Advent, Reinvention, and the Future of Daily Philosophy #394
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Autopoiesis
12 min read
The article directly references Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis as self-creation and self-preservation of living systems, applying it to societies and institutions. This biological/philosophical concept deserves deeper exploration.
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Heideggerian terminology
18 min read
The article uses Heidegger's concepts of Dasein and 'zuhanden' (ready-to-hand) to discuss human existence versus tool-being. This page explains the philosophical vocabulary central to the article's argument.
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Eudaimonia
14 min read
The article invokes Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia as the goal of human flourishing and the good life, contrasting it with being reduced to an interchangeable economic unit. This Greek philosophical concept is central to the article's message.
In the past two weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about this newsletter and how to proceed with it. It’s Advent season, after all—a time that invites reflection, expectation, and the quiet anticipation of something new. The word “advent” itself carries this dual meaning: the coming of something — but also the end of something else. As the year winds down, we’re offered a new chance to redefine ourselves, to begin our lives again.
This idea of renewal has always been part of the season. Christmas, whether you celebrate it religiously or not, is about rebirth. Not only the rebirth of nature after the hiatus of winter, but also a spiritual rebirth that we experience every year. It is a moment to pause, to reflect, and to ask ourselves: who do I want to be in the year ahead? What do I want to change? What do I want to leave behind?
For Heidegger, being human means precisely this: to reinvent oneself.
For Heidegger, being human means precisely this: to reinvent oneself. To be Dasein is not to be a fixed thing, a tool with a single purpose, waiting to be used. It is to be a being that defines itself through its choices, its projects, its openness to the future. But our societies do not want us to do this. The rules of capitalism, the structures we live in — they want us to be tools. They need us to be tools in order to function. The economic unit that is the human being must be, in Heidegger’s terms, zuhanden—ready-to-hand—for the machinery of society to keep turning.
A bus driver retreats into the background of our attention and becomes part of the bus. A cook or a waiter are perceived as nothing but available, ready-to-serve parts of the machinery of a restaurant. A teacher or a philosophy blogger are nothing but cogs in a system that provides knowledge for us to consume — so that we can eventually replace these cogs when they fail because of old age, reduced performance, or any other reason. This makes it necessary that we all train the next generation not only to be educated in particular ways, specific to the bus driver, the cook, or the teacher — but also to make them work in exactly the same way, so that they are ready-to-hand to replace us when we
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