Nick Kasmik

“Llegó con tres heridas: la del amor, la de la muerte, la de la vida.”
Ex tenebrīs lūx
contact: [email protected]

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard #philosophy

[Zito @_Zeets]

Umberto Eco on reading

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

"The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."
— 2 Corinthians 3:6 #philosophy

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” — Rilke #philosophy

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
— Walter Benjamin #philosophy #ai

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

Every wind is unfavorable to the sailor who has no destination #philosophy

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

We will all share the same fate. Why not go out with a bang? #philosophy

[Jorge Garza @hyruliangoat]

Xi Jinping is more American than most Americans.

From a 2015 speech

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

In The Republic, Plato warns that the greatest political danger comes from people who confuse their own judgment with absolute truth.

That is what makes Light Yagami so disturbing in Death Note.

He begins with a clear goal: eliminate criminals and create a better world.

Plato argues that tyranny begins when a person no longer distinguishes between opinion and truth.

Light’s transformation follows this pattern closely. L represents the opposite principle.

That tension is what gives Death Note its philosophical relation. #philosophy #deathnote #anime #morality #truth

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

Kierkegaard believed most people never truly choose their lives.

They drift through stages without confronting who they actually are.

In works like Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, he describes three stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

#philosophy #kierkegaard #existentialism #selfdevelopment #books

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

Half-Life (1998) presents one of the most important anxieties of late twentieth-century science fiction.

Black Mesa is a world built on the assumption that reality exists to be tested &  extracted from.

The catastrophe at the center of the game begins as a routine experiment.

This reflects the warning Martin Heidegger gave in The Question Concerning Technology (1954).

Heidegger argued that modern technology is a way of understanding the world.

Nature becomes raw material. Knowledge becomes output. Human beings themselves become resources within larger systems of efficiency and control.

Half-Life dramatizes this collapse to show that it can measured and managed.

The danger of Half-Life is that Black Mesa already viewed reality as something to extract long before the experiment failed.

Gordon Freeman survives the collapse, but leaves a deeper question behind:

What happens when scientific progress continues without reflection on the way it transforms human beings and the world itself?
#philosophy #halflife #heidegger #gaming #scifi

[HerodotusWave @HerodotusWave]

The Hercules Armor of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, a masterpiece of Renaissance ceremonial armor.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Take the risk.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

Alexander wept. Caesar wept. Jesus wept. Your problem in life is not that you are too passionate. Your problem is that you are not passionate enough.

[Nick Kasmik @nickkasmik]

Augustine’s Confessions, written around 397 AD, is one of the earliest and most influential spiritual autobiographies in Western thought.

Augustine reflects on his own life as a way of examining human nature and the search for truth.

He describes a youth shaped by ambition and pleasure yet marked by a persistent sense of restlessness.

Even success and knowledge fail to resolve this inner tension.

Through moments like the famous story of stealing pears, Augustine identifies a deeper problem.

Human beings are drawn toward things that do not truly satisfy them, even when they recognize their emptiness.

His eventual conversion marks a change in how he understands fulfillment itself.

Confessions also moves beyond personal narrative into time/memory, and the nature of existence.

At its core, the work presents the idea of human life defined by a kind of restlessness that cannot be resolved through pleasure, or knowledge alone.

As Augustine writes, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

#philosophy #augustine #books #history #selfknowledge

[Alexander 𖤓 Nietzschean Vitalist @UbermenschMind]

“The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.”

Camille Paglia