Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
What does it mean to be open-minded, in the sense required for serious learning and self-development? It certainly does not mean assuming that every idea is as good as every other, or that no one’s perspective is truer than anyone else’s. That is not openness; it is relativism. Relativism is the death of thinking, philosophy, and self-development, because it suffocates the desire that motivates…
A good warrior is a person who is willing to obey orders or carry out an assigned duty for his society, even to the point of death if necessary. A good man, by contrast, is a person who is willing to disobey orders or defy an assigned duty of his society, even to the point of death if necessary. From this it follows...
This past weekend, Donald Trump made what our minute-by-minute age calls “history” by becoming the first U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl game. In other words, true to form, Trump was the first president in American history crass enough to think it appropriate to turn even his country’s most popular annual apolitical entertainment event into a divisive and hyper-political photo opportunity for...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 31, 2025 · Last modified May 16, 2026
Elon Musk, as I have previously discussed here, has been widely accused of giving a Nazi salute to his fellow Trump supporters, said accusation consisting in an object lesson in establishing a truth by dint of endless repetition of a blatant lie. For the video clip of the supposed neo-Nazi outrage is readily available for all to see, although I am quite sure...
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…
My country, wrong.— There are broadly two ways to criticize one’s own country. The first is to despise what it was and is, and desire its replacement with something else. The second is to despise what it has become — that is, what it has been replaced with — and lament the loss of what it was or ought to have been. I...
In the eternal battle between cats and birds, I am always on the side of the birds. Make no mistake, though: I know the battle is eternal, which is to say that it is both essential and without hope of ultimate resolution or victory. I have chosen my side nevertheless, or rather perhaps I ought to say that I have been chosen by...
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 26, 2024 · Last modified April 27, 2024
Socrates, in The Republic, defines the five essential forms of government in rank order, from most to least just: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. His cleverest rhetorical trick, the most famous (and probably least understood) conceit in the dialogue, is his redefinition of aristocracy by means of the radical proposal that in order to realize a truly just city in practice, philosophers would...
We spend a lot of time (which is itself an illusion) hemming and hawing with mock-profundity about what we are going to do, as though we were making decisions, rather than merely waiting to do what we must do. We must either flow with the wave in which we inevitably find ourselves, or struggle to remain standing and resistant against its force. But...
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