Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 14, 2025 · Last modified July 16, 2025
If your most important contribution to the world was something you did for material gain, then you have not contributed anything of great importance to the world. The profit motive exists, and works well, but what profit motivates is not of a higher nature. Or rather, even the most potentially beautiful activity becomes pedestrian and merely practical to the extent that profit is...
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 5, 2025 · Last modified July 6, 2025
The opening lesson I offer whenever I teach any kind of classic literature, in a classroom or privately, and whether fiction or philosophy, is always some version of this: “There are ideas in this book that might strike us as immediately strange, morally uncomfortable, or completely contrary to our modern way of looking at things. When you see such ideas, always remind yourself...
The danger of political identity.— The moment one begins to identify oneself with a party, movement, or faction, one has also begun to shift one’s intellectual center of gravity from the solid ground of the mind’s own observations and perceived needs to the anxious and ever-shifting social imperatives of remaining a partisan in good standing, imperatives that perforce become increasingly compelling and emotionally...
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” as we moderns are so fond of saying. There is probably no serious adage about the soul which is subject to a greater gap between the number of people who cite it and the number who understand it. Apart from that sad fact, however, it is notable that late modernity has gradually transformed the expression from general...
Having outlined my basic premises and principles in Parts One and Two, I have arrived at a point where I may finally reply directly to the last of your original questions, which, once again, was… 3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view. You phrase the question in two parts, which...
Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to...
A few months ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a most inquisitive student about the role of advanced technology in modern life, and specifically how our age’s technological obsession has blinded us to fundamental questions, not only about the ultimate human value of our rapid material changes, but also about the terms on which we categorize technological innovations as “advances” in the...
A common classroom activity is to ask students to speak or write about what they would do if they were “king for a day.” I hate that activity, as it fosters the notion that absolute power is desirable; and to my recollection, I have yet to hear of a single child—or adult—giving the proper answer: “I would abolish the monarchy.” Modern civilization desperately...
The imaginary body.— To worship pleasure is to empower pain, which in turn is to elevate the body and its distractions to the status of self-identity. But if I am my body, then I do not exist, for the body is merely the soul’s imaginary postulate of a hypothetical space radically distinct from space in general. Body is real; my body is not....
Donald Trump continues to insist that the stumbling block to a peace deal in Ukraine is President Zelensky. (Why do I refer to Trump as “Donald” while at the same time referring to the leader of Ukraine as “President Zelensky”? Because I am a Platonist who believes that truth consists primarily in proper definitions. Zelensky is the president of Ukraine. Trump has ceased...
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