More specifically concerning: morality
19.09.01
19 September 2001, around 9.15.
Huizinga on games and pity.
03.03.02 – Sunday
3 March 2002, around 21.11.
This a juxtaposition of three quotations about pride and anger and suffering.
social ethics
27 September 2006, around 18.59.
An exaggerated personal morality is often mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to attain a social morality with a basis of democratic experience results in a loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends in an […]
modern moral life
23 September 2007, around 22.26.
A new way of making and accumulating money, a dizzying new form of social mobility tied to this new economy, a new culture obsessively dedicated to work and financial success, consumerism, a cult of celebrity and fame, a mass culture based on journalism and advertising, a new conception of individuals as untrustworthy centers of self-interest, […]
exposure
28 March 2008, around 5.25.
A book, June 2002. There is the fear of exposure (as if one would be exposed as, really, nothing), or the general theme of exposing (the debutante ritual, or the pretense of initiating someone into ‘something’ that isn’t really ‘there’). There is the anxiety of being out of place (an ‘American in Europe’) especially and […]
at the mercy of confusion
8 May 2008, around 7.57.
In Jerusalem, I had spent much of my time among the books of Gulbenkian library, following the loose threads of Armenian history. But the massacres, I put off until the end. What I’d been reluctant to start absorbed me at once; it was that that I had been afraid of. Everything else seemed meaningless when […]
wide of the mark
31 December 2014, around 5.29.
I suppose after all that no one whose mind was not, to put it mildly, abnormal, ever yet aimed very high out of pure malice aforethought. I once saw a fly alight on a cup of hot coffee on which the milk had formed a thin skin; he perceived his extreme danger, and I noted […]
temptations
9 May 2016, around 6.33.
Catherine the Great on self-government.
Citation (55)
18 June 2016, around 6.31.
on the best society…
applicability
25 November 2016, around 13.05.
This a juxtaposition of three quotations about writing, practicality, and danger from Margaret Cavendish, Hegel, and Simone Weil.
wandering
4 June 2023, around 18.40.
Employing his broad conception of self-consciousness and his distinction between physical and moral freedom, he argues that the data of self-consciousness cannot establish moral freedom. At best, self-consciousness can reveal physical freedom, such as, after work I could go to the library, go home, go to the coffee house, or decide to flee my miserable […]
baggage
19 February 2024, around 8.49.
There is a bit in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments that I misremembered, misunderstood, or made up entirely, but the gist of it was that if one takes on one of a thinker’s ideas, one has to take on their entire system of thinking and being – the faults in their logic and the faults […]
viola
21 February 2024, around 13.40.
…But if subtleties and sophisms composed the greater part of the metaphysics or pneumatics of the schools, they composed the whole of this cobweb science of ontology, which was likewise sometimes called metaphysics. Wherein consisted the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, […]
the hazy reader
24 February 2024, around 17.35.
These little puzzles which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling Lolita. —Dmitri Nabokov (‘On a book entitled The Enchanter’)
lunatic
11 August 2024, around 20.40.
Night is fair virtue’s immemorial friend; The conscious moon, through every distant age, Has held a lamp to wisdom, and let fall, On contemplation’s eye, her purging ray. (V.177–180) * * * Were moon, and stars, for villains only made? To guide, yet screen them, with tenebrious light? (IX.964f.) —Edward Young (Night Thoughts)1)Consistency, hobgoblins, etc. [↩]
start your cognitions
25 August 2024, around 17.40.
The story of the sleepers is followed by some moral observations which appear to have no connection with it. But this apparent irrelevance is deceptive… —C.G. Jung (The Four Archetypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 70) Slept in this morning until nearly six, when the dog made her desire for breakfast known. Managed to step onto […]
mythos
2 September 2024, around 9.05.
Here the compensation certain did not fall out as the dreamer would wish, by handing him a solution on a plate; rather it confronted him with a problem to which I have already alluded, and one which life is always bringing us up against: namely, the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of […]