Category: Human Predicament
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Middle-Sized Happiness
The best of this blog is hidden in its vast archives, a fact that mitigates 'You're only as good as your last post.' So there is justification for the occasional repost. Think of a repost as a blogospheric rerun. It has been over two years since I ran Middle-Sized Happiness. Having mentioned its topic in the entry immediately preceding, here…
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Short Views, Long Views, and the Feel for the Real
The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste. If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives. They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views. Is it best to take short…
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Revenge of the Parents
In the moment when one sees in oneself traces of the very attributes one so harshly criticized in one's parents — in that moment they get their vicarious revenge.
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A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands
We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our own intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other's body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other's freedom, making…
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Different People to Different People
We are different people to different people, and different people are different people to us. ………….. No aphorism can comment on itself, or justify itself, on pain of ceasing to be an aphorism. But what I am now writing is not part of the above aphorism. What makes a good aphorism? A good aphorism is…
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How Did We Get to be so Arrogant?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." So inauspicious…
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The Social Dilemma
Either mix or don't mix. If you mix, you must move to the level of your companions, which is often to move down. If you don't mix, then they will hate you for being a snob. So you either degrade yourself or incur their dislike. Mixing a little is no real solution, since they will…
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Al-Ghazzali on Worldly Trifles
From The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48: Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.
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Unburdened by Yesterday’s Baggage
In human relationships it is often the absence of a past that makes possible the having of a future.
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A Pascalian Pointer to Our Fallenness
Edward T. Oakes in a fine article quotes Pascal: The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better…
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Of Ego and Insult
Don't flatter yourself that I should care enough about you to insult you.
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Militarization and Weaponization of Space
Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed…
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Grief: Three Solutions
That we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss…
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Moral Corruption
The corruption in institutions is first in the human heart. But we are able to recognize it in both places. And that provides a slim basis for hope. A totally corrupt being would presumably be blind to his own corruption. The benighted who know they are in the dark are not completely lost.