Category: Human Predicament
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Righteous Indignation
Is your righteous indignation perhaps only envy in disguise?
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Righteous Anger
That there is more anger than righteousness in our righteous anger is no argument against it.
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Could Free Will be an Illusion? (2016 Expanded Version)
0. At regular intervals we find in the popular press articles about how free will is an illusion or 'a trick the brain plays on itself.' Just today, in fact, two different readers referred me to two different articles on this theme. One was positively awful, the other merely bad. So I reckon it is…
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Sickness
The physically sick are rarely unaware of their state; the morally usually.
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Worry and Regret and Time
Worry and regret form a pair in that each involves flight from the present; worry flees the present toward an unknown future, regret toward an unchangeable past. The door to Reality, however, is hinged on the axis of the Now. If access is to be had to the nunc stans it is only via the…
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False Modesty
False modesty sometimes assumes the form of an avowal that one's modesty is not false.
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Man the Unjust
Limited as we are, we limit others to less than they are.
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Anchorage in the Certain
We should anchor our thought in that which is most certain: the fact of change, the nearness of death, that things exist, that one is conscious, that one can say 'I' and mean it, the fact of conscience. But man does not meditate on the certain; he chases after the uncertain and ephemeral: name and…
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Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75: The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which…
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Propinquity and Social Distance
Familiarity and social proximity have their positive aspects, but they also breed contempt. No man is a hero to his valet. Nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua: No prophet is accepted in his own country. (Luke 4:24) Few bloggers are read by their relatives. Social distance, too, has positive and negative sides. One negative is that…
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The Conservative is a Realist About Human Nature
Most people are basically decent. Just don't put them under too much moral pressure.
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On ‘Making It’
One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters. He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds…
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On Hitchens and Death
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised. ………………………………………… I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is…
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Vita Brevis
This mess we are in, this predicament, the fall into time . . . leaves us no time for its solution.
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The Idolatry of the Transient
It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it.