Philosophy Weekend: A Message From Sappho

History has a way of turning complex philosophers into simple cliches. Through the course of my philosophical education, I've only ever heard of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as a target for refutation, a "straight man" from an earlier age of extreme rationalism, destined to be torn to shreds by the witty talents of Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, William James. With skillful opposition like this, Hegel's legacy of crystalline idealism never stood a chance.

It also did Hegel's legacy no favors when Karl Marx built his advanced theory of utopian Communist society upon a Hegelian framework, though Marx explicitly stated that he was doing so by transforming Hegel's abstract intellectualism into a materialist system of thought, aiming for real-world results rather than theoretical conclusions. It's does not seem that Marx's Communism was a faithful friend to Hegelian idealism (Hegel died when Marx was 13 years old, so Hegel never knew about his most influential follower) -- but it is clear that Marx ruined Hegel's name for legions of anti-Communists. Once a bright light of the German renaissance, Hegel has taken such a terrible beating from the empiricists, existentialists, pragmatists, free market economists and philosophical libertarians who followed him that his reputation can barely be said to have survived at all, except as a symbol of obsolescence.

What do you buy a morose Danish philosopher who invented Existentialism for his 200th birthday?

Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard's breakthrough Existentialist book about desire, love and marriage, 'Either-Or'.

Three quotes to illustrate the phrase "disturbances in the field".

From Plato's Republic to Sebastian Brant medieval satire to Katherine Anne Porter's bestselling novel, the idea that we are sailing on a ship of fools has intrigued many minds.

The image of the "Ship of Fools" has appeared in several books, a movie, and sixteen songs by artists like the Doors, Grateful Dead, John Cale, Robert Plant, Soul Asylum, Sarah Brightman, Bob Seger, the Scorpions, Echo and the Bunnymen ...

A few things that have caught my attention: Anomalies by Charlie Kaufman, Elvis Costello's memoir (and the story of his father), everything by Virginia Woolf.

Beverly Cleary's prose style was a model of simplicity and clarity, but contained wondrous existential and psychological depth: a boy who overdoses on bubble gum, the stream of consciousness of a dog, an 8-year-old girl with undiagnosed ADHD who scares herself inside a Halloween mask.

In the moving documentary Midsummer in Newtown, a production of a Shakespeare comedy starring local kids brings renewal to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Paul Bowles was born in New York City on December 30, 1910. He was an only child and exhibited early the existentialist's sense of alienation ...

Cor van den Heuvel surveys the Western side of the Haiku tradition.

Bill Ectric ponders his favorite book of the Bible.

The performer is no longer the object of the spectator, but rather her/his confessor. The spectator's emotional response should be induced by a confrontational, violent experience.

We live in a Gogol world. He may have died 150 years ago but his world is our world, a world of absurdities haunted by ghosts and government clerks, where people are victimized by committees and asylums, where rational insanities and irrational truths determine the course of lives ...

Reading is confrontation. At the end of a good book, you may decide to change your life, and a reader or writer is somebody for whom that possibility is always open. This is why a person who discovers a great work of literature (or music, or art, or any other form of creative expression) often appears for the moment like a crazed animal, twitching and mumbling, incomprehensible. Don't talk to this person -- give them time -- they are emerging from some cocoon right now, and you are an unwelcome witness ...