Enjoying the view from Limbo
Morbid curiosity getting the better of me this morning, I made the momentous decision to give almost two minutes of my earthly life to popular movie director Christopher Nolan. I watched the trailer for his latest award-baiting film, The Odyssey. Well, to be honest, I should say that I gave about fifty seconds of my life to Nolan, after which the trailer continued...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 12, 2026 · Last modified July 13, 2026
Partisans.– A comprehensive explanation for today’s hyper-partisan politics (aka tribalism) would merely be an elucidation of this aphorism from Nietzsche, published in 1878: Not suited to be a party man. — He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon. From which we may...
Watching Donald Trump these days, with his increasingly unhinged bluster and threats and humorless assaults on common sense, I see more and more of what I have always seen. It is the same thing we would see in Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and any other upside-down man of our time for that matter, were they all as constitutionally inclined toward infantile public exposure...
In case anyone is curious as to why I felt no inclination, let alone motivation, to write anything here in honor of this year’s most auspicious July 4th holiday, allow me to explain the reason. July 4th is Independence Day, a holiday established to celebrate the founding of The United States of America, and this year’s Independence Day was supposed to be special...
The key to participating in the definitive activity of the philosophic life is not, as may sometimes be assumed, merely a matter of having sufficient private time, let alone of being alone for any specific length of time. The essential thing, rather, is the subjective certainty of being free to become immersed in one’s train of thought without any (perceived) threat of interruption....
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
Every age’s defining desires and corresponding fears are revealed by the gods it worships. For example, an age that worships money and technology — or, if you will, Business and Applied Science, this age’s iterations of Zeus and Hera — reveals its defining desires as material comfort and practical ease (i.e., the absence of desire), its defining sources of fear as personal insecurity...
Recently, a student who got started on the philosophic path a little later than is ideal, and who, in spite of her endless enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, is still occasionally beset — as indeed we all are at times — with belittling self-doubts in the face of the vastness of all there is to know, and the undeniably daunting wisdom of the men who...
Social existence is being surrounded by a hundred relentless and incorrigible replicas of everything you have ever disliked and tried to correct in yourself. Social existence is tolerating what you told yourself you would never tolerate, accepting standards you swore you would never lower yourself to accepting, and pretending you are satisfied with conditions you despise. Social existence is living and working alongside...
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