Category: Human Predicament
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Life and Chess
What has been said about chess may also apply to life: For a game it is too serious, and for seriousness too much of a game.
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Envy
The mother wanted the son to amount to something while the father was afraid he would — and make the father look small. Envy is a major player in human life. I present a substantial analysis in The Role of Envy in Human Affairs.
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Man is Risible
In that he jokes? Or in that he is a joke? Or both?
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Why Forgive?
Because we ourselves need to be forgiven. "But I have never done anything that requires forgiveness." Really? Then please forgive me for considering you either a liar, or deeply self-deceived, or an amnesiac, or insane, or a joker, or someone unfamiliar with the English language . . . .
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Other People
We need those distorting mirrors called other people to achieve self-knowledge. For a distorting mirror, while it distorts, also mirrors.
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On Keeping Folks in Check
An appeal to reason works with a few, and an appeal to self-interest with most. But then there are the hopelessly recalcitrant for whom only the appeal to force is effective. The only argument that reaches them is the argumentum ad baculum. Herein yet another reason to uphold Second Amendment rights. Those who call for…
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Life Without Views
Could one live well without views, 'long' views? I address the question in Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?
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A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle
It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians. What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification. Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.) Plato and Aristotle! These are not…
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The Monetary Criterion
When are people serious? When money is involved — their money. My mind drifts back to faculty meetings in which half-listening colleagues doodled and dozed. But when salary considerations came to the table, the dullest among them pricked up their ears. Suddenly they became sharp and serious.
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The Strange Tale of Chris Knight, the Central Maine Hermit-Thief
A hell of a story. This one goes into the Questers and Other Oddballs file. Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two…
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Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
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Is Man Basically Good?
Conservatives answer in the negative, liberals in the affirmative. This may be the most important difference between the warring parties. Dennis Prager explains the difference very clearly here. Liberals will object to the 'radioactive' Man in the above title borrowed from Prager. They think it excludes women. It does not. It only excludes women if…
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Doubly Foolish
Even if what we cling to could last, what we cling with can't. Our clinging is doubly foolish.
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“If You’re a Conservative, You are not My Friend”
Rebecca Roache writes, One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to…