Enjoying the view from Limbo
The Enlightenment has thrived in today’s popular imagination and in the social sciences that are its children (products of the Enlightenment’s attempt to reduce human nature to just another subject of empirical investigation) on the basis of certain myths. As these myths are used to justify so many absurdities today, from our theories of public education to the sheepish surrender of our common...
A student sent me an e-mail yesterday which consisted of one simply-worded, but far from simplistic, question: “How can I be rational?” The question has perennial importance, of course, and may in a sense be the defining concern of the human soul. However, as the obstacles to living in accordance with reason grow more pervasive and pernicious with each generation, the notion of “being...
A student who sometimes visits me in search of advice and direction for her life, and who has come to view me as something of a role model, recently asked, in an effort to understand how I maintain my peculiar form of extreme focus, “Are you moderate?” My immediate response was to reiterate an expression I have adopted as a kind of personal...
“To look at” vs. “To see”: Directing one’s eyes toward a thing is completely different from focusing one’s vision upon it. To look at a thing is a physical action, a movement of the body and an aiming or orienting of the organs of sight. To see that thing (to focus upon one part of one’s visual field rather than another) is a...
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