Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live Titelbild

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

Von: Dale Wright & Krzysztof Piekarski
Jetzt kostenlos hören, ohne Abo

ZEITLICH BEGRENZTES ANGEBOT. Nur 0,99 € pro Monat für die ersten 3 Monate. 3 Monate für 0,99 €/Monat, danach 9,95 €/Monat. Bedingungen gelten. Jetzt starten.

Über diesen Titel

 One thing is needful. --To "give style" to one’s character–– a great and rare art! ~Nietzsche Professors Dale Wright, Malek Moazzam-Doulat, and Krzysztof Piekarski explore Nietzsche, Zen, and the Philosophy of Living.

firephilosophy.substack.comKrzysztof Piekarski Persönliche Entwicklung Persönlicher Erfolg Philosophie Sozialwissenschaften
Folgen
  • A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage

    A Dialogue about Cultivating Courage
    Oct 21 2025

    We offer Fire Philosophy as a space for living questions—for Nietzsche’s provocations, Zen’s paradoxes and silences, and the uneasy beauty of learning how to live with courage and imagination.

    We offer this free of charge. But if you find value in our brief essays, video interviews and dialogues that challenge and unsettle our lives while nourishing and invigorating them, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps stoking our collective fire.

    ~ Krzysztof and Dale

    The above conversation draws on Dale’s five part series about courage. Below are the installments to give you heart in the midst of life’s challenges. We en-courage-you to read and reflect on them before listening to our conversation above; and if you know someone who could use some encouragement, please share this series with them.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit firephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    42 Min.
  • What's your blind spot? Playing table tennis without vision

    What's your blind spot? Playing table tennis without vision
    Aug 26 2025
    Can blind people play table tennis? “Yes we can” says Brendan Wright who gradually lost his vision until becoming completely blind over 20 years ago. Brendan is a huge sports fan and a multi-sport athlete who participates whenever he can. He is an accomplished four stroke swimmer, having won numerous medals at the Special Olympics, and plays “Beep Baseball” with his blind friends in the Los Angeles area. Still not fully satisfied with those limits, he wanted to try table tennis to explore whether it might be possible to play that sport without being able to see the ball. And it’s worked! Although the rules of the game differ, Brendan is now an accomplished ping pong player. Check out the video above to see how he can do that.Like others who live their lives with what we call a “dis-ability,” Brendan has learned to live a fruitful, active, and basically happy life without the benefit of vision. His abilities are astonishing. Compensating for the absence of sight, Brendan’s ability to feel and to understand the contours of his environment is astonishing. And his hearing capacity is so much greater than mine that you might as well call me “deaf.” He hears the world with astonishing precision and tells me what I’m missing.Based on research over the past half century, we now realize that many animals have ways of registering the world that are very different from human ways. And in many cases, more accurately attuned, more perceptive. In other words, all living beings have “blind spots” that go along with their specific ways of encountering the world. Beyond perceptual blind spots, we all stumble through the world with a wide variety of mental blind spots, cognitive leaps and gaps that shape how we perceive and understand the world in which we live.People who realize this—and cultivate the ability to notice—are able to recognize the strengths, weaknesses, and differences between a wide range of people. Picture those with a poetic sense for the world, with an artistic sense, with an acute connection to the natural world, with the capacity to understand animals in some intuitive way, with a musical ear, with a natural inclination to be quiet and listen or to be articulate, vocal, and humorous, with a chef’s ability to differentiate between tastes, with a natural ability to learn many languages, and on and on and on. People live incredibly interesting lives with different kinds of perception that support very different skills, and although we label some differences as disabilities, that label often blinds us to other people’s natural gifts. When the power goes off and the city is pitch dark, Brendan can navigate his environment as though nothing has changed. When I can’t hear subtle sounds in my environment, Brendan teaches me what I’m missing.The career that I stumbled into for very contingent reasons—a professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies— forced me to acquire some level of sensitivity to human differences. I found myself exploring different cultures, different spiritual sensitivities, different philosophical takes on who people are or could be. Looking back, I can see how fortunate I was to spend my life learning to understand and to appreciate these differences. Other people—all of you—spend their lives with other occupations, other pursuits and as a result develop different sensitivities, different skills and ways of living. Human diversity is the engine of our collective creativity and a posture of open generosity to others is what sustains peaceful, productive living.For all the reasons above and more, I spend considerable time and some money to help support blind athletes—men and women who participate in the Special Olympics or who play “Beep Baseball.” For anyone interested, I invite you to join me in this endeavor by making a donation to support the Beep Baseball team featured below. Although, having spent my career as a teacher there are serious limits to my capacity as a donor, I am happy to offer to match all donations up to a limit of $2000. Here is a brief video on how blind men and women play baseball and a link for donations to help this team afford to rent a field for practices, purchase equipment, and travel to Beep Baseball tournaments around the USA:➡️ https://www.socalbeepbaseball.org/donate/Krzysztof here: Dale, who some of you may know is the author of The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, wrote about the cultivation of generosity as the first important step on the path of seeing beyond the limits of one’s world . It’s a bit squeamish for Dale to talk about his own writing, especially in the context of encouraging donations to his son’s Beep Baseball team. So I’m going rogue here by adding this commentary and a pithy reminder from that book: We can only give to the extent that we are truly free, and are not possessed by our possessions, or our money, or ourselves. This is a public ...
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    4 Min.
  • Conversation with Michelle Huneven, Author of Bug Hollow, on Losing Her Home in the LA Fires and the Art of Fiction

    Conversation with Michelle Huneven, Author of Bug Hollow, on Losing Her Home in the LA Fires and the Art of Fiction
    Aug 6 2025
    Consider supporting Fire Philosophy if our conversations with Steven Heine, Agnes Callard, Stephen Batchelor, Joanna Klink, Karen King, and now Michelle Huneven have brought value and insight into your life’s journey. ➡️ You can find Bug Hollow here. Dale is also a huge fan of Michelle’s book Blame: To understand the full context of the quotations below, we highly encourage you to listen to our whole conversation with Michelle Huneven in the video above. You just have to keep going. You need to buy clothes. You need to buy a cage for your bird. You need to buy a fishbowl for the two fish you rescued from the debris soaked pond. And I think that one of the problems is, I think the body gives you a grace period. And then when you're ready, you can start to feel stuff. And what happens is that you go to make a dish and you think, oh, I need some sumac, I've got sumac. And, no, I don't have sumac. It burnt. Or you think, oh, I had that nice little shovel. No, I don't have that shovel. It burnt. I see a homeless man, I tear up, I see a dog with three legs I tear up. But I don't mind that; I like being so tender to the world or so raw to the world.Their suddenly being gone and so sudden like you're the change in your life. I think that's a definition of grief. I think my experience of grief is that you have to think everything you possibly can about that person or that place before grief is done with you.It's like grief has you by the scruff of the neck and it's you lost this, you lost that. This is gone. That's gone. And I'm not sure it ever completely, lets go. I'm still grieving people that died many years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, more. So it's not even, how do you be a good person in this world? It's how do you just live in this world? But I think that the more comfortable you are with this difficult world is how spiritual you are in a way. How do you find a way to live? And I think that every single one of my characters grapples with it. I wondered how do you know if you're a good person or if you're claimed by darkness? And I think that's something that I've always been interested in. How do you know if you're a good person? What I learned was that I'm full of characters. I've got a river of themes and interests and characters up there that I just need to tap in a kind of free associative way but it established that relationship that wasn't there. I went from having no ideas to having a lot of ideas.But another huge difference that I finally came to discover is that the difference between thinking that your life is just in this channel and it's just happening and realizing that imagination can really extend those boundaries and send you off in directions that you might not otherwise have realized were possible.It matters to you what kind of shovel you're using in the garden, and for most people, they couldn't care less. But for you, the way you do everything, what you read and eat and cook and tend your garden and take care of your chickens and travel and write, all of these are made to be beautiful, and aesthetically real in your life.I've always seen style as the way you finess your limitations. You butt-up against your limitations, and then you have to finesse it. Look at Leonard Cohen, somebody one time said he mastered the notes of A and B, he does not have great singing range. And yet, he's a total genius. People might disagree with me, but I think that he's fantastic, but he does have limitations. And yet how he finesse them is his style, is his signature style. And I think as a writer, you're writing always just up against your own limitations. You're writing at the edge of your vision, and you think as you get to be a better writer, that you have more access. But that just keeps going. You're always out of reach of what, at least I am, of what I can actually do.If you believe in God, God is creating God's self. That's standard process theology in a way, I think, I really do believe that every act of living is creative and that probably results in what you’re calling style. In a funny way, I resist it because you make me sound like a yuppie who just lives the beautiful life and buys the most beautiful things. And now that you, say it that way, I realize all of my life I've been a rebel against style, very careful not to be stylish, but that of course is a style that's very particular of somebody who's always revolting on the edges. But in Nietzsche's sense I think it means very much how you described it, and that was really wonderful.That you are out on the edges of your limitations and you're out on the edges of your imagination. You've got these choices to make, and there they are. Why not make them? And why not carve something unique? To make my character Sybil, the mother, a complex a character I had to eliminate a hundred other complexities in a way. I tried to fit them all in, but you really have to simplify in order to get them on the page because they contain ...
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    47 Min.
Noch keine Rezensionen vorhanden