So much in the world is there to convince us, if only implicitly, that we are not responsible. Recently, I started looking at the messaging behind many of the basic things and activities in everyday life with this question in mind: In what way does this specific thing make me responsible or irresponsible? The alarming …
Progressive modernity says that reality is a dead thing and that what we do is to project our feelings and notions onto it merely. How thrilling it may seem to become like gods, making good and evil for ourselves. You can be whatever you want to be, and the world can be whatever you make …
Where some would notice the transformation of live wood into dead lumber as part of what was needed to make the world more pleasant to live in, for furniture and fire, Hoydel saw only death in that lumber; how he saw changed what he saw. His carpentry had been, for him, an endless reminder of …
To know what this means, to know what this feels like, walk into a dark room and, if you’re not stuck in a phase of rolling blackouts as I often am here in South Africa, flick that light switch. Day erupts inside a room, and night is chased into its various corners. The entire environment …
“Without genuine, deep inwardness, we cannot take a stand against the inauthenticity of the world. Fighting noise with more noise will not do. In doing so, inevitably, the crowd becomes the measure, just as political chatter so easily becomes the content of our thinking.”
Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new …
The metamodern mindset almost seems to operate on Yogi Berra’s quip, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” It structures a worldview that cannot tell you what a woman is (how very postmodern) but sincerely believes it is possible to become one if you are a man (how very modern). That oscillation is …
We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some …
The point of simulacral terminology is not to clarify but to mystify. Its aim is mythification, not demythologization. The story of Abraham on the verge of murdering his son, on the other hand, is a story of demythologization. Through his experience, the virtual understanding of God is replaced by something more actual and more livable. Something …
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 …
