Category: Philosophy as a Way of Life
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Forgetful echoes
“Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.” E. M. Cioran, The Book of Delusions (1936) “Except it have a meaning, a word is but…
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Dawning Jedi
This semester, I find myself contributing to a number of university courses. One is Metaphysics. As designed by my colleague, the class moves between classical metaphysics (what we have thought about Being in the past) and transhumanist metaphysics (what human being may become in the future). After some Plato and…
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The Question Concerning Technoscience
A good show from the BBC. I begin the episode a bit of the way in. Worth watching the whole thing, but this gives you a taste of things to come in Humanity 2.0… Maybe.
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Night Vigil 20140212
Passing wondrous strange that any seek the holy or sacred anywhere than within themselves. Why can we not see that to seek elsewhere for the divine is already to deny yourself as being a part of the Encompassing Good? Do you believe we are lacking fundamentally? Not so! We lack…
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Playfulness: the Point of Existence
“A man’s maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil “To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other…
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Tears of Joy in my Life
When tears begin to flow in the moment of an ecstatic joy, I find an awareness of just how much the body–with all its pains and perturbations–is the necessary crossroads of possible Transcendenz. The feel of my gut contacting, my breath catching, tears falling down hot cheeks to quivering lips,…
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Textimony 20140208
To say that we are on the ONE WAY is not to say there is only a single way. Get to it, now… EXPLORE!!!
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Afternoon Memo 20140202
My MEMO Status update on FB: Some caricature metaphysics as the most meaningless of abstractions: e.g. pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Such examples work precisely to say that the “beyond” trumps the now/here for a metaphysician. But really, the true offense arises from…
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Night Vigil 20140201
Night Vigil has been occupied with the issue of anthropocentrism. Of course anthropo– means human and –centric means center. So the term means to place humankind at the center of everything. Knowing how -centric got the usage, however, is very enlightening. Arising through French from a Latin usage, the centrum…
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Marsilio Ficino
Probably one of the least known yet most influential philosophers in the last 1000 years. Another way to understand Ficino and his academy is to examine the various ways he uses the word “academy” and its variants. What one finds is that Plato’s dialogues themselves could be referred to as…
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Keeping Vigil
I call the time between first and second sleep the Night Vigil, following the old monastic traditions. For me, Night Vigil begins with an examination of conscience: Oh thou Encompassing, thou All, thou One. How can I give myself over to thee without examining who I was this day? Open…
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Greater Means Yet Less Meaning
Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, examines eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing) as the end or purpose of human life. He does this at first through a series of negatives: Happiness is not… Pursuit of Pleasure because even animals can experience pleasure and we are looking for what is the end of…
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The import of the Sardonic and the Uncertain
From Frank Herbert’s Dune . Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never persistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a…
CALL ME MAGGIE 
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