Category: Human Predicament
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Ideals and Non-Attachment
Self-mastery, you say, is the highest mastery. You are attached to this ideal and you live for the most part in accordance with it. But on occasion you stumble and fall. You lose your temper, overeat, or succumb to lust. And then you feel disgust with yourself. The failure hurts your ego. It diminishes your…
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Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment
Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire…
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“We are not here to have a good time.”
The lady to whom I said the above replied, "Then what are we here for?" Her reply showed her cluelessness, so I said nothing more. An appropriate response would have been, "Indeed, but then why do people fill their waning days with idle talk and card games?" Some people are built too close to the…
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Six Types of Death Fear
1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation. The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death. Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation. There is the…
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The Wild Diversity of Human Types
The wild diversity of human types never ceases to fascinate me. There are people like Hugh Hefner who live for their own pleasure. And then there are those who live to sacrifice themselves for causes that transcend themselves even unto literal self-immolation. Man on Fire will hold your interest.
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Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden
An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic. There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic. And there never were any such cave-dwellers or goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story. And…
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Neither Angel nor Beast
Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329: Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast. The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself. The second…
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If it is all just a tale told by an idiot . . .
. . .why begrudge ordinary folk their retreat into the warm bosom of average everydayness (Heidegger's durchschnittliche Alltaeglichkeit) with its vapid socializing? I do not begrudge them, nor do I try to change them. But there is something base and contemptible about a life without questioning and seeking, a life sunk in divertissement. Here is…
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The Need for Vindication
"See? I was right, and you were wrong!" But why does one want to be seen as right by an indigent and fickle mortal? Why not be satisfied with being right? Let it go!
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An Unarmed Man
An unarmed man is a defensively naked man. Now I defend your right to go around (defensively) naked, but only on condition that you defend, or at least not interfere with, my right to go around 'clothed.' ………………………. Facebook comment: Paraphrasing Machiavelli: Why should a man who is wrong pay any attention at all to…
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Human Relations
In human relations an excess of past often insures an absence of future. Newly-minted friendships, however, are pregnant with future but at risk in an age of abortion.
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How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?
The hour of death has arrived. You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options. You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same. But if every last detail is to be the same,…
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Two Guises of Religion
Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings…
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Dissembling in the Barber’s Chair
My barber once asked me if I had done any travelling since last I saw him. I lied and said that I hadn't, when in fact I had been to Geneva, Switzerland. If I had told the truth, then that truth would have led to another and yet another. "And what did you do in…
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Trotsky’s Faith in Man
On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. The Left eats its own. …………………………………………. The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime…