Exchanged emails with a friend on the related terms: bullying, cruelty, and tyranny. Is not the recognition of this type of behavior a matter of skill? One learns by experience, and by exposure to literature, poetry, and story telling,–empathy. Empathy is learned. It is the profound appreciation of our capacity for suffering. The capacity…
Imagination is the chief instrument of the good… art is more moral than moralities. For the latter either are, or tend to become, consecrations of the status quo… The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they always spoke in free verse or by parable. —John Dewey Art as Experience (New…
A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than by force, by reform than by revolution. by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. ….an ideal liberal society is one which has no other purpose except freedom, no goal except…
The culture of liberalism should be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or of a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to…
By seeing every human being as consciously or unconsciously acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see the distinctively human, as opposed to the animal portion of each human life as the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person, object, situation, event, and word encountered in later life. This process amounts to redescribing…
SEDUCED BY HATE, INDIAN POLITICIAN EMBRACES A LYNCH MOB By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar July 20, 2018 HAZARIBAGH, India — Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey. Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston…
Perhaps you will agree that a vacation time away permits one some different choices about the foci of one’s attention. In our ordinary lives, the “blind impress” of accrued circumstances can be oppressive. We feel the need to “get away” to a destination affording different scenery, perhaps time for more reading, fewer phone calls,…
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking. —Martin Heidegger Gary kindly shared a quote that prompted him to consider afresh his conception of Reason. The quotation had the same effect upon me. And as a bonus, Gary…
Chaos is not the enemy. It is a tempting jump to this conclusion. Is it not the case that the disorganized, and even threatening elements of experience provide material for making a habitat of mind? I think so. Organization arises from the mind, and especially from the give and take of shared minds with…
These photos were taken at the Rivera Boat House at Lake Geneva this past Sunday afternoon. Lake Geneva on a Sunday afternoon is close enough to Paradise as far as I am concerned. The lake stretches to the horizon, the surface sparkling in the sun, a platter of diamonds. We walked out on the…
