Circus Philosophy

Yet soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life. Here, in the thin earthy boundary between inanimate rock and the planet’s green carpet, lifeless minerals are weathered from stones or decomposed from organic debris. Plants and microscopic animals eat these dead particles and recast them as living matter. In the soil, matter recrosses the boundary between living and dead; and, as we have seen, boundaries-edges-are where the most interesting and important events occur.

—Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (via fuckyeahpermaculture)

(Source: sleikas, via fuckyeahpermaculture)

Naturally, every philosopher thinks that his or her work is completely new. That’s only human. And many historians of philosophy have introduced absolute ruptures. for instance, after Kant, classical metaphysics was said to be impossible. Or, after Wittgenstein, it was no longer possible to forget that the study of language is the core of philosophy. So we have a rationalist turn, a critical turn, a linguistic turn…But in fact, nothing in philosophy is irreversible. There is no absolute turn. Many philosophers can find today, in Plato or in Leibniz, some points which are for them more interesting, more active than similar points in Heidegger or Wittgenstein. It is because their own matrix is largely identical to that of Plato or Leibniz. The fact that philosophy is largely a repetition of its own act clarifies the immanent affinities between philosophers. Deleuze with Leibniz and Spinoza; Sartre with Descartes and Hegel; Slavoj Žižek with Kant and Schelling…And maybe, for almost three thousand years, everybody with everybody.

—Alain Badiou, Philosophy as Creative Repetition (via adumbrations)

(Source: autochthones)

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (via shedsumlight)

(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson (via shetakesflight)

(via dichotomydestroyingparty)