Philosophy
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Natural Value
As the world becomes more virtual, and thereby less real, our physical world gains in stature. I reflected on this as I walked through my neighborhood today. Spring was – literally – in full bloom. Purple and yellow, ruby and orange, white, black, pink, blue and green were painting the sidewalks in a thousand different…
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What I’m Reading #3
Sun Under Wood, by Robert Hass. Selected poems from the great American poet. I’ve always been drawn to Hass’ natural insights, textual flow, great imagery, etc. Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Gregory Hays). Never intended for publication, this incredible “self-help” journal, one of the great journals of all time, provides timeless insights and recommendations…
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What I’m Reading #2
My Life & Love Are One, letters by Vincent Van Gogh, selected and arranged by Susan Polis Schutz and Nancy Hoffman. Incredible collection of heartfelt letters from Vincent to his brother Theo. nonrequired reading, by Wislawa Szymborska. Funny, insightful and eclectic collection of essays – about the big things, and the small – from the…
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A Prologue . . .
“The one that knows the beginning and the end, and knows the logos that runs through all things and that assigns to all a place, each in its allotted span, throughout the whole of time.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, circa 170 A.D. You could hear the buzz from the Logos, like cicadas pulsing on a hot, humid night…
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Dateline 2036 C.E.
Historians agree we lost our freedom in 2018. We entered a hallway, the door locked behind us – no way back. Actually, my first sentence is inaccurate: there are no historians left, at least not in the traditional sense of people looking back and trying to understand what happened and why, unraveling a thread to…
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End, then Again
Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End, paints a future of pure intellect, humans evolving to only thought, mental power. Bodies no longer needed. The novel is evocative and prescient, like most of Clarke’s work, but simplistic. He sees history in a linear fashion: moving from unrefined (that would be us) to refined (that would them),…
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Connecting
Existentialism is a humanism. Actually, it is. It asks us to focus on our current lives, not dwell on a past or future that may not even exist. Or to fixate on why we can’t do something, to hold onto constraints – and Lord knows we all have constraints – as the reason for not…
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Rediscovering Plato
I studied rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s. It was a thrilling intellectual ride and slightly counter-culture decision to study classics and history during those go-go days of Wall Street and Ivan Boesky (he of the “greed is good” mantra) and Michael J. Fox’s yuppie character Alex P. Keaton on the hit T.V. series…
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Sartre, Now
Jean Paul Sartre writes about now; about here: what he is experiencing and feeling at any given moment; and most intriguingly, what the objects around him ‘feel’ and project and demand. He is ‘present’ as we would now say, watching and trying, very hard, to capture the essence of being human, of existing in an…
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Philosophy at Work
The unimaginable – certainly the unpredictable – continues, literally every day, in American politics. Strong feelings swirl across the political and cultural spectrum. Families, friends, co-workers, partners are embattled, angry, anxious; exhausted. I’m in the same boat, so felt it was a good opportunity to put Alain de Botton’s “Consolations of Philosophy” to work — namely,…
Words to Live By
One evening I saw a red sunset, its rays falling on the trunks and foliage of pines growing among a tumble of rocks, coloring the trunks and foliage with orange fire. It was superb.
— Vincent van Gogh
Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation . . .
— Albert Einstein
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.
— Thomas Wolfe
I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself — that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
— Albert Camus
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
— Simone Weil
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
— Walt Whitman
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The process: sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the flow of the narrative on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.
— Haruki Murakami
Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe