Enjoying the view from Limbo
Drug advocates who justify their pleasure-seeking or escapism with notions of a “higher consciousness” which they believe may be achieved through chemicals, seem to me much like a man who looks through a kaleidoscope and believes he has discovered the true world. If only insight and understanding were so simple. On the contrary, it would be more plausible to say that we must...
The single most universal and inescapable necessity of all human life is death. In principle, though not in subjective experience, it is known from the very beginning of life that this outcome is inevitable. This awareness, to the extent that it is achieved, colors every aspect of life, and increasingly so over the years, until its certain, though temporally unpredictable, arrival. It would...
To avoid death at all costs is the primary aim and concern of human life — so says this late modern age, which at the same time is so smugly proud of having scientifically proven that life does not exist, but is merely an epiphenomenon of accidental material interactions. To avoid death at all costs is to define oneself as subject to continuous...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 22, 2020 · Last modified December 25, 2020
Strictly speaking, the opposite of life is not death, but rather non-life. Everything depends, then, on how one defines life, in order to determine, by implication, what non-life entails. That is to say, it is possible that death is not essentially opposed to life at all, if life is defined in such a way that non-life may be attributed to a being that...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 4, 2020 · Last modified December 5, 2020
To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...
This autumn, Pope Francis shocked the world by finally saying something rational, religious, and rhetorically out of step with this progressive moment — the occasion was duly noted here in Limbo — namely that “gossiping is a worse plague than COVID.” As my adopted home of South Korea gradually returns to something the government calls “Level 1.5” social distancing (don’t ask), thus more...
Death comes to all, whether we imagine it everywhere and spend our lives running and hiding from it, whether we seek and embrace it in an act of cowardly bravado aimed at alleviating our overactive imaginations, or whether we simply live our lives to the best of our abilities secure in the awareness that someday it will come. It is coming in any...
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
If every single Republican in Washington, D.C. over age fifty tests positive for COVID-19, and not a single one of them dies or even becomes critically ill, will the media still try to cite this spread as evidence that America needs more lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and mass hysteria to save us from this deadly contagion? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. In...
I am the last person to go around denigrating a person’s dying wishes, let alone advising that anyone ignore or outright refuse to respect a person’s dying wishes. As Milan Kundera says in his excellent musing on artistic intentions, Testaments Betrayed, if a farmer on his death bed tells his son not to cut down the old tree next to the house, we...
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