Coda: the finale of a ballet in which the dancers parade before the audience. The values of a human being betray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its conditions of life, its true need. It would follow on the whole that easy communicability of need —-which in the last…
What, in the end, is common? Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, or groups of sensations. To understand on another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for…
Once in a while I experience time dislocation. By that I mean a disruption in my accustomed sequence of things. Time for us is a concatenation of events, causally related, more or less–that we have adapted to. Sometimes something happens to upend those expectations. If you stop to think you can imagine events that…
April 1, 1949 was the day that I was born. I seldom think about it. In past years often I needed a reminder, “Isn’t today your birthday?’ World War II concluded on September 2nd 1945 with the surrender of Japan. Germany surrendered earlier in May. I was born soon after the second great war…
Every people has its own Tartuffery and calls it its virtues— What is best in us we do not know— we cannot know. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Peoples and Fatherlands #249
A friend forwarded to me the address of a conservative web site. The site featured an article that explores the negative reaction expressed by the conservative minded to philosophers who specialize in postmodern thought. In our discussion group there is always push back when an essay is offered, authored by Slavoj Zizek or Michele…
Art lies in concealing art. –Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (December 8, 65 BC – November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). His career coincided with Rome’s momentous change from a republic to an empire. An…
Open societies, in their pluralism, create an anxiety that brings about a reaction toward a fixed organic state, which, then as now, serves both the interests of an oligarchy and those of a frightened, insecure population looking to arrest change. We live, certainly, in societies that are in many ways inequitable, unfair, capriciously oppressive,…
Diogenes used his simple lifestyle and behavior to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt or at least confused society. In a highly non-traditional fashion, he had a reputation of sleeping and eating wherever he chose and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan…
This same will has at its service an apparently opposite drive of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of deliberate shutting out, a shutting of one’s windows, an inner No to this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with the…
