Enjoying the view from Limbo
Anyone who knows me knows that I am often susceptible to the charge of being excessively disdainful or dismissive of most things contemporary, at least in the soul-defining realms of ideas, art, and politics. I freely admit to being guilty of such an excess on occasion, or even on most occasions. Having granted this, however, I must aver that I come by my...
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....
Modernity is hell-bent on proving what would be without need of proof if we still experienced life as humans. Case in point: it wants to demonstrate through experimentation that mortality gives life its purpose, its interest, and its reason to carry on. People before the age of science used to intuit this simply by recognizing that they were going to die, feeling afraid…
In Book I of his Politics, Aristotle offers a rational argument for the natural legitimacy of slavery. A modern person, encountering this fact for the first time, is likely to respond in one of two ways: (1) “Well, that shows how much we have advanced since Aristotle’s time, and makes it hard to take his political theories seriously;” or, (2) “I wonder how...
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...
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