Enjoying the view from Limbo
The principle of the thing matters more than the individual outcomes — and this includes also one’s own individual outcomes.
There is no reality that, having finally revealed itself, cannot be accepted, and to which one cannot adjust oneself. This adaptability is not to be mistaken for….
Every person I care about on this Earth either lived in the past, or lives in the present. Within a very few years of my departure from this Earth, there will be no one left on the planet whom I ever knew or cared about. Why, therefore, should I concern myself about what happens to my work, my thoughts, or my deeds after...
Anything that cannot be justified as contributing to the advance of my ultimate human goal — the glimpse of eternity, a share of wisdom, god-like happiness, call it what you will — must be regarded as an obstacle and liability, and therefore rejected or actively diminished in significance in my life, as the case admits. It is the easiest thing in the world,...
You are obliged by the most basic necessities of nature to make choices. You should therefore make your choices with the greatest degree of attention, the widest range of understanding, and the most serious appreciation for the extent to which your freedom to choose in any given circumstance is a gift that will come only once. But there is one more element of...
Freedom is not caring what they think, not fearing what they say, and not dwelling on what they might do. Freedom is listening to them when it suits you, but without ever needing to listen — and speaking when it suits you, but without ever needing them to hear. Freedom is seeing where you have changed, without fear of the sight — and...
Late modernity, having adopted naïve materialism as its religion, has dismissed the belief in the immortality of the soul, not merely as a logical consequence of rejecting the soul itself, but rather morally, objecting to the belief in an immortal soul as a kind of cowardice, specifically a refusal to accept the “hard truth” of life’s brevity and the absolute finality of death...
A student with whom I engage in regular philosophical discussions sent me the following musing, after admiring the night sky during a full moon: A few stars reveal their existence by the tiny but clear sparkle, and I think of how tiny I will be from the point of view of the stars. How short human life will be, and how small some...
Most human beings throughout all of the known history of our species have lived in subjection, whether in literal slavery or in the somewhat more figurative but no less tangible enslavement of life lived at the end of tyrannical tethers. They have had to struggle their way through some sort of unnatural or partial existence in which the most fundamental choices Nature provides...
The future.– Everyone will die soon, and no one knows how soon, unless he is the one facing that moment right now. You might be next, for all you know. And yet you allow your life’s worth to be reduced by coercive authority and condescending experts to the refrigerated prolongation we call security and comfort, as though it were enough, “for the time...
The honest answer.– If I knew the answer to all the world’s problems…would it make any difference? For in order for this answer to actually solve the world’s problems, the world would have to understand what the world’s problems were, and care about solving them. Furthermore, the world would have to pursue the answer to its problems in a relatively universal but also...
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