Dag2 : Helden en waarheid

Zaterdag 8 oktober 2022
Doors&bookshop open
14:30 h

Being a Human: Is 'civilization' necessary for human freedom?
(English speaking) 15:30 – 16:20 h
Charles Foster (In-person appearance)
Q&A
16:20 – 16:40 h
Charles Foster
Talk: Two cakes Kyiv and a sniper - Across the border of Ukraine and further
(Dutch&English speaking) 16:40 – 17:10 h
Jaap Scholten(Livestream)
Break
17:10 – 17:20 h

Feico Deutekom speelt Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hania Rani
17:20 – 17:50 h
Feico Deutekom
Break
17:50 – 18:20 h

Talk: Freedom, a country at the end of history
(English speaking) 18:20 – 19:05 h
Lea Ypi (Livestream) Professor in Political Theory in London School of Economics, expertise in Marxism & Critical Theory.
Q&A
19:05– 19:20 h
Lea Ypi(Livestream)
Talk: On absolute and relative truth
(English speaking) 19:25 – 20:10 h
Richard Baker Roshi & Nicole Baden (In-person appearance)
Q&A
20:10 – 20:25 h
Richard Baker Roshi & Nicole Baden (In-person appearance)
Break
20:25 – 21:00 h

Talk: Surplus enjoyment: Do we still have masters, or are there just servants serving other servants?
21:00 – 22:00 h
Slavoj Žižek (In-person appearance)
Q&A
22:00 – 23:00 h
Slavoj Žižek
Meeting at the winebar
23:00 – 23:30 h

Charles Foster

Jaap Scholten

Jaap Scholten shares the conviction with pre-Dadaist and boxer Arthur Cravan that a writer should not be too intelligent. Scholten never ever reads user manuals. He studied Industrial Design at the Technical University in Delft and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. He writes books, restores old houses, chops wood, and lived for the last 20 years in Hungary, mostly in a remote village close to the border with Croatia.

By a niece (living together with a Ukrainian) he got involved from day 2 in the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Because he loves freedom, he is helping refugees, and acquiring trauma packs, helmets, vests, and quadrocopters for the Ukrainian army. Since February 24th he went a few times to his neighboring country to bring protective materials to pick up an American sniper and to listen to stories, to write, to film, to do what a writer should do: Documenting, documenting, documenting.

Philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko said last August in Kyiv to Jaap: ‘European identity is built upon two ethical systems: the warrior ethics of the ancient Greeks and the bourgeois ethics. The warrior ethic sees the goal of life as winning against the enemy. The bourgeois ethic sees the goal of life as providing victory for everybody, the positive sum game. Europe thinks we can do everything on the bourgeois ethics and is forgetting the warrior ethics. In a way the Ukrainians are reviving this ancient warrior ethics.’

Jaap Scholten will publish Friday, November 18th 2022 Drie zakken dameskleding, twee cakes Kyiv en een sniper about his experiences in the first six months of the war and the stories and the voices of the Ukrainians he met in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, from chefs, violin players, writers and singers to marines operating far behind enemy lines.

Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi is an Albanian author and academic and currently a professor of political theory at London School of Economics.

Ypi grew up in one of the last Stalinist outposts of Europe: Albania. An isolated country where communist ideals had officially replaced religion and a place that was almost impossible to either visit or leave. But to Lea Ypi it was still home and her upbringing under communism until its fall in 1991 turned her into a relentless questioner of what it means to be really free. In October 2021 she published the book “Free” – a memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans – where she traces the limits of progress, the burden of the past as well and the space between ideals and reality.

“Free” was chosen as a book of the year by The Guardian, Financial Times and numerous other newspapers.

Richard Baker Roshi & Nicole Baden

Richard Baker Roshi is a world-famous Zenmaster with a stylish Character.
He was already active in the sixties and seventies in San Francisco during and after the Beat Generation.
He was befriended with Alan Watts he Beatport.
He was the founder of the great Zencenter in San Francisco and the restaurant chain: Greens which was an instant success.
Baker Roshi combined a quality as an organizer and Zenmaster in one person which is and was rare.
some conflicts arose from that mindset, but If there is anybody alive who combines all these qualities and can turn them into a discourse of tremendous depth, it is Richard Baker Roshi.

Zen teacher Richard Baker was born in Maine in 1936. He studied architecture and history at Harvard College and in 1960 left the East Coast for San Francisco. A year later he began studying Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. In 1962, Suzuki Roshi established San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), the first residential Zen center in the West. In 1966, SFZC expanded to include the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, where Zen practice adhered to the traditional modes of a Japanese Soto monastery. Shortly before his death in November 1971, Suzuki Roshi installed Richard Baker as the abbot of the extended community. Over the next twelve years, Baker Roshi’s work included the founding of the Green Gulch Zen Practice Community in Marin County, the Tassajara Bread Bakery, and the Greens Restaurant. In 1983, under pressure from senior members of the community, and amid accusations and subsequent denials of sexual and financial misconduct, Baker Roshi resigned from his position as abbot. The rift between Baker Roshi and SFZC remained bitter for many years and still lacks resolution.

After leaving San Francisco, Baker Roshi started the Dharma Sangha, with centers in Germany, Austria, and Crestone, Colorado. For the past six years, Baker Roshi and his companion, Ulrike Greenway, have divided their time between the United States and Europe. His forthcoming book, Original Mind: The Practice of Zen in the West, will be published by Riverhead Books (Putnam).

Compare these words with the commentary in block 9 of Tim Parks : The spread mind

Baker Roshi: First, just because Buddhism is called a religion and Christianity is called a religion, and so forth, one cannot assume that they occupy the same territory in a culture. For example, Buddhism offers no contradiction to science, it has no problem with science at all, so the deep and fundamental split between science and the humanities that we’ve known in the West simply doesn’t exist with Buddhism.

Sugata: You mean the fear that science would displace God, or jeopardize the construction of who we think God is?

Baker Roshi: Yes, that just doesn’t exist in Buddhism. Also, going back to India before Buddhism, the basic conceptual position that Buddhism grew out of is that the exterior world and the interior world are the same—share the same reality or actuality. Whatever reality is, that’s what we are. We don’t live in the world as in a house. The house is us, and the house is in us. Nowadays, contemporary physicists are asking a similar question: If this is the way physics describes the world, then how should this affect my life? And Buddhists are saying, If this is the way the world is, then this must be the way we are too. So that’s why it overlaps with science. So many of these processes of studying ourselves and others are drawing on Buddhism because it offers the most developed technique of studying consciousness especially our own.

Feico Deutekom

Feico Deutekom is a Dutch pianist, singer and arranger. He is specialized in the work of contempory composers such as Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Lang. Early on in his life introduced to music his father, a jazz musician, Feico studied the works of classical composers before turning more towards minimal music and neo-classical music.

Co-founder of the Attacca Ensemble, Feico has toured together with harpist Lavinia Meijer all major stages in The Netherlands.

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek hardly needs an introduction.

He is regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of our time, although he would certainly not say so himself. There are many different ways to describe him, and he is being called both a ‘Marxist’ and a ‘rockstar philosopher’ – often in the same sentence.

What makes Žižek so interesting is that he knows how to trace the values ​​of the present time such as 'woke' and 'populism' back to their roots to show the values ​​they conceal. Reality is not very real for Žižek, it is just a construction consisting of symbols, which can only be regarded as relatively real.

When Žižek talks about the many political crisis of our time he does not just repeat what others have already pointed out but instead he gives an original interpretation of the world that becomes visible when you look past the clichés.

These thoughts and insights put him in the forefront of many of our time’s debates – whether it is about identity, sex, popular culture, power or war. His most recent book is “Hegel in A Wired Brain” and to understand Žižeks vision is to understand a piece of a possible future – whether or not that future is one we would want to be a part of.

The video below is a recent conversation between Žižek and Harari on the topic of the increasingly unclear difference between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.