Bert Olivier

There are, indeed, many ways of addressing the issue of human happiness, and even in the work of one particular thinker one encounters more than one set of concepts to do so. In my previous posting, I looked at Martin Heidegger’s notion of the existential structure of being-human (thrownness, projection and falling) in relation to […]

My previous posting elicited a number of responses that, directly or indirectly, questioned the meaning of human happiness and fulfilment. At the outset of a discussion of these one has to admit, as the song goes, that “happiness is … different things to different people”, but far from resolving the issue via an affirmation of […]

A number of recent events in the United Kingdom, as well as the United States of America, seem to suggest that a generally high level of material prosperity does not necessarily go hand in hand with human happiness, but, more disturbingly, that at least sometimes it seems to produce conditions that actually undermine happiness among […]

Assessing the political and social conditions in a country is like volunteering an opinion on religion or sex; everyone believes that he or she is in a position to say something authoritative about it without necessarily doing so from an informed position. Moreover, what counts as being “informed” about such matters is not always easy […]

Some of the responses to my previous posting suggested that the relation between images and concepts, as explained by Leonard Shlain in his book on the link between alphabet literacy and patriarchy (The Alphabet versus the Goddess), requires clarification. What better way to do that than by referring to his earlier book, Art and Physics: […]

Late in the 1990s, a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study appeared that shed light on an age-old struggle, and did so in a novel way. In his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image (published by Penguin Arkana, New York, 1998), Leonard Shlain, neurologist and neurosurgeon turned philosopher, offers a novel argument […]

Driving to work on Saturday morning, I was listening to the soundtrack of Milos Forman’s film, Hair, based on the 1967 Broadway hit musical, and I was swept away by the sheer force of the first track, Aquarius, sung by a woman with an unbelievably powerful, yet melodious voice. The beat, the rhythms and the […]

Freud called dreams “wish-fulfilments”, inviting the obvious objection, that this would fail to account for nightmares. Except … if we think of nightmares as negative wish-fulfilments — whatever it is that haunts you in your dreams, is precisely what we wish to avoid. The father of psychoanalysis also pointed out that dreams unfold in the […]

In my previous posting, “The receptivity to the idea of change“, I suggested a possible reason why so many Americans have responded affirmatively to Barack Obama’s persistent rhetorical emphasis (no matter how amorphous) on the need for “change”. It could be, I said, because it resonates with what Hardt and Negri have identified as the […]

Barack Obama’s emphasis on change, or the desire for change, as something that unites his supporters in the race for the Democratic nomination in the US, has been so conspicuous that it is difficult not to see in it something significantly symptomatic of the general social and political mood in America, and perhaps in the […]

In an earlier piece — The changing face of identity — I reflected on the implications and possible influence, if not “effects”, of the social networking site, Facebook, on people’s sense of identity. At the time, Vincent Maher made an interesting comment on my piece, questioning what he saw as the implication that I was […]