A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the contrasting treatment of objects and living beings, questioning the value placed on human life compared to material possessions.
Zapffe's quote highlights a profound philosophical observation about the human condition. It suggests that while a coinβa mere objectβis carefully handled and turned before being given away, a child's life is sometimes subjected to the harsh realities of existence without consideration or compassion. This stark contrast provokes thought about how society often prioritizes material things over the well-being and dignity of individuals.
In practice
In a discussion about societal priorities, one might use this quote to illustrate the value we attach to possessions over human lives.
Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change.
The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
This book was not written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death - because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever.
Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.
The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
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