Walking and Thinking
“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”
Chris Augusta
Letter: On “Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense”
“Vice President Harris’s phrase could be described as the animating principle behind the whole modern project, as well as much of what we think of as progress: The more we unburden ourselves from nature and history, the more human ideas can determine what can be.”
Letter: Reflecting on “These People All Know Each Other”
“Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?”
Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Rereading
“If reading is about a relationship with a text, then my subsequent readings represented different relationships. As I changed, the book changed. I was a different person reading a different book. I am not even sure it is accurate to call this rereading.”
What Type of Religion Is Wokeness?
“As we might expect, the Woke, often well educated and articulate, have generated their own convoluted and comprehensive ‘theology’ replete with saints and sinners, priests and heretics, and even their own kind of Heaven and Hell.”
Dr. Fauci and Our Pandemic of Distrust
“To challenge Dr. Fauci is, thus, to challenge a kind of revealed truth. Those who question Dr. Fauci are not merely expressing differing opinions; rather, they are apostates, ‘science deniers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ spreading dangerous ‘misinformation,’ and they are worthy of ridicule, censorship, and, of
Roberto Calasso: A Man Possessed
“Roberto Calasso passed away this year at the age of 80. There is no one quite like Roberto Calasso; perhaps there is no one remotely like Roberto Calasso.”
From Revolting Masses to Revolting Elites
“Although reaching immense influence in the 20th century, the mass man is the ‘spoiled child of history,’ and when he goes in search of bread, says Ortega, he always does one thing, ‘He wrecks the bakery.’”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part IV): Wars of the Spirit
“Lewis observes that young people are no longer being taught to experience a unity with greater powers but, rather, to accept themselves as separated from greater reality.”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part III): From Dada, to Dachau, to Davos
“While seemingly contrary in ‘theory,’ the great totalitarian systems—fascism and communism—would have a great deal in common in practice. Both are manifestations of the human Ego flailing about in a world reduced to Nothing.”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part II): Something for Nothing
“We presumed to be no longer worshipping anything, but were we not actually worshipping Nothing?”
A Brief History of Nothing
“Historically, human beings worshipped gods or God; modern secular man worships Nothing.”
George Orwell: from Hell to Salvation
“Leaving behind a bucolic past, the engine of modernity has nature on the run as it speeds towards an uncertain future.”
Allan Bloom at Harvard, a Lesson Reverberating through the Years
“ The university is nothing less than the institutionalization of Socrates. So the end of philosophy in the university portends the subversion of democracy itself.”
The Coronavirus and a “Coup d’état” of the Brain
“Today, we are witnessing the medical equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Moon Mission.”
When We Oversimplify Darwin
“Charles Darwin himself was quite wary of the metaphysical or religious implications of his discoveries.”
Maurizio Cattelan and When Art “Ridicules Art Itself”
“This is an art which no longer presumes to speak to or for the general public. Such an art “assails all previous art” and even “ridicules art itself.”
Can We Read Moby Dick?
“But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?”
Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”: Where Is Meaning to be Found?
“Aeschylus’ tragedy represents the most elemental aspects of our human condition: all human flourishing comes with a cost.”
Poetry and Modernity
“Any civilization or culture is itself a vast dynamic interpretation or, we could even say, a vast dynamic work of art.”
The Secular Age Fails to Escape Its Roots
“These transformations in understandings of sacrifice culminate in what today we think of as our ‘liberation’ from centuries of naïveté and superstition.”
Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
On Nihilism and the Power of Nothing
“While the mass man is the product of his history, the mass man recognizes no necessary connection or debt to his past. He is ‘the spoiled child of human history’ with a, ‘radical ingratitude to all that has made possible the ease of his existence.’”
A Reply to Matt McManus: The Last Man
“There appear then to be two kinds of people: those who presume history has ended and those who do not presume history has ended.”