Category: Human Predicament
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Forgiveness and Self-Justification
One feels justified in not forgiving. "Why should I forgive the bastard? He wronged me, and not just once!" "Don't you need forgiveness? You must forgive because you yourself need to be forgiven for what you have done to others!" "There is a part of me that can appreciate your fine Sunday School sentiment. But…
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A Reason for Reserve
The less I know of you, the more highly I can think of you.
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A Reason to Live Long
There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here. It may be that at death soul-making stops and one is stuck at the moral, intellectual, and spiritual level one has attained in the precincts of the sublunary. This could prove problematic if one survives one's bodily death. …
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With Detachment from the Outcome
There are games and there is life, and life is not a game. But life is like a game, and sufficiently so to warrant application of the same principle: play hard, but with detachment from the outcome. In chess, and not just in chess, it is 'unsporting' not to try to defeat the opponent by…
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The Optics of Compassion
We make a brave attempt at seeing the best in one another. The attempt is aided by not looking too closely.
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Self-Deprecation
A little self-deprecation is good, but more is not better. Nobody likes the boaster. Take self-deprecation too far, however, and people will have contempt for you.
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Wife and Life, Truth and Practice
My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking, gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital. Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some…
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The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates
Substack latest.
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The Truth of Life and the Art of Life
We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding. They sense the difference between the true…
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How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues
Here is a possible attitude for examination. Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from…
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On Thinking for Oneself
You must think for yourself while never forgetting that the wild and troubling and contention-stoking diversity of opinions abroad in the world is due to people thinking for themselves. The herd animal may be stampeded into a slot canyon where he drowns; the maverick may end up in the same place and meet the same…
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I Know My Limits
I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know. Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. (Note how 'I' is used above. It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is…
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Why I Want to Live Long
I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions. Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond…
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Hard and Soft
You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation. Self-individuation is a task, not…
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Pleasure in the Petty
We humans are ineluctably petty in various ways. It can't helped. And so we can't be faulted for the occasional pleasure we take in the petty particulars of the quotidian round, such as the way the towels are arranged on the rack or the way the lazy cats are splayed upon the bed.