Enjoying the view from Limbo
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 15, 2024
Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational...
In the eternal battle between cats and birds, I am always on the side of the birds. Make no mistake, though: I know the battle is eternal, which is to say that it is both essential and without hope of ultimate resolution or victory. I have chosen my side nevertheless, or rather perhaps I ought to say that I have been chosen by...
There are gods even here. — Aristotle, Parts of Animals When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me more than I am with her? — Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond We imagine we are better than we are, because we instinctively exaggerate the value of the things we do well. Every time I watch a sparrow...
Philosophic hedonism.— The soul naturally inclines toward beliefs, solutions, behaviors, and aims that promise the greatest pleasure. Education is primarily the process of unlearning the childhood weakness for mistaking the quickest or most immediate pleasure for the greatest pleasure. The educated person is thus the one who habitually forgoes the near or easy pleasure in favor of the distant, rarefied one, and the...
From the entry on “Bird” in Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols: Every winged being is symbolic of spiritualization. The bird, according to Jung, is a beneficent animal representing spirits or angels, supernatural aid, thoughts and flights of fancy. Hindu tradition has it that birds represent the higher states of being. To quote a passage from the Upanishads: ‘Two birds, inseparable companions, inhabit the...
We are living in the proverbial “interesting times.” To say the world is in a state of flux would be absurdly generous. The world is in a state of freefall. Nothing will stop this fall now, until, inevitably, we hit the ground. And having lost the use of our wings, due to rampant materialism and generations of spiritual lockdown, we have no civilizational...
When birds stop flying,
And flowers unbloom, call me —
Until then, be calm.
_______________________
Sentimentalists
bore me with their mock feelings —
Distractions from life.
______________________
I have several
good reasons not to panic —
in my camera.
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...
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, in his dying hour, describes his mind’s eye view of the Earth, as a final life lesson for his friends. The most striking feature of his remarkable quasi-mythical account is his speculation that the true surface of the Earth is not the ground we walk on, which we mistakenly call “the Earth,” but rather the upper limits of our...
Early twentieth century Irish nationalist Robert Wilson Lynd wrote the following very worthy, somewhat Stoic, observation: In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. One has to sit still like a mystic and wait. One soon learns that fussing, instead of achieving things, merely prevents things from happening. To be passive is in some circumstances the...
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