Enjoying the view from Limbo
An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert. Political life is...
Modernity is hell-bent on proving what would be without need of proof if we still experienced life as humans. Case in point: it wants to demonstrate through experimentation that mortality gives life its purpose, its interest, and its reason to carry on. People before the age of science used to intuit this simply by recognizing that they were going to die, feeling afraid…
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 4, 2023 · Last modified June 26, 2023
The challenge in teaching Plato’s Apology used to be overcoming the students’ incredulity and incomprehension faced with the historical fact of a supposedly democratic society rejecting the philosophic activity so stridently as to put a man’s freedom and his very life on trial, merely for asking questions that the political establishment did not like. “How unjust and intolerant the Athenian people must have...
The single most indispensable explanation of what a philosopher is comes in the context of the most famous trial in legal history. Socrates, who in Plato’s presentation of him was and remains the definitive philosopher, the embodied essence of the philosophic life, was tried, convicted, and executed on two charges: impiety and corrupting the youth. The philosopher is thus, by definition and essential...
The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...
We are told in a thousand ways today that we are engaged in a global struggle to save democracy. Perhaps we are. If so, it would do us well to take a moment to ask what it is that we are trying to save, exactly, and furthermore, whether or in what sense it deserves to be saved. Democracy, we like to say, was...
As much as our modern temperament is inclined to demand simple reductions of everything — simple reductions being the wisdom of the common man, suitable for an egalitarian age that has elevated commonness to an ideal — there is in truth no single question that defines or epitomizes philosophical investigation. Rather, the essential questions of the philosophic pursuit may be represented as manifestations...
Multiculturalism, a Newspeak fantasy initiated, predictably enough, in Canada, is a social theory that pretends to promote and defend all cultures, while in fact — and in true intention — diluting and neutering all cultures. It accomplishes this subterfuge by subordinating all cultures to the demands of a democratic egalitarian relativism which becomes, in effect, the new global super-culture, or, more accurately, anti-culture....
If all the simpletons and halfwits magically disappeared from the Earth, society would be infinitely more rational; but then who would do the menial jobs, such as practicing modern medicine, banking, leading our largest churches, and inventing the internet? Plato’s great political insight, the founding wisdom of political philosophy itself: The only men intellectually and temperamentally suited to rule are precisely the ones...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2022
The other day, I had a written exchange with a Korean student about the problems of modern education, and specifically the narrow agenda-driven nature of modern teaching content and methods. Along the way, as one example of the problem, my student noted the gulf between political theory as presented at school and the lessons in political philosophy that she and I had discussed...
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