Enjoying the view from Limbo
The only thoughts that ultimately matter much are those which we may, following Nietzsche, call “thoughts out of season.” This is true in part because seasonal thoughts, by definition, do little to advance the discussion, and tend to merely amplify the ambient noise, but mainly because such thoughts, being reflections of one’s time and surroundings, are often difficult even to classify as thoughts...
I just read the following headline from Reuters — one of the world’s largest and most widely-read news agencies — related to the Hollywood gossip story of an actor’s accidental shooting of a cinematographer on a movie set: “Gun not thoroughly checked before Alec Baldwin fired fatal shot.” Really? It wasn’t thoroughly checked. Well, who could have guessed? I mean, prior to this...
If the universe were infinite, everything of which it is comprised would by necessity be infinitesimal, and a universe of incalculable vastness thus comprised of an array of incalculably small components — with both the incalculably small components and the incalculably vast whole becoming increasingly so (small and vast, respectively), without end. In such a condition, everything — both the world and its...
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...
Oscar Wilde wrote that “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” Wilde’s century was rife with the luxury of unpaid-for emotion, which is the special indulgence of the comfortable class. Our own time, however, has elevated this romantic weakness for claiming unearned emotion to an artform — and then, as is typical...
If everyone in a crowded room were speaking at the same time, who would be the audience? Would each person not merely be speaking to himself? Would each person not therefore be failing to attend to anyone else? In such a condition, would not each voice beyond one’s own be reduced in one’s awareness to the status of background noise, a distraction? In...
How much of the challenge of political philosophy is rooted in deficiencies of available language? How many essential truths have failed to reach the ears they needed to reach at the critical moment, merely because the individuals who saw those truths lacked universally familiar points of reference with which to communicate their lightning bolts with sufficient precision, or at least with the shattering...
I prefer feeling anxiously alone to feeling safely swaddled within a crowd. I prefer ideas that leave me uncomfortable in my weakness to ideas that satisfy my weakest inclinations. I prefer looking at things squarely to rounding off the edges of my vision for the sake of stability. I prefer the constant hum of disquiet that comes of acknowledging the vast unknown to...
A note on Derrida and the postmoderns.– Difficult language is sometimes necessary to communicate thought. However, difficulty, in the sense of varying degrees of opaqueness or indecipherability, must never be the goal, for the simple reason that language must never be the goal. To make language itself the goal of writing is analogous to making pots and utensils the goal of cooking. This...
Here is Donald Trump, so-called President of the United States, in a “blistering” letter to Nancy Pelosi about the impeachment process, most of which was obviously written by lawyers and aides, but a few lines of which, such as the following, were clearly inserted by the man himself, as they bear all the marks of his special form of erudition: You have cheapened...
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