検索キーワード： 著者 "Boris Kriger" すべてのカテゴリー

Teddybearness is a system of values, ideas, and actions, based on a gentle and benevolent attitude towards everything and everyone, the absence of all anger, hatred, envy, and hostility. Teddybearness ignores the insolubility of the problems of this world and is aimed at creating maximum comfort “here and now”.

Everyone knows Tolstoy. Everyone has heard of Dostoevsky. But the writer without whom neither of them would exist as we know them—the man who single-handedly invented the Russian novel, pioneered literary absurdism eighty years before Kafka, and died at forty-two after burning his own masterpiece—remains, for most English-speaking readers, little more than a name attached to a strange story about a missing nose.

For two and a half centuries a small confession by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing has sat quietly at the edge of Western thought. He looked across the gap between the accidents of history and the necessities of reason, and admitted he could not leap it, however earnestly he tried. He called it a broad, ugly ditch, and he asked for help crossing it. No one came. This book takes the ditch seriously and then does something Lessing did not dare. It refuses the two easy answers our age keeps offering —that the far bank is solid and knowable, or that nothing is real and everything is permitted.

Leo Tolstoy is usually remembered as one man with one greatness, either the novelist who wrote the largest book in the world or the moralist who tried to live by the Sermon on the Mount and refused all comfort. Both portraits leave something out. They leave out the third Tolstoy, the one who walked behind a plough at sixty, who quarrelled with his wife about the price of boots, who wrote to a tsar and to a peasant in the same week, who at eighty-two left his own house at night and died on a railway platform without telling anyone where he was going.

We picture tyranny as a fist, a wall, a man with a weapon. Michel Foucault spent his life showing us that the most complete control wears no uniform at all. It arrives as a schedule rather than a chain, as a recommendation rather than an order, as a kindly figure in a white coat rather than an executioner. It enters the mind in childhood, through the schoolroom and the clinic and the well-meant advice of those who love us, until the watchman who once stood in the corridor has quietly moved inside, where he no longer needs to shout.

The emergency was supposed to be temporary. That was the whole idea of it. Something terrible happens, the ordinary rules are set aside for a while, and then the rules come back. Somewhere along the way the second half of that sentence quietly stopped happening. Giorgio Agamben has spent thirty years arguing that this is not a malfunction of modern government but its operating principle — that the exception has become the rule, that the camp rather than the city is the true model of our political space, and that power exists to strip human beings down to the bare fact of being alive.

Some films refuse you everything. They withhold explanation. They dwell on rain and rust and silent faces. They impose a length that feels, for the first twenty minutes, like an insult. And then they move into you and stay for the rest of your life. Meanwhile the film that gave you everything is forgotten by the time you reach the parking lot. This book begins with that puzzle, and it does not stay with cinema for long.

Some words are born in laboratories and die in footnotes. A rare few escape, slip into ordinary speech, and take on a life their makers never intended. “Passionarity” is one of these escapees—a strange, electric word coined by the Russian historian Lev Gumilev to explain why peoples suddenly blaze into history, conquer, build, overreach, and burn out. He meant it as science. It became something stranger: a myth, a mirror, a political slogan, and a way of feeling time. This book tells the biography of that idea.

Most people, when they hear the word anarchy, picture a window being broken. This is unfortunate, because the word was meant to describe something quite different—a society without rulers, not a society without order. The two are easily confused only by those who suspect, in their hearts, that without a uniformed person standing nearby they would immediately bite their neighbor. Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince who renounced his title and most of the comforts that came with it, devoted his life to a stranger proposition.

What if God has a character, and that character is tragic? This is the question at the heart of Nikolai Berdyaev's strangest and most unforgettable idea—that the Creator is not a calm watchmaker, not an impassive intelligence behind the world, but a personality marked by struggle, freedom, and a wound that runs through divinity itself. Tragic God: Berdyaev and the Abyss takes that idea seriously and follows it where it leads. This is not a portrait of a philosopher.

In the winter of 1437, on a ship crawling home from Constantinople, a German churchman was struck by an idea so strange that he spent the rest of his life defending it: the highest form of knowledge is knowing, with precision, what you cannot know. His name was Nicholas of Cusa, and he was, by turns, a boatman's son, a lawyer, a cardinal, a mathematician, a failed reformer, an accused heretic, and quite possibly the most modern mind of the fifteenth century. Five hundred years before relativity, he argued that the universe has no center and that all motion is relative.

What if Hinduism is not merely a religion in the modern Western sense, but also the preservation of one of humanity's oldest and most sophisticated explorations of consciousness, reality, and the structure of existence? What if the Upanishads are not only sacred texts, but fragments of a profound philosophical architecture whose depth continues to unfold across centuries of interpretation? What if yoga, beyond its contemporary forms, originally emerged as a disciplined method for transforming perception and investigating the nature of mind itself?

The human being is the only creature that does not merely live in the world but reads it. We wake into a flood of signs — words, faces, memories, headlines, silences — and we cannot help turning each one into meaning. This is not a hobby of scholars. It is the condition of being human, and it reaches from the way the brain assembles a sunrise to the way a civilization argues about its past.

A proton has not changed since the universe was a second old. A knot tied in a loop of string cannot be undone without cutting. A star burns steadily for ten billion years, and then, in its final hour, snaps into one of exactly three possible afterlives. Across the whole night sky, galaxies hang in a single vast web that looks the same in every direction. We are used to explaining each of these marvels with its own private science, in its own private dialect.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a brilliant and gentle Frenchman sat down to do the modern world an enormous favor. He would explain Jesus. He would strip away the miracles, the resurrection, the alarming claim of divinity, and hand back a figure everyone could finally admire without embarrassment: a tender Galilean moralist, a poet of the hills, a man. The book was a sensation. It was also, this book argues, a catastrophe of comprehension—and not a unique one.

Mikhail Bakunin was the most incandescent revolutionary of the nineteenth century: a Russian aristocrat who traded his estate for the barricade, a veteran of three uprisings, a prisoner of three empires, the rival who nearly broke Karl Marx, and the trusting soul whom the young fanatic Nechayev played like an instrument. He gave anarchism its most famous sentence—that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge—and he believed, with his whole enormous heart, that freedom was something you seized by tearing the old world down.

Somewhere in the popular imagination there lives a tidy little robot called The Scientific Method. It wears a lab coat, it never guesses, it never sulks, and it grinds out truth by turning a logical crank. Paul Feyerabend spent his life arguing that this robot is a fairy tale—and that the real story of how we come to know things is far stranger, far messier, and far more human than anyone wants to admit.

Every serious argument quietly chooses a reality. It chooses what counts as true, what exists for the purpose of the claim, and which moves of reasoning are allowed. Most of the time this choice remains unspoken, hidden behind familiar language and shared habits. The result is a persistent illusion of neutrality—an illusion that fuels endless disputes in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, not because the world is obscure, but because the rules of speaking about it remain concealed. The Choice of Realities dismantles this illusion.

One Thursday in June of 1904, a middle-aged advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom walked around Dublin. He bought a kidney for breakfast, fed the cat, attended a funeral, ate a cheese sandwich, dodged a man he did not wish to meet, and came home in the small hours to a wife who had not, that particular afternoon, been entirely faithful. Almost nothing happened. James Joyce spent seven years and seven hundred pages on it, and called the result his damned monster-novel. Why would anyone do that?

For two centuries, utilitarianism has promised a simple formula for a better world: the greatest good for the greatest number. It has shaped laws, governments, and the way we think about justice. But baked into its elegant arithmetic is a troubling possibility — that some people are simply rounding errors in the sum of human happiness.