best news photographs of the day

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2013/jul/23/best-news-photographs-of-the-day-storms-weather-royal-baby-pope-brazil



This tiny tree frog was photographed sheltering under a leaf in East Java, 
Indonesia. Photograph: Penkdix Palme/Newsteam

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Books reviewed - Lost in Transformation: biographies of Franz Kafka

Kafka: The Years of Insight
By Reiner Stach 


Kafka: The Decisive Years
By Reiner Stach 

Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt 
By Saul Friedlander 

reviewed by Kevin Jackson

Lost in Transformation
Someone must have been telling lies about K., for the popular image of him as the great Gloomy Gus of 20th-century letters (close rivals: Beckett, Cioran, maybe Céline) does not bear very much scrutiny. Consider this incident, which took place as he was dying of tuberculosis, and knew it. One day, when he was walking in a Berlin park, Kafka saw a little girl crying. He asked her why she was sad and she told him that she had lost her doll. Oh no, Kafka said, her doll was not lost - the toy was simply off on an exciting adventure. Understandably sceptical, the girl asked for proof. So Kafka went home and wrote a long, detailed letter from the doll, and gave it to the little girl the following day. Then, every day for the next three weeks, he gave her an additional letter. It seems that the doll had met a boy doll, and become engaged, and then married. By the end of the three weeks, the doll was setting up her marital home and the little girl no longer missed her mute companion.

This is hardly the sort of thing you would expect of the fellow who wrote The Trial orThe Castle or 'In the Penal Settlement' (one of the most horrific short texts ever to have sneaked its way into the literary canon), and it is poignant as well as charming, not least because in our own climate of nervy erotic suspicion a middle-aged male writer who attempted such kindliness would have the social services or police on him like a shot. But the story of Kafka and the Lost Doll is instructive as well as surprising.

It explains to the neophyte what an unusually kind and thoughtful man he could be, even when he was drawing his shallow breaths in sharp pain. Some of his fans think that - again like Beckett - he bordered on the saintly. But it also hints at Kafka's knowledge of the power that lies in stories, his own stories in particular. Stories can cure the sadness of small girls. They can also frighten, console, give courage. They can help even a sick and dying writer make some sense of what remains of his short life. Kafka seems often to have thought of writing as a curse or (to borrow a term from the literature of shamanism) a sickness vocation. And yet the thing that makes you ill may also, from time to time, make you powerful.

Some of Kafka's greatness is due to the fact that his work belongs as much to the very long history of storytelling as to the relatively short history of Western literature. On the whole it is plain, simple, direct and tantalisingly cryptic. His stories worm their way under your skin and stay there until you itch. They make some people itch so badly that they have to start telling their own stories about K. In the years when his reputation first began to take off, after the Second World War, he was mainly revered as Kafka the prophet, the man who had read the entrails of his age and foreseen, first, the rise of totalitarianism, secondly the cancer-like proliferation of faceless officialdom, thirdly 'alienation' and finally, especially, the death camps in which most of his close family and lots of his friends were murdered.

That story of dark prophecies is still being passed around, despite its many and increasingly evident flaws.. 
read more: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/jackson_07_13.php

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Ugandan child soldier returns to terrorised boyhood village

When he was 13 Edward was kidnapped by Ugandan rebels and forced to become a soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. He survived the longest–running guerrilla war in modern history by being a trusted confidante of Joseph Kony, the chief architect of the brutal insurgency. Fourteen years later, with Kony on the run, Edward is returning to his childhood village, nervous about the reception he will receive after his role in terrorising his own people.

For more than two decades about 30,000 children abducted from northern Uganda provided the fuel for Kony's cult-like LRA. A self-styled mystic who claimed to channel a host of spirits, his hazy aims of seizing power and ruling Uganda according to the biblical 10 commandments collapsed after his forces were chased across the Nile and out of the country in 2006. Since then he has roamed east central Africa's forests with a band of a few hundred children kidnapped from neighbouring countries.

While all but a handful of abducted Ugandans have now escaped, a generation of children is traumatised by war. Edward, now a wiry 27-year-old, was one who got away. By the time he fled Kony in April he had spent so long in the bush that he had forgotten what a bank was. Because he became so close to the LRA chief, his story provides a rare first-hand glimpse into the spiral of paranoia one of the world's most wanted war criminals. "In the middle of the night the rebels came, and surrounded our homes," Edward said, recalling how the LRA rampaged down the same pot-holed red dust road now leading him back to his village. "Until then I had never heard the sound of a gunshot."

Jeering rebels rounded up dozens of boys whose mud huts were within shouting distance; the youngest was eight. Most died during the forced five-day march to neighbouring Sudan. There the LRA trained the remaining boys to kill, using trees for target practice.

Speaking softly, fingers knotted on his lap, Edward said fear made his first kill easier. "If we had done a bad job, [our commander] might have killed us instead." Then, his voice barely a whisper, Edward explained how the abducted were repeatedly forced to kill other children who attempted to escape, and warned they would face the same fate if they tried it. "So many times it happened," he said.

For a quarter of a million child soldiers globally, the disorientating experience of returning home is exacerbated by deep stigmas and missed education opportunities. Girls kidnapped as "wives" often return with children born in captivity, or remain with the men they were forcibly given to even after liberation. In Liberia, unable to find jobs, some former child soldiers from Charles Taylor's notorious "small boys unit" have resorted to raiding graveyards to survive. After the genocide in Rwanda one study found more than 60% of children, many of whom were child soldiers, said they did not care if they ever grew up.

"I know [going home] won't be easy. Some people may think …" Edward left the sentence unfinished and looked at the passing scenery. Coming home means coming to terms with a decade spent in a child army fighting against his own people. A neighbour kidnapped alongside him was forced to kill his parents.

A balmy breeze ushered in the morning on which Edward was returning to live in his village after 14 years... read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/23/joseph-kony-child-soldier-return-uganda-lra

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Mukul Mangalik - Delhi University's summer of shame

“People are people through other people” — Xhosa proverb

“We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery” — Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator

Colleges of the Delhi University are in the grip of frenzy. With the university administration breaking promises about appointing permanent teachers against existing and newly sanctioned posts since 2009-10, large numbers of ‘ad hoc’ appointees are being shown the door as new ad hocs are poised to replace them. This has been happening systematically since 2012, but the scale on which it is being pursued this summer appears to be unprecedented.

This is being done through the unfair practice of holding repeat interviews for the same jobs. Serving ad hoc teachers, it must be emphasized, have been selected at different times through due process for these jobs. This renders the repeat interviews nothing but forms for the exercise of power over ad hocs, and instruments for deepening the presence and footprint of malleable labour at Delhi University. The large-scale sacking, or threat of removal, of teachers currently under way needs to be brought to an immediate halt and dignity and secure employment guaranteed for all colleagues.

‘Ad hoc’ appointees become teachers after going through merit-based interviews. They are appointed for durations of up to four months. Within this period — in the event that the vacancy in question may be longer than four months — selection committees are supposed to be constituted, fresh interviews advertised, and appointments made against temporary or permanent posts. University ordinances are clear on this issue. If, for whatever reason, this does not happen, the fairest practice has been that the previously appointed ad hoc teachers, who are not responsible for delays in interviews, continue until such time in the near future that this process is completed.

All of this has been informed by the understanding that ‘ad hoc’ conditions must remain, at most, a transient moment in teachers’ lives, and that too only if absolutely necessary. The regular work of teaching demands regular forms of employment. Anything else would have a negative impact on teachers’ work apart from constituting unfair labour practice. There is also adequate evidence regarding the long-term mental and physical destruction caused when people are faced with job insecurity or unemployment. Yet, all across the colleges of Delhi University, undergraduates are being taught by thousands of teachers struggling to offer the best they can in the face of indignities, terrible economic insecurity, and the increasing threat of stress-related illnesses.

In spite of the provision in Ordinance XVIII (7) of the University of Delhi, that “Not more than one-third of the total number of the teaching staff shall be on a temporary or contractual basis at the same time”, 4,500 of 9,000 plus teachers at the university are teaching as ‘ad hocs’, with many continuing in this capacity for years. This number, together with the few hundred guest lecturers, paid per lecture delivered, makes it clear that Delhi University is being run largely on the exploited backs of casual labour, and has been witnessing the rapid normalization of ad hoc employment practices.

This is unfair enough. The widespread compulsion now, that ad hoc appointees sit for repeat interviews for another set of ad hoc appointments at the same department of the very college where they are already employees, instead of appearing in a fresh round of interviews for a new category of posts, is massively compounding injustice... read more:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130723/jsp/opinion/story_17143582.jsp#.Ue6f5NKKocU

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RAMACHANDRA GUHA - What Hindus can and should be proud of

Those who care for the future of the religion should valorise the work of reformers who rid an ancient, ossified faith of its divisions, prejudices, and closed-mindedness

A bhadralok friend of mine is of the view that the Government of India should celebrate every December 16 as Vijay Diwas, Victory Day, to mark the surrender in 1971 of the Pakistani forces in Dhaka to the advancing Indian Army. My friend argues that such a celebration would take Indians in general, and Hindus in particular, out of the pacifist, defeatist mindset that he claims has so crippled them. The triumph in Dhaka represents for him the finest moment in a millenia otherwise characterised by Indian (and more specifically Hindu) humiliation at the hands of foreigners.

I was reminded of my friend’s fond fantasy when reading about the posters in Mumbai recently put up by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party. These carry portraits of a prominent BJP leader, with two accompanying slogans: ‘I AM A HINDU NATIONALIST,’ in English, and ‘Garv sé Kaho Ham Hindu Hain’, in Hindi. The latter slogan needs perhaps to be translated for south Indian readers, and set in context for younger ones. ‘Proudly Proclaim Our Hindu-Ness’, would be a faithful rendition. The slogan originates in the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign of the 1980s and 1990s, when it was used by the VHP, RSS, BJP, and Bajrang Dal cadres to mobilise men and materials in the drive to demolish a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya believed by many to be sited on the birthplace of the (mythical) God Ram.

Victory in Dhaka

Should Hindus be proud of the Indian Army’s victory in Dhaka in 1971? Perhaps as Indians, but not specifically as Hindus. The war had its basis in the savage repression of Bengalis in East Pakistan by the West Pakistan Army. The refugees who came to India were both Hindus and Muslims. The help rendered to them by the Government of India did not discriminate according to their faith. As for the Indian military campaign, the chief commander in the field was a Jew, his immediate superior a Sikh. A Parsi served as Chief of Army Staff. His own superior, the Prime Minister of India, had notoriously been disallowed from entering the Jagannath temple in Puri because she had not married a Hindu.

To be sure, many soldiers and officers in the Indian Army were of Hindu origin. Yet they never saw themselves in narrowly communal terms. In our armed forces, then and now, Hindu and Muslim, Christian and Sikh, Parsi and Jew, lived, laboured and struggled together.

Hindu in intent and content

Unlike the military campaign in East Pakistan in 1971, the campaign to build a temple in Ayodha was unquestionably Hindu in intent and content. No Muslims or Sikhs or Parsis or Jews or Christians participated in it. But should Hindus have been proud of it? I rather think not. In a society where so many are without access to adequate education, health care and housing, where malnutrition is rife and where safety and environmental standards are violated every minute, to invest so much political energy and human capital in the demolition of a mosque and its replacement with a brand-new temple seemed wildly foolish, if not downright Machiavellian. As it turned out, the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign led to two decades of strife across northern and western India, with thousands of people losing their lives and hundreds of thousands their homes and livelihoods.

The war of 1971 was not a Hindu war, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid was not something that could fill Hindus with pride. What then, should Hindus be proud of? The answer is that rather than seek for one defining moment, one heroic triumph, Hindus who care for the fate and future of Hinduism should instead valorise the quiet, persistent work of reformers down the centuries to rid an ancient, ossified faith of its divisions, its prejudices, and its closed-mindedness.

The story of Hindu pride that I wish to tell also begins with Bengal, not with the surrender of the Pakistani Army in 1971, but with the work in the early 19th century of Rammohun Roy, who was unarguably the first great Indian modernist. Rammohun campaigned for the abolition of sati, for greater rights for women more generally, for the embrace of modern scientific education and for a liberal spirit of free enquiry and intellectual debate. His example was carried forward by other Bengali reformers, among them Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Swami Vivekananda, who focussed on, among other things, education for women and the abolition of caste distinctions.

Epicentre of radical thinking

The torch first lit in Bengal was taken over, and made even brighter, in Maharashtra, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the epicentre of reformist and radical thinking in India. The pernicious practice of ‘untouchability’ was attacked from below by Jotirau Phule and from above by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Maharashtra also gave birth to India’s first home-grown feminists, such as Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai, who wrote searing tracts against patriarchal practices and motivated young girls to emancipate themselves through modern education.

In 1915, Mohandas K. Gandhi came back to India after two decades in the diaspora. Living in South Africa, he had been seized of the need to build harmonious, mutually beneficial, relations between Hindus and Muslims. This commitment to religious pluralism he now renewed and reaffirmed. Meanwhile, he progressively became more critical of caste discrimination. To begin with, he attacked ‘untouchability’ while upholding the ancient ideal of varnashramadharma. Then he began advocating inter-mixing and inter-dining, and eventually, inter-marriage itself.

Gandhi was pushed to take more radical positions by B.R. Ambedkar, the outstanding lawyer-scholar who was of ‘Untouchable’ origins himself. A modernist and rationalist, Dr. Ambedkar believed that for Dalits to escape from oppression, they had to not look for favours from guilt-ridden reformers but themselves ‘educate, agitate and organise’ their way to emancipation. He remains an inspirational figure, whose work and legacy remain relevant for Dalit and Suvarna alike.

When India became independent in 1947, a central question the new nation faced was the relation of faith to state. There was a strong movement to create India as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, a mirror-image of the Islamic nation that was Pakistan. The person who stood most firmly against this idea was the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In a letter written to Chief Ministers on October 15, 1947, he reminded them that “we have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India. This is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilised manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”

Gandhi was a heterodox Hindu, who was detested by the priestly orthodoxy; so much so that the Sankaracharyas once even organised a signature campaign that asked the British to declare Gandhi a non-Hindu. Nehru was a lapsed Hindu, who never entered a temple in adult life. He too was intensely disliked by the sants and shakha heads who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for Hindus. Ambedkar was a renegade Hindu, who was born into the faith yet decided in the end to leave it, through a dramatic conversion ceremony weeks before his death.

For all their lapses and departures from orthodoxy — or perhaps because of them — Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru were the three 20th century figures who did most to rid Hinduism of its ills and excesses, who worked most heroically to nurture the spirit of equal citizenship that the Laws of Manu so explicitly deny. The work that they, and the equally remarkable reformers who preceded them, did, are what Hindus should be most proud of.

Entrenched prejudices

That said, Hindus still have much to be ashamed about. As the recent spate of attacks on Dalits and women shows, deep-rooted caste and patriarchal prejudices remain entrenched in many parts of India. Meanwhile, in countries that neighbour ours, Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, giving ammunition to parties in India who represent the most sectarian and exclusive aspects of Hinduism themselves. The battles inaugurated by the likes of Rammohun Roy and Jotirau Phule, and carried forward by Ambedkar and Nehru and company, have now to be fought afresh. The abolition of caste prejudices; the elimination of gender hierarchies; the promotion of religious pluralism — these remain the elusive ideals of those who wish (proudly or otherwise) to call themselves Hindu and Indian.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/what-hindus-can-should-be-proud-of/article4941930.ece

Comment by Aseem Shrivastava

"For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendor of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect." Amartya Sen uses Asoka's words in his Nobel Foundation "Biography" to describe his own disenchantment with the left wing, post partition politics that he saw as a student at Presidency College, Kolkata.  A simple extension of the spirit behind them says that the picture of a "pacifist, defeatist mindset" that has "so crippled Indians, and Hindus in particular" that worries Ramachandra Guha's bhadrolok friend inflicts equally severe injuries on today's Indians/Hindus. A contemporary Asoka would reject it, forget that it is also the RSS's main political plank. Asoka knew some of the social ills that Guha mentions. They, and their extensions, continue to deprave subcontinental life. That is both profound, and profoundly discouraging.

See also:

Purushottam Agrawal - Why does the RSS hate the idea of India ? (2001)

Rethinking Secularism by Bhagwan Josh, Dilip Simeon, and Purushottam Agrawal

Communalism in Modern India

A Hard Rain Falling - private armies & political violence in India-EPW, July 2012

Armies of the Pure: The Question of Indian Fascism

Another time, another mosque: Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948

A WHITE LINE AND A MOSQUE

V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder

The Savarkarist syntax (Anil Nauriya) 

Anil Nauriya: Portrait as mirror

 Madhu Limaye's observations on the RSS 1979.

Communalism feeds on itself

An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971

On 'revolution' - Closing the Circle - Frontier Aug-Sept 2012

The Futility of Common Sense: An Essay on Ahimsa

Poornima Joshi: Sangh Singh Song

A Hard Rain Falling (private armies and political violence in India) (EPW)

A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (SVA)

Political Resolution of the Annual Convention of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan, Delhi, March 1992

The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism // Fascism as a Mass Movement // A Subaltern Fascism ? (on V.D. Savarkar & the Hindu Mahasabha)

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Venkat Dhulipala's lectures on the Muslim League in the 1940's

Venkat Dhulipala is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He has an M.A in Political Science from University of Hyderabad, an M.A in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D in History from the University of Minnesota. He was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas Austin 2010-2011 during which he completed his book manuscript, 'Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India', forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2014. His published essays include Rallying the Qaum: The Muslim League in the United Provinces 1937-1939 (Modern Asian Studies- May 2010) and A Nation-State Insufficiently Imagined? Debating Pakistan in Late Colonial North India, (IESHR July/Sept 2011). (Click here for a link)

Professor Dhulipala will deliver four lectures in Delhi between July 25 and August 8. Here are details of the first two. More information will be posted soon.

The Forgotten Pioneer of Partition Studies: B.R. Ambedkar and the idea of Pakistan

Thursday 25th July at 3 pm

Venue: Committee Room, School of Social Sciences - II

Centre for Political Studies; School of Social Sciences
Jawaharlal Nehru University

Towards a New Medina: Jinnah, Deobandi Ulama, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India

Venue - India International Centre; Conference Room - II (2nd floor above the Dining room, IIC main building). 

Friday, 26th July at 6.30 pm

The talk is part of the series "Frontiers of History"

Arab Pilot and the English Sea Captain: The Deobandi Ulama, Jinnah, and the Struggle for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India

JNU (CHS)- 7 August, 3 pm

Arab Pilot and the English Sea Captain: The Deobandi Ulama, Jinnah, and the Struggle for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India

Jamia Millia Islamia- 8 August 12:15 pm

The talks address how the idea of Pakistan was articulated & debated in the public sphere and how popular Muslim enthusiasm was generated for its creation, especially in the crucial United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (now Uttar Pradesh) whose Muslim elites played a critical role in Pakistan’s creation. The speaker argues that Pakistan attracted overwhelming support in the UP not because it was a vague emotional slogan but because it was articulated as an Islamic State- a New Medina as some would call it-- a utopia that would be a refuge for and protector of Indian Muslims, as well as the harbinger of Islam’s renewal and rise in the twentieth century. This new State was expected to emerge as the new leader of the Islamic world protecting both Indian and global community of Muslims (ummah), and thus be a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate. The speaker has studied the critical role played by clerics (ulama) from the influential Deoband School in building this imagined national community, acutely aware of Pakistan’s global historical significance. He demonstrates how these ulama collaborated with the Anglicized leadership of the Muslim League & forged a new political vocabulary fusing ideas of Islamic nationhood & modern state to fashion decisively popular arguments for creating Pakistan. 

Here are links to two of his published essays:

http://www.sacw.net/index.php?page=recherche&recherche=dhulipala

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Pale blue dot - Earth captured in rare photograph from Saturn spacecraft Cassini

NB - 'Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened..' (Friedrich Nietzsche)

And we still think we need nationalism! and that religious and national communities need atom bombs to kill one another! Truly we humans are masters of self deception -DS

*****************

A robotic space probe nearly 900m miles (1.5bn kilometres) from Earth has turned its gaze away from Saturn and its entourage of moons to take a rare picture of its home planet. The resulting image shows Earth as a very small, blue-tinged dot – paler and tinier than in other photos – overshadowed by the giant Saturn's rings in foreground.

"We can't see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19," Linda Spilker, Cassini spacecraft lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

Cassini took the picture on Friday, the same day NASA's Mercury-orbiting Messenger probe also photographed Earth. In that picture, Earth and the moon take up less than a pixel, but appear large because they are overexposed. "That images of our planet have been acquired on a single day from two distant solar system outposts reminds us of this nation's stunning technical accomplishments in planetary exploration," Messnger lead scientist Sean Solomon, with Columbia University in New York, said in a statement. "The whole event underscores for me our 'coming of age' as planetary explorers," said astronomer Carolyn Porco, who oversees the Cassini imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Usually, spacecraft in the far reaches of the solar system don't look back towards Earth to avoid damaging their instruments by direct sunlight. Last week, the sun was temporarily blocked relative to Cassini's line of sight, allowing the pictures to be taken.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jul/23/earth-captured-photograph-saturn-cassini

Smile! Cassini sets up photo of Earth

Dr Porco hopes the picture will be reminiscent of the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image captured by the Voyager-1 probe in 1990. That was a picture she helped organise with the astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan. He memorably described the Earth as looking like a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam", such was its apparent insignificance in the vastness of space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23373821

NB: A view of the human predicament different from Nietzsche's may be read in Hans Jonas’s essay Gnosticism, existentialism and nihilism, from which here is an extract:

'There is no overlooking one cardinal difference between  the gnostic and the existentialist nihilism: Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, antidivine, and therefore antihuman nature, modern man into an indifferent one.  Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the reallu bottomless pit. In the gnostic conception the hostile, the demonic, is still anthropomorphic, familiar even in its foreignness, and the contrast itself gives direction to existence – a negative direction, to be sure, but one that has behind it the sanction of the negative transcendence to which the positivity of the world is the positive counterpart. Not even this antagonistic quality is granted to the indifferent Nature of modern science, from that nature no direction at all can be elicited...This makes modern nihilism infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic nihilism ever could be for all its panic terror of the world and its defiant contempt of its laws. That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone in his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projected meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation’ - From Hans Jonas’s essay on Gnosticism, existentialism and nihilism, p 233 in The Phenomenon of Life

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