fingertips ~

A man entered the room interrupting the class: ‘O master, your merchant ships sunk in the middle of the sea!’ The Master replied  ‘thank God’ . After a while, the same man came and said ‘they were someone else’s, not yours’ The master replied again ‘ thank God ’. His disciples curiously asked him the reason he replied both in the same manner. He said ‘Neither former news upset me nor the latter pleased. It was not my loss because the ships were in fact my Lord’s, not mine. There is no profit for me either, because they are still not mine. Therefore, I thank God for freeing my soul from which do not belong to me.’

Philosophy was long regarded as the sole method of thought that would explain phenomena, be it imaginary, concrete, celestial, or terrestrial. Aristotle was a biologist, if we look at his work from today's perspective. He was mainly interested in the species that scattered all over the places. His concern was to collect as many different animals and plants as possible, so that he would have been able to talk about them with greater certainty. However, he was also a strong advocate of categorization and in order to categorize what he had collected, he needed to contemplate on what to put in this or that category or on what makes two things different. This contemplation made him a philosopher, as we understand it today.

"Camus was only 46 when he died in an automobile accident. Ironically, he had once said that he could not imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident." From Understanding Philosophy, Joan A. Price

  In his chapter on Marx’s critique on capital, Dipesh Chakrabarti ( Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton 2000) tries to deal with the idea that provincialized Europe has a universal and overarching character. Marx criticized capital on two categories: the abstract human and the idea of history. As historicism assumes that capital arose in Europe out of the Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, it constitutes a unity both in time and space. For Chakrabarti, and Marx, the main reason behind this assumption is the need for a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity. This measurement will of course be designed to reduce diversity and human belongings into one category called ‘labor’. Abstract labor, therefore, is to destroy differences among workers. Abstract labor is abstracted from any empirical history, it is like a ghost. However, paradoxically, capital is in need of a human, concrete, labor in advance in order

Great Britain banned slavery in 1833 because laborers when motivated by salary were working harder than slaves who were motivated by punishment. It wasn't a coincidence that Britain's Industrial Revolution has started right after that time. Slavery wasn't profitable any more. In the same period, slaves living under Ottoman rule had rights as this: No owner can free a disabled slave as compensation for his (owner's) legal faults. The protection and survival of such a disabled slave was ensured that way.

The worst oppression is that of knowledge. I think, an expert who assumes he has right to direct you is the most cruel oppressor. If one speaks and gives 'advice' without concerning his audience, their needs and capacities, he actually tries to maintain his authority over them. Knowledge, in this sense, becomes a tool in hands of an expert for sucking all the nourishment from non-expert people. Look at those so-called possessors of knowledge. They are as if gods of the society. Any word coming from their mouths gains an authorization quickly. However, their words not always open locked doors, rather sometimes  lock the doors to people in order to keep their privileged position in the society. They consider themselves as ‘gatekeepers’ keeping lay people away from the source of knowledge. They are afraid of that once people get access to the sources, there would be no need for these so-called keepers of knowledge.

Samuel Huntington, the writer of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ article, imagines a disagreement between major cultures of the world. He suggests, for the future, a certain separation between civilizations that cannot be avoided. Through the centuries, a fault line between civilizations was created by the different views of God and man, the individual and the group, and so on. This line is also gradually growing because of the unbearable Western military, economic and cultural superiority to others. The line will not soon disappear because it is more fundamental than the separation created by political approaches.

A good piece of analysis on the emergence of European/Western identity: “The process by which people in the West came to define what made their own civilization distinctive among the civilizations of the world entailed drawing a series of sharp contrasts between what they noww began to see as Western and what they began to see as non-Western. These contrasts delienated those characteristics and virtues which Europeans were coming to see as unique to Western civilization, especially in its modern form, and which they thought accounted for its increasing power, wealth and knowledge. Conversely, it was other societies’ lack of these characteristics, these core values and traits, that made them weak and backward and that thus both facilitated and justified Western domination. In the course of defining who they were not and who their ‘others’ were, Europeans simultaneously defined and consolidated their own identity.” Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East

A general picture of Huntington's argument:   Great division among humankind will be cultural instead of ideological and primarily economic. Non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history. Civilization: Highest cultural grouping people, broadest level of cultural identity people that distinguishes humans from other species. Two major variants: European-North American Islam has its three subdivisions: Arab, Turkic and Malay. Civilizations differ from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and religion. Cultural identity turns into civilization consciousness. Why civilizations will crash?

Humans want to be sure about what they believe in, but those who give their will to another’s hands can never get rid of doubts. Doubts are infections in the heart and the heart needs a constant treatment of Faith conducted by reasoning. Humans are expected to clear up doubts in their hearts with sound arguments.