On the Nature of Help

By Maharddhika

A book that sets to examine such popular phenomena and notions in our society, from philanthropy, to suicide and women's rights, on definitive ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maharddhika
• Release date: Dec 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798224462865

Book preview

On the Nature of Help

Maharddhika

Published by Maharddhika, 2023.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ON THE NATURE OF HELP

First edition. December 30, 2023.

Copyright © 2023 Maharddhika.

Written by Maharddhika.

Also by Maharddhika

The Meaning of School

On the Nature of Help

Table of Contents`

About the author

Epigraph

Prelude

Chapter 1 Of Help and Philanthropy

Chapter 2 Of Suicide

Chapter 3 Of Women’s Rights

About the author

I am a thinker from Indonesia with an interest in philosophy and social critic, and more importantly, in the fact that these two constitute the same project.

I have earlier published another book, titled The Meaning of School.

You can download it for free in the following page:

books2read.com/themeaningofschool

If you are willing to support me, you can be my patron at:

patreon.com/maharddhika

Any amount would be appreciated. Thank you very much.

Epigraph

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka

Prelude

And now we start again. But where should we begin? Or how should we begin?

There are, as it were, lines that appear before our sight. As a human, these alone we can trace, one at a time, according to its progress. But for a deity, that is unthinkable. He surmises these lines and grasps them all at once. In this we are inferior. But to understand one has to do just that. It is therefore impossible to understand.

Until one realises something: that may be incorrect. One must indeed follow these lines, one by one, cubit by cubit, but one must see that as a temporal, temporary physical restriction; for when one has understood this restriction is overcome. It is then, not that a deity will understand, but that to understand is, by that very virtue, to be a god.

Chapter 1

Of Help and Philanthropy

1.

As the night fell on him, a primate’s mind was filled with sudden and awful fear. Never in his life had he ever known this thing; having, thus far, met none but broken impressions. But his given brain, having been worked up through chance and misery, thrust him at last into just that state; a state, indeed, of horrid confusion. And no wonder, for his whole life he had only known to sense and feel. And thus the sky, when looked at was bright, then turning dark, and pouring rains at whim. And in his way there were trees and tall grasses, where danger sometimes lurked. But he had never grasped the vastness of that sky, unending in its chain, which now seemed to him scarcely thinkable. Nor had he caught up with how so often he could have been maimed, wrecked, and left to die alone on every nook and turn, yea, every single day. Death itself came at last. The air felt so tight as he now cast himself into that emptiness where all his family had gone. That he should have gone there too made him take a stone and throw it to the wall, over and over and over. Until there was a sound coming from the door. Startled he sought