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Posted on May 9, 2023 Leave a Comment
There was a time in our lives when we craved complexity. We wanted the novelty of new experiences, the excitement of busy destinations, and the charm of well-meaning but unnecessarily convoluted people. We once believed the recipe to happiness consisted in combining as many flavours and textures as possible. Perhaps we are more boring now; […]
Posted on April 20, 2023 Leave a Comment
‘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 […]
Posted on November 16, 2022 Leave a Comment
When done well, philosophy does two things: it shows how two similar things are actually rather different, and it shows how two different things are actually rather similar. This is an essay about the second class of philosophy. We generally think of cooking, gardening, dancing, painting, building, parenting, and writing as having nothing in common. […]
Posted on November 3, 2022 Leave a Comment
We tend to romanticise willpower, believing that if we simply try harder, focus more intently, or exert ourselves a little more, then we will reach our goal. While this may sometimes be true, it remains an incomplete picture, and therefore, an untruth. Exercising willpower will lead in two radically different directions: This is not as […]
Posted on September 5, 2022 Leave a Comment
I Like the dog chasing its own tail, Ouroboros has forgotten a part belonging to himself. There is a split, a splinter separating the head (mind) and tail (body), and this split manifests in many diverse yet similar ways. Think of our chemically enhanced foods which stimulate the mind but malnourish the body, or cigarettes […]
Posted on February 12, 2022 Leave a Comment
If you had asked a serf 400 years ago if they found their work fulfilling, they would have looked at you in confusion; the necessity of work was absolute, the type of work was non-negotiable, and toil was considered a part of the process; a type of thinking which backgrounded Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic […]
Posted on February 3, 2022 Leave a Comment
Two seeds carried on the back of a strong wind were cast into a garden. One seed fell into a sunny bed of soil, which was judiciously cared for by the gardener who lived on the land. The second seed slipped through the cracks of the concrete upon which the gardener walked. The first seed […]
Posted on January 9, 2022 Leave a Comment
Looking in the mirror, you probably say to yourself in particularly self-hating moments that you aren’t normal. Everyone else seems able to hold down a job, maintain emotional equilibrium, and manage healthy relationships; it is you, and you alone, who are singularly cursed to abnormality. If only you could change, be different, be normal… But, […]
Posted on December 28, 2021 Leave a Comment
To the Ancient Greeks, one of the essentials of the good life was keeping everything in proper measure. As a part of this, Greek tragedies portrayed man’s suffering as a result of him going beyond the proper measure of things. So did Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s noble vice was a quality in his protagonists (Othello, Romeo, Macbeth, […]
Posted on December 25, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear’ writes Katherine May in her work Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. We imagine ‘our lives to be a long march from birth to death in which we amass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while […]
Proper Candor 