Enjoying the view from Limbo
In fact pleasures and pains are the things with which moral virtue is concerned. For pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions. Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.iii,...
A man lives in fear of saying the wrong thing, lest he be abandoned. Yet in truth the knowledge that they will abandon you if you say the wrong thing is all the more reason not to care what they want you to say.
The only legitimate purpose of amusement is as an efficient and necessary means of restoring the soul’s energy…
We are told in a thousand ways today that we are engaged in a global struggle to save democracy. Perhaps we are. If so, it would do us well to take a moment to ask what it is that we are trying to save, exactly, and furthermore, whether or in what sense it deserves to be saved. Democracy, we like to say, was...
We are born almost exclusively matter. Our aim is to become almost exclusively soul. This trajectory of nature, our teleology, though rarely perceived and barely understood by those few who do perceive it, must be the touchstone of all our self-understanding and all our judgments and choices. Today, however, men strive to maintain and perpetuate their most fully material condition, regarding the gradual...
The philosophic life, understanding that phrase in its most comprehensive and classical sense, can often seem a remote and unrealistic notion in our late modernity. Human existence today, in the developed world, is so fraught with inescapable interconnectedness, indoctrinated utilitarianism, and the practical appeal of “capitalist society,” that Socrates’ observation, during the sentencing phase of his trial, that he simply had no money...
In my recent “Reflections From A Great Distance,” I compared the thinking life to backing away from a mirror. Seeing yourself too close up exaggerates one’s perception of the immediate foreground of life, the accidental details of the moment — flaws, errors, pleasures, excitements, fears, frustrations, and all the rest of the transient and noisy. As you back away, those accidental details of...
This is actually not a reply but more like Mayday. Be, it surely is a familiar word, but I’ve never met such a confusing one before. Even though it is not too much to say that “be” is the most common verb, it is extremely difficult to understand the meaning of the word. Be, exist, being, existence, property, essence…
The defining mission of this website, sometimes pursued subliminally, sometimes overtly, is to undermine the corruptive influence of “current events,” which is to say the distracting noise of the everyday, in the lives of anyone within reach of my voice. As our civilization winds down, the attraction of building a solid spiritual fortress to defend the soul against the glittering degradations and nihilistic...
Last Sunday, I received an e-mail from a serious student who has been studying painting. She had taken a day trip to a nearby cape to enjoy the ocean view, and had come away with some difficult questions about the value of her artistic pursuits. In particular, she reflected that she would never be able to capture more than “a shadow” of the...
Anaxagoras says the world is comprised of innumerable seeds of all things, which are grouped into various proportions, these proportions determining each thing’s identity, by a whirlwind controlled by Mind. Aristotle’s own theory of the intellect is influenced by this Anaxagorean imagery, as he equates “controlled” with “known,” and Anaxagoras’ seeds with his own notion of potency (matter). Anaxagoras believes the cosmos, qua...
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