How to Be Truly Free: Lessons From a Philosopher President

NYTIMES, Aug. 23, 2024

Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth.

Q: Do you believe that humanity can change? 

It could change. But the market is very strong. It has generated a subliminal culture that dominates our instinct. It's subjective.  It's unconscious. It has made us voracious buyers. We live to buy. We work to buy. And we live to pay. Credit is a religion. So we're kind of screwed up. 

Q: It seems you don't have much hope. 

Biologically, I do have hope, because I believe in man. But when I think about it, I'm pessimistic.

Q: Yet your speeches often have a positive message.

Because life is beautiful. With all its ups and downs, I love life. And I'm losing it because it's my time to leave. What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose. Or not. If you don't find it, the market will have you paying bills the rest of your life. If you find it, you will have something to live for. Those who investigate, those who play music, those who love sports, anything. Something that fills your life. 

I have one thing. The magic of the word. The book is the greatest invention of man. It's a shame that people read so little. They don't have time. Nowadays people do much of their reading on phones. Four years ago, I threw mine away. It made me crazy. All day talking nonsense. We must learn to speak with the person inside us. It was him who saved my life. Since I was alone for many years, that has stayed with me. When I'm in the field working with the tractor, sometimes I stop to see how a little bird constructs its nest. He was born with the program. He's already an architect. Nobody taught him. Do you know the hornero bird? They are perfect bricklayers. I admire nature. I almost have a sort of pantheism. You have to have the eyes to see it. The ants are one of the true communists out there. They are much older than us and they will outlive us. All colony beings are very strong.

….

Life is a chain and it is still full of mysteries.

What a complicated animal man is. He's both smart and stupid.

DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP by Pierre Cabanne

DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP by Pierre Cabanne

Chapter 4. I Like Breathing Better than Working

Page 69

CABANNE: You have also said that the artist is unaware of the real significance of his work and that the spectator should always participate in supplementing the creation by interpreting it.

DUCHAMP: Exactly. Because I consider, in effect, that if someone, any genius, were living in the heart of Africa and doing extraorinary paintings every day, without anyone's seeing them, he wouldn't exist. To put it another way, the artist exists only if he is known. Consequently, one can envisage the existence of a hundred thousand geniuses who are suicides, who kill themselves, who diappear, because they didn't know what to do to make themselves known, to push themselves, and to become famous.

    I believe very strongly in the "medium" aspect of the artist. The artist makes something, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of the spectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can't stop that, because, in brief, it's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.

   Naturally, no artist accepts this interpretation. But when you get right down to it, what is an artist? As much as the furniture maker, say Boulle, he's the man who owns a "Boulle." A work is also made of the admiration we bring to it.

  African wooden spoons were nothing at the time when they were made, they were simply funcational; later thye became beautiful things, "works of art".

  Don't you think the spectator's role is important?

Introduction by Robert Motherwell, page 10, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne

An artist must be unusually intelligent in order to grasp simultaneously many structured relations. In fact, intelligence can be considered as the capacity to grasp complex relations; in this sense, Leonardo’s intelligence, for instance, is almost beyond belief. Duchamp’s intelligence contributed many things, of course, but for me its greatest accomplishment was to take him beyond the merely “aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist - whose role is neither religious nor communal, but instead secular and individual. This problem has been called “the despair of the aesthetic:” if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another? If he does not make a purely “aesthetic” choice, he must look for further criteria on which to base his value judgments. Kierkegaard held that artistic criteria were first the real of the aesthetic, then the ethical, then the realm of the holy. Duchamp, as a nonbeliever, could not have accepted holiness as a criterion but, in setting up for himself complex technical problems or new ways of expressing erotic subject matter, for instance, he did find an ethic beyond the “aesthetic” for his ultimate choices. And his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp’s intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done. 

Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. His father, a noted concert pianist and and musicologist, taught him piano, and he considered a career in music before his interests shifted to literature, particularly French.
“From an early age ,” he told an interviewer for the literary journal Salmagundi in 1987, “I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco, and admired French surrealism.” - Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being. “ - Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

If you’re not joyful you are wasting your life. The fact that I exist is a perpetual surprise for me. What’s the healthiest emotion? Not love, not compassion, not even joy. It’s All. It’s wonder. Why do we exist? Perpetually surprised, full of wonder and joy. You return to innocence. And what we lost today in this world is the loss of innocence - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

Best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It’s a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity. Creativity is death and resurrection. It’s a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story. And a new meaning, relationship, and story. That’s fundamental creativity. Einstein coming up with the Theory of Relativity…or a great piece of art. Beethoven’s 5th. These are original creativity as a disruption to the algorithm. - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO