Enjoying the view from Limbo
Morbid curiosity getting the better of me this morning, I made the momentous decision to give almost two minutes of my earthly life to popular movie director Christopher Nolan. I watched the trailer for his latest award-baiting film, The Odyssey. Well, to be honest, I should say that I gave about fifty seconds of my life to Nolan, after which the trailer continued...
“The soul” is mankind’s general name for everything we are and are meant to be. “The body” is our name for every obstacle, hardship, and distraction that would prevent us from becoming what we are and are meant to be. The old war between the Ancients and the Moderns turns on the fact that the Ancients understood this relation and therefore perceived the...
The imaginary body.— To worship pleasure is to empower pain, which in turn is to elevate the body and its distractions to the status of self-identity. But if I am my body, then I do not exist, for the body is merely the soul’s imaginary postulate of a hypothetical space radically distinct from space in general. Body is real; my body is not....
Beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject…
Party life.— Stay out of the partisan ruse that passes itself off as politics today. No taking sides, no “lesser of two evils” rationalizations, no caring about the parties’ mutual assured destruction shadow play as though you were not their intended victim. To care is to delude oneself that there is something within the realm of practical possibility which would be better, and...
What moderns crave.– We look for emergencies — literally, for emerging problems. They give us respite from the stable emptiness that results from having exhausted last month’s emergency. Modern humans are ever-resourceful in finding emergencies to satisfy their need for some new crisis that absolutely demands attention right now. Not action, mind you, but merely attention. It is not that we moderns want...
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...
We are born almost exclusively matter. Our aim is to become almost exclusively soul. This trajectory of nature, our teleology, though rarely perceived and barely understood by those few who do perceive it, must be the touchstone of all our self-understanding and all our judgments and choices. Today, however, men strive to maintain and perpetuate their most fully material condition, regarding the gradual...
Recently, a serious student who has embarked with gusto on the path of philosophy mused, in an e-mail, about what it means, definitionally speaking, to “be who she is.” Let’s say this is a note for the future, in case I might lose myself someday. What if I lose myself and forget who I was? Read this: “From myself in the past (2022)...
Do not attempt to live in ordinary ways — to “carry on with your life as well as possible” — during times of crisis and decline. When oppression is ascendant, liberation naturally becomes, or ought to become, the central theme of practical life. If it does not, then you are living in detachment from your true situation, which is never advisable and may...
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