Om Vents Graciously

Welcome to a new philosophical exploration! This series will be diving into a bit of modern social philosophy. More specifically, we will be covering the idea of "nudges", which are a political device of sorts that gained massive popularity as one of the biggest-scale transplants of philosophy into politics of all time. It's creators, Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, acted as advisors to Obama during his presidency, and many of the public policies in his campaign were shaped using nudges. In this article, I will introduce the parent philosophy of nudges, something called "libertarian paternalism", along with what nudges roughly are, and the main moral motivation behind them. In the following parts, we will go beyond their original philosophy, looking at the debates and the critiques that followed their work, as well as existing problems and ideas to make a better political philosophy using them. 1. Introduction:  Paternalism...

"Ode to A Pink Glove" The world seemed boring and empty to me until I found a pink glove  stuck on a tree. I was puzzled, then angry, 'Cause it was so dumb, a spot on a tree that sticks out like a thumb. I wanted to walk, but my brain had no luck, It's like its pink finger was making a "fuck". Though not just to me, but a "fuck" to the world, To Life, the Universe, its finger unfurled, "I do not belong, but I sit on this tree, I know not for long, but now, I feel free." I stared at the glove, it flopped in the wind, Industrial junk sat atop like a king, Or a castle  that's built on a mountain so tall, The pink hand of God crowning over us all. But the hand is long gone. What remains is the glove. It's staining and rotting and covered in bugs. I hope that the glove, in it's death, found it's truth Maybe, one day, I pray I will too.  But in that moment, I thought to keep walking. The fact that I stood there that long is just...

The following is the final part of my mini-series reviewing Kafka's short stories in relation to Arendt's Human Condition. I sincerely hope you enjoyed my analyses of The Metamorphosis  and The Hunger Artist ! Please do read the first part that strictly discusses Arendt's main concepts of the "active life" and how humanity has grown up to essentially spit in its face. With that being said, let's move on to the last story left to discuss, in which I will bring up the quintessential concept defined after Kafka - the mysterious and absurdist Kafkaesque. 3. An Imperial Message & The Kafkaesque: There is no doubt that Kafka’s greatest skill was to create black humor out of characters that despair at the hands of unjust political loopholes inspired largely from the real-world loopholes he observed in the age of early modernism. With rigid and authoritarian administration taking over most facets of life, the essence of that facet or work is ultimately drained in...

The following supplements my philosophical mapping between Arendt's Human Condition  and Kafka's short stories. So far, we have summarized the relevant parts of Arendt's main concepts about the modern corruption of human effort with some socialism theories, and also looked at Kafka's most well-known story, Metamorphosis. Read Part I and Part II if you'd like!   In this article, we will review another one of his stories, The Hunger Artist , which, in my opinion, offers an even more moving portrayal of Arendt's grandiose mocking of changing societal mechanisms. 2. The Hunger Artist: The artistic perspective has seen one of its greatest-ever portrayals through the paradoxical parable of Kafka’s "The Hunger Artist". Amalgamating two polarizing ideas to Arendt – the subsistence of labor and the worldly transcendence of art – Kafka manages to expose fundamental flaws in modern society’s work mentality. This story shows Arendt’s idea of work in a very twist...