“When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” ― Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses In the novel Dangerous Liaisons, which shocked the French public with its depiction of the cruelty and degeneracy of the nobility, two aristocrats plot to corrupt a teenage girl who is …
Plato’s Republic teaches us that education of the young is not only about the mind; it needs also to be about the body as well. Modern society tends to dismiss much of Plato’s advice on education, asserting that such advice was needed for the world of Greek warring cities, not for large commercial nation-states.
So now we live in an aperspectival panopticon. There is no Benthamian authority watching us. There is no Big Brother. There is just us. Even big tech is just another name for the democratization of totalitarianism. Surveillance isn’t conducted from a lofty central point but from everywhere, through your eyes and mine. We’re alone, each …
There is something extremely mundane about this foundational element of all culture, but there is also something excitingly cosmic. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien famously explains the concept of “subcreation.” He argues that imaginative authors act like God when they create worlds of beauty, meaning, and story. Extending Tolkien’s concept (beyond what …
Schelling invokes the creation of an aesthetic intuition to link both subjective and objective poles. Our consciousness becomes active and productive by Nature’s own unconscious power to affect us. This is Schelling’s romantic solution of synthesizing the conflict between the subjective and objective.
Wisdom involves two elements: (i) gaining insight into the way of things, that is, the objective structure of reality or what the Greeks would call the Logos, and (ii) learning to shape our lives in conformity with this objective order.
During the Medieval period in which they were first organized, the universities such as Oxford operated as kingdoms unto themselves, the intellectual work associated with the vita contemplativa occurring in isolation behind cloistered walls that exempted the monkish scholars from the practical exigencies of the town’s daily life.
Meaning, in general, is a process in which resonance is found and created. It has a setup-payoff structure. A perfect image of this is Chekhov’s so-called gun. Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that insists that everything in a story should be necessary.
If the novelist, philosopher and critic, Colin Wilson is remembered at all it is as one of the ‘Angry Young Men,’ and for his first book, ‘The Outsider,’ (1956) ‘the definitive study of alienation, creativity, and the modern mind,’ as it is described on the front cover of the Victor Gollancz paperback that lies on …
How do I know what to read? If I have not read a book before, how do I know whether it will be any good? After all, reading a book, especially if I read it well, is a significant investment of hours. Every time I commit to reading one book, I am simultaneously choosing, by …
