Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 26, 2024 · Last modified April 27, 2024
Socrates, in The Republic, defines the five essential forms of government in rank order, from most to least just: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. His cleverest rhetorical trick, the most famous (and probably least understood) conceit in the dialogue, is his redefinition of aristocracy by means of the radical proposal that in order to realize a truly just city in practice, philosophers would...
In honor of the passing of Daniel Dennett, I offer the following foray into my misspent youth, in which I assess Dennett’s materialist critique of consciousness in some detail. Read at your own risk. Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, though concluding with some positive suggestions regarding avenues of future consciousness research, exists primarily as a clearing house for his most developed efforts to...
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most famous and accomplished philosophy professors of the past fifty years, has died. I choose my words carefully, though I confess somewhat (certainly without intention) disrespectfully. Dennett was not a philosopher; he was a philosophy professor, a very different entity. And in saying that he died, I know that I am insulting his thought and that of...
Pushkin wrote the following lines almost exactly two hundred years ago, describing with grim fatalism his vision of liberty’s chances in his fatherland:
“With Freedom’s Seed”
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow.”
With freedom’s seed the desert sowing,
I walked before the morning star;
An Orwellian entity called the European Court of Human Rights has declared that duly elected governments which pursue paths of fiscal responsibility and rational restraint with regard to the neo-Marxist demands of climate activists are by definition guilty of violating human rights, such rights now implicitly including the right to have one’s society and economy micromanaged by unfettered climate communists. In Scotland, it is...
Q. What would Donald Trump have to do to change your mind about him? A. He would have to replace his rational faculty with that of Thomas Jefferson, his temperament with that of Ronald Reagan, and his principles with those of George Washington. Unfortunately, his life, past and present, shows him to be on the very opposite end of the spectrum on all...
Art and non-art.— Every drama worthy of the name has some sort of implied agenda. The difference between dramatic hackery and dramatic art is that the hack begins with the agenda, and manipulates his characters and scenario around as needed to “prove” it, whereas the artist begins with characters and scenario, and allows these to unfold as feels natural to him until, willy-nilly...
Victor Davis Hanson, the favorite historian of American conservatives, continues the magic thinking of the MAGA cult’s educated minority, which finds ever more imaginative ways of persuading itself and its lobotomized audience (the MAGA majority) that Donald Trump is somehow the solution to all the problems he causes. The key to this magic thinking is the not-so-subtle art of obscuring or denying the...
Life in spite of everything.— A Turkish proverb: “One already wet does not feel the rain.” From which it follows that if you can withstand five seconds of discomfort, undesirable conditions ought to be no barrier. Waste not, want not.— A student’s question: “Why shouldn’t I follow a cheap pleasure?” The answer: “Because it leads you into the habit of more and more...
The selfie culture, as it is elevatingly called — the universal youth vanity obsession with taking endless photographs of oneself and spewing them indiscriminately throughout the cosmos — is a perfect emblem of the endtimes. It is our species’ final surrender to the fate of absolute self-annihilation, which is to say pure non-existence. The most obscure wisdom from the fog of philosophic antiquity...
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