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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 May 11, 2021 Leave a Comment
Silence is more than a phenomenon marked by the absence of sound. Silence is an ideal. It manifests in at least two forms. The first is what we may call ‘imposed silence’. Imposed silence stems from an inability to speak up. It is the disempowered silence of the listener who is denied access to a […]
Posted on March 23, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘Not everything is useless’, writes Josef Pieper in his counter-cultural work Leisure, The Basis of Culture ‘which cannot be brought under the definition of the useful’. Yet, in our pragmatic society we seem to disagree, only finding value in that which can be tied to productivity or efficiency. Underfunding arts while increasing funding for economics […]
Posted on February 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
Almost everywhere we turn we are encouraged to express ourselves. Social media platforms extol us to share whatever is on our minds, advertisers promise their products will manifest our deeper-selves and reveal them to the world, our employers inform us we can ‘speak up’ about any issue without fear of reprimand, our friends remind us […]
Posted on February 16, 2021 Leave a Comment
One of the problems that arise when listening to others, as David Bohm wrote in his exquisite work On Dialogue, is our belief ‘that one already is listening to the other person in a proper way’. It is always the other person who is misguided, isn’t it? It is the dangerously misplaced belief that we […]
Proper Candor 