Jewish theology shares in this idea without making God a literal human.
In addressing the problem of the Holocaust, Hans Jonas imagines not a God who is responsible for it, but a God who is witness to it, a God who "goes into exile with God's people."
This said, I think one conflict between Judaism and Christianity has to do with the role each assigns to philosophy. The Torah is fundamentally narrative. Philosophy is fundamentally about abstract concepts.
Read 6 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
7 Oct
The Talmud (Gittin 56b) teaches that the Emperor Titus died from a gnat that flew into his ear and grew into the size of a pigeon. Thread.
1/7
What's remarkable about the story is that it repeats the trope of the Trojan horse, but on the nano-level.
2/7
While you can read the story in physicalist terms with the gnat as a a kind of migraine or tumor, you can also read it in contemporary terms as a "psy-op" or "brain-worm." That is, Titus died from ideational/ ideological corruption.
3/7
Read 7 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
1 Oct
One of my many contrarian takes on Peter Thiel's Zero to One is that it's a work of theology, first, and not a work of business advice. Being a successful business founder is besides the point.

Here, I use Thiel to read the Cain and Abel story:

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/peter-thiel-…
"At a strategic level, Cain and Abel are both condemned, so long as they are competing for divine love on the same axis. One is condemned to death, the other to murder."
"In God’s cryptic admonition to Cain, I hear a call for Cain not to compete, a call to walk away from the tournament for divine affection. It is a test that Cain fails, but one that we can hope, reading his cautionary tale, to pass in our own lives."
Read 5 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
26 Sep
Time for a @threadapalooza on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), philosopher, classicist, and leading thinker of hermeneutics, AKA "the understanding of understanding." Gadamer was a moderate postmodernist who thought life was an unfinished conversation with ourselves and others.
Gadamer's main work, Truth and Method, is devoted to showing that our experience of art is not one experience amongst others, but paradigmatic of all acts of interpretation. 2
Scientific enquiry can never be totally objective, because at its core, science is mediated by language, conversation between people. 3
Read 99 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
24 Sep
Agreed. The question is how you can derive responsibility from a metaphysics that sees the individual as an illusion, the self as a fiction or an emergent property.
As I see it, there are two paths. One is to double down on individualist metaphysics and say there really is an essential self out there, an individual soul, without which Lockeian right to property would make no sense. The other path is the pragmatic one.
In the pragmatic one, individuality and freedom are useful but false or at least unprovable beliefs. I see utilitarianism as a species of pragmatism. Don't focus on questions of essence, just maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
Read 7 tweets

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