Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2025 · Last modified January 29, 2025
Listening to a friend’s description of a disappointing social engagement with a former work colleague, in which she confessed, though without any great sense of self-recrimination, that she herself was “being boring” during that evening’s dinner conversation, I was compelled to reflect upon my own life as a social entity, such as it is, or rather to reflect on the sense in which...
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and...
A student asks me what I make of the fact that she often talks to herself while walking, either repeating words she has recently said to someone or imagining what she would say in situations yet to come. My reply: I talk to myself while walking all the time. Sometimes I suddenly catch myself talking a bit too audibly, or with too much...
The classic cartoon image for discovery is a light bulb appearing above a character’s head. This is perfectly apt, and the use of light, especially a source of light, as a metaphor for the actualization of the mind, including the divine mind, is standard throughout the history of figurative expression. It must be remembered, however, that an idea as such brings light only...
Five years ago, I posted my book, “The Case Against Public Education,” here in Limbo, both as an e-book download and in a readable online version. It made no discernible difference to anything, of course. Five years is rarely long enough for serious ideas to take root, particularly ideas which run counter to all the social conventions and intellectual trends of the day;...
Purposefulness. It is better to die never having found the answer than to live never having heard the question.
Profit. Never seek material gain from the best thing you can do; for that is the literal meaning of selling one’s soul. You will not get it back.
Teaching. Those who have just opened their eyes must be led toward the sun….
Every society, without exception, tends to harden its founding presuppositions and hopes into a set of stated and unstated rules for living. Gradually, the great character and thought needed to bring a society into being give way to the forced teaching and rote learning of the simplified and simplifying rules deemed necessary to preserve that society. And this in turn reduces maturation to...
“Do as I say, not as I do.” This has for centuries been the model of bad advice, or rather of poor advisors. However, when you are speaking to yourself, it is precisely the correct admonition, and the hardest good advice to follow. There are more teachers and soldiers than there are members of any other politically essential vocation. Yet there are fewer...
Philosophic hedonism.— The soul naturally inclines toward beliefs, solutions, behaviors, and aims that promise the greatest pleasure. Education is primarily the process of unlearning the childhood weakness for mistaking the quickest or most immediate pleasure for the greatest pleasure. The educated person is thus the one who habitually forgoes the near or easy pleasure in favor of the distant, rarefied one, and the...
It is not weak, nor any contradiction of the desire for independence, to look to others’ opinions in assessing one’s own thoughts and behavior. The mistake or weakness is in looking to others’ opinions at random — looking to the crowd, or to the popular, or to the powerful. One has already made a great advance in self-knowledge and independence who is able...
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