Enjoying the view from Limbo
Books / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 25, 2025 · Last modified February 26, 2025
A question from an ambitious student, paraphrased: What makes poetry poetry? In other words, what are the defining features of a poem that distinguish it from other forms of verbal or written communication? The easiest answer, and probably the one you would find most often in any quick internet search of this question, is that poetry, unlike non-poetry, is written in verse form,...
There is no art without limits. Absolute freedom of expression, attractive as it may be as a theoretical principle, ought never to be allowed into the arena of artistic endeavor. Art thrives on finding ways to imply what cannot be said and to reveal new beauty within the constraints of existing forms — and existing norms. Even the artists whom we have come...
Political life is over. There are only money and guns now, each of these, in any socially effective quantities, increasingly concentrated in the hands of an increasingly affiliated few. Everywhere, men are cowering, conceding, complying — and not only with their bodies. Modern men, in fact, have developed an impressive ability to feign courage, resistance, and erectness with their bodies, as a veil...
Plato presents his teacher, Socrates, as the foremost expert on love and the most erotic of all men, on the grounds that Eros is at base the longing for immortality, thus defining a natural hierarchy of human fulfillments, at the peak of which resides the search for eternal truths, i.e., philosophy. Aristotle, taking the cosmic view, explains the relationship between the world of...
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