Our culture emphasizes “building wealth” not “building places,” self-service over community life. Pragmatics, efficiency, metrics, metropolis. We have been sold a new vision of architecture, centered on convenience, comfort, the car. This vision erodes our connection to the land, and it is from the land from which we ultimately draw our vitality and viability….
What is to be done? I cannot forget, by some means distract myself, from the darkness that invests Washington, and seems to be gathering strength. This poem by Tennyson, giving voice to aged Ulysses, captures my sense of our situation. The aspiration, given the constraints of age as well as the advantage of experience…
Is there enough pride, daring boldness, self-assurance, enough spiritual will, will to responsibility, freedom of will available today for “the philosopher” to be from now on really —- possible on earth? The desire to see differently for once in this way is not a small discipline of the intellect, and a preparation for its…
Friday morning is bright, a rare sunlit day for midwinter. Mentally I wrestle with a better understanding of artificial intelligence, the future which accelerates toward me with self-driving vehicles and all manner of intelligent things busily analyzing my habits and tastes. I just finished reading a four page essay by Gilles Deleuze published in…
Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games We got everything you want honey, we know the names We are the people that can find whatever you may need If you got the money, honey we got your disease Have we been seduced into imagining that the day to day operation of government…
I couldn’t listen. Last night after our philosophy discussion ended I departed for home. Tuning to NPR on the radio a few minutes after 9PM, the voice of President Trump filled the space around me. His labored reading of lines, halting enunciation of words, caused me to cringe inwardly. Feeling my disgust I changed…
If we spend our life looking for the eye of the hurricane, we live a life that is fruitless. We die without having really lived. No one can know what life is. But we can experience life directly. Only that is given to human beings. Life is not a safe space. It never was,…
I believe there is no ultimate meaning outside of humankind, no final answer to be discovered which provides a certain anchor, a firm grounding, a robust assurance that “all will be well” and that all human suffering is justified. Life itself is change; life is recognized by our self-awareness and reason in the form…
I believe human freedom is narrowly circumscribed, channeled, confined by genetic inheritance, by the resources available for clothing, shelter, nourishment, safety, and above all shaped — by the values absorbed from the birth family, and mores of the zeitgeist into which I was born. None of these factors were and are, within my discretion….
I mentioned that in graduate school that one requirement for graduation was that I compose a essay addressing the foundational belief commitments that I held at the time. A friend suggested that I post that statement. so I retrieved an age-tinged copy composed on a typewriter in 1983. I confess that I still hold…
