Our highest insights must – and should! – sound like stupidities, or possibly crimes, when they come without permission to people whose ears have no affinity for them and were not predestined for them. …There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects; and who would dare…
O sancta simplicitas! What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! the wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our…
…if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their “responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group)….
It is Saturday late afternoon. Failed to write anything this morning. The stars did not align. A friend joined me at Starbucks and we enjoyed an extended conversation. I think a good principle is to give priority to friends over projects that we intend to advance. I have followed the principle with difficulty in…
A spring morning is yet one more delectable indication of the natality of the world. Nothing is fixed, unmoved, but all is in motion, the exuberance of growth, a driving trajectory of maximum expression. Perhaps that sentence is nonsense. What is my basis for knowing anything? When I know, I make the claim with…
But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the…
I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the whole plant has…
What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure of mistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent they are – how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childish childlikeness – but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty about them: even…
Saturday morning in Cleveland. It is unclear how much I will be able to write. A few minutes is available before our Tour Coach boarding time. Our night at the Hampton Inn was pleasant. One feature of our stay, from our second floor room we had a fine view of the front entrance of…
How inevitable every detail of my life has been, how channeled by prior events, some partially understood, most just opaque happenings that appear dumb, still no less impactful upon my life. Fortune and misfortune are how I would label the entire saga. I know that with some effort I could construct a list of…
