A long process of religious self-delusion has been necessary to pass from the myth of the birth of work as God’s punishment for the original sin, to the infamous slogan covering the entrance to Nazi concentration camps, ‘Work will set you free.’ A process which covers the distance between the origin of the French…
Wakening this morning, Tuesday, in a mental fog. I managed to stand erect, moving toward the kitchen, wondering how long until the thick malaise of mind would clear. Is this normal for a person my age, a diabetic of too many years…? What is normal? Is it the average, the median? There is no…
No community can survivethat cannot survive the worst.We lack tragic imaginationthat through communal form or ceremony,permits great loss to be recognized,suffered, and borne,and makes possiblesome sort of consolation and renewal. If we are members of a society,we participate, willy nilly,in its evils.How do we reduce our dependencyupon what is wrong?Wrong will be corrected by…
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….
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…
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,…
Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. No social order can securely found itself on the principle that…
Parents are generally anxious about really big things like melting ice caps and collapsing economy and unending stories about violence and predators and college admissions…. They displace all of these fears of things they cannot control onto the one thing they believe they can control, which is children. —-excerpt Wendy Mogel, The Blessing Of…
Many years ago, when in graduate school, I was asked to write a Credo, a concise statement of the core principles of my life. This was a good exercise for anyone intent upon earning a degree. After all what has one really learned from the exercise of education, — hours spent listening to passionate…
