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The Virtue of Silence

‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world’ explains Paul Goodman in his altogether wonderful but sadly out of print work, Speaking and Language.: A Defence of Poetry But, continues Goodman, ‘there are grades of each’. Just as there is speech to hold a family together, a sophist’s speech to […]

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Jiddu Krishnamurti On Images & Relationships

‘All our relationships are really imaginary’, writes Krishnamurti in his collection of talks titled Freedom from the Known. ‘That is’, he continues, they are ‘based on an image formed by thought’. According to Krishnamurti, we rarely see each other as we are now. We have memories of what someone likes and dislikes, things they have […]

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Living In the World vs. Being Lived By the World: Martin Heidegger On Being an Authentic Self

It seems like a preposterous thought. How could I be anyone other than me? Of course, you can’t. But that isn’t exactly the point Heidegger is making in his hefty work, Being & Time. Heidegger asks us, ‘how much of you, is really you?’ And to what extent, following Krishnamurti, are we ‘second-hand people’, copying, […]

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On Kintsugi

In a society such as ours, which glorifies the flawless, unblemished and perfect, we have a conditioned (but by no means natural) desire to hide our flaws, minimising the parts of ourselves that are damaged, warped, or otherwise ugly, in the hope that we too will appear as an object of perfection and therefore, worthy […]

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