Children, of course, cannot be objects of satire in the usual sense (the neo-classical sense of Pope, Swift, and Dryden say) because they are not worthy targets. The strategy of Blakean satire, though, is not so much to ridicule the ridiculous or to castigate vice as to diagnose forms of ‘bad faith’, to show the …
As Aristotle observed, man is a political animal. In the limited cases of feral children (none of which have been truly and completely separated from the human community), we see the devastating effects that isolation has upon the individual. Such children fail to develop even the basic capacities characteristic of a proper human existence and …
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 …
“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.
