Pointing Upwards

“Supposing the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves should moralize, what will be the common element in their moral estimates? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his situation.” - Nietzsche 

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O Death, In Poetic Prose

“Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on through life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge —here, the Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. ...

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The Contemporary Black Figure

“Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being.” — Ortega

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Toward a Positive Self-Concept: An Examination of Dynamics

What are the dimensions of ideologies founded on negative theories? Ideas that subjugate and denigrate. What depths would one go to create an inferiorized “other” to justify its unjustified superiority? As Terry Eagleton proposes, "Ideas are internally shaped by their social origins, their true value, or lack thereof, is not reducible to them." 

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Emerging from the Cave: Consciousness and Liberation

“And see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision—what will be his reply?”—Plato

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