Enjoying the view from Limbo
From the “truer words were never spoken” file, a few wise aphorisms from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others. (II.6) The best...
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 20, 2018 · Last modified May 24, 2018
Apropos of a discussion of Plato’s intentions in his depiction of Socrates, and specifically the notable ways that Plato’s Socrates differs both from Xenophon’s contemporaneous depiction and from the historical figure later Socratic philosophers, such as the Stoics, had in mind, a friend who views Plato with some skepticism confronted me with this provocative question: Is Plato a philosopher or an artist? Is...
“August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.” (Franz Kafka, diary entry) Tuesday morning, needing something to read while my graduate students wrote their midterm exam, and having been somewhat guiltily perusing Kafka’s diaries lately — I hope he doesn’t mind, though I suspect he does — I selected a rereading of “The Metamorphosis” as my amusement....
A couple of days ago, I spent an idle hour rifling through Nietzsche’s Gay Science, one of my personal favorites among his books. Reading various familiar but half-forgotten aphorisms almost at random, I came across the following excellent passage discussing a very “German” topic on which Nietzsche is always profound, scholars. Specifically, Nietzsche is addressing the problem of the scholar through the lens...
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, falsifying my Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis that they are actually the same person, have appeared together at a press conference, where they reassured everyone…that they are actually the same person. I understand your doubts: McConnell is a mealy-mouthed, vowel-swallowing, conniving turtle, whereas Trump is a crude, thought-disintegrating, pinwheel-hat-level vulgarian. Ergo, Jekyll and Hyde. So when it’s time for...
Tuesday morning, I gave my final pre-midterm lecture in my Twentieth Century English Fiction class, completing Joyce’s Dubliners with an analysis of the final pages of “The Dead.” Joyce’s perspective is ultimately deeply flawed in my view, but there’s no denying that the man knew how to finish a story. I may have been a little more animated during this lecture, given my penchant for going out with a bang, but for...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 22, 2017 · Last modified April 2, 2017
Plato informs us that Socrates, awaiting execution in his prison cell, devoted some of his time to writing verse. Socrates — that supreme dialectician and debunker of the Muses, writing poetry! Recalling that for the ancient Greeks, the battle of Philosophy vs. Poetry was a prime manifestation of what we now call Reason vs. Revelation, we are startled, right there in the pages of the Phaedo, to...
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 5, 2017 · Last modified April 16, 2017
We artificially restrain our boys and girls from developing themselves into young adults, so that by the time they reach the proper physical age for leaping headlong into life, they are so ill-suited to do so that they almost crave the fettered boredom of high school as a means of avoiding a world for which they (correctly) feel utterly unprepared. Again, the crime...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 1, 2016 · Last modified October 2, 2016
This is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of How Democracies Perish, an analysis of the spread of world communism by Jean-François Revel, one of freedom’s most serious French defenders since Tocqueville. At the heart of this work, Revel details “The Tools of Communist Expansion,” among which the most relevant for understanding our current situation comes in Chapter 16, “Ideological Warfare and Disinformation.”...
America Descending / Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 1, 2016 · Last modified July 3, 2020
If the closest confidante and advisor to an extremely consequential American president had written a fantasy novel about a heroic social agitator with a plan to bring about a “benevolent” progressive dictatorship by instigating a brutal civil war, might one imagine that an honest press would take an interest? In fact this has happened, and America’s actual press has tried to dismiss the...
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