DAREN JONESCU

Enjoying the view from Limbo

Tagged: meaning of life

Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections

Random Reflections: AI’s Precursor, Sculpting A Life, Forests and Trees

The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...

Ideas and Reflections

Choosing the Best Life

Recently, a student who got started on the philosophic path a little later than is ideal, and who, in spite of her endless enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, is still occasionally beset — as indeed we all are at times — with belittling self-doubts in the face of the vastness of all there is to know, and the undeniably daunting wisdom of the men who...

Ideas and Reflections

Money and the Good Life

I had the following exchange the other day with a thoughtful student who is currently in the process of working out how to orient her life in ways that involve the least spiritual compromise. I reproduce it here with only minor cosmetic editing. Do you like money? I like it as much as I don’t like living on a park bench. But I...

Ideas and Reflections

Reflections on Body and Soul

Against Stoicism.— Each of us, when we slam a window on our finger or stub our toe, is instantly two years old again. If you think this reveals a profound truth about our nature or “undermines all our pretenses of reason and civilization,” then you are either of the nature of a materialist cynic who shouts his atheism, prayer-like, to the heavens, or...

Books / Ideas and Reflections

Reflections On Living Outside of One’s Time

The opening lesson I offer whenever I teach any kind of classic literature, in a classroom or privately, and whether fiction or philosophy, is always some version of this: “There are ideas in this book that might strike us as immediately strange, morally uncomfortable, or completely contrary to our modern way of looking at things. When you see such ideas, always remind yourself...

Ideas and Reflections

Random Reflections On Being Here

The annoying thing about unrestrained government authority is that it does not magically become beneficial when it happens to fall into the hands of the faction you prefer. The insidious thing about unrestrained government authority is that it invariably appears to have become a beneficial thing when in the hands of the faction you prefer. Everything political leaders do is questionable, because only...

Ideas and Reflections

Reflections On Living

How to know whether you are still alive.– Do you occasionally think something that cannot be communicated properly without discarding all stock phrases and standard “talking points” vocabulary? Better yet, do you occasionally catch yourself thinking something that, for all your sincerest efforts, cannot be communicated in any language you know? That is to say, do you sometimes feel trapped within an idea...

Ideas and Reflections

Reflections On Meaning and Modernity

When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...

Ideas and Reflections

Alternatives

Do you believe that there are certain fundamental tensions in human nature, that these tensions are intractable, that the challenge of surviving these tensions reasonably well is essentially what living a good life means, and that finding one’s way through these incongruities of our nature is possible only or primarily at the individual level, which is not to say in isolation, but rather...

Ideas and Reflections

On Being A Sloth

Recently, a serious student mired in stressful study for a professional certification exam expressed anxiety about her current situation and concern about her work ethic, wondering how her study progress, judged by Time, would look any better than the movement of a sloth. This description got me thinking about our common use of the sloth as a standard metaphor for inefficient or unproductive...