Month: August 2011
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On Geoff Dyer’s unsatisfactory philosophy of life – Part 1
The Nature of Desire A desire is born. That desire seeks something other than itself: namely, the object of desire. Because the desire does not have what it wants, it lacks. It lacks and aims to possess. An organism is a desiring being. Because it is not self-sufficient, because not everything is already within it,…
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Dougald Hine on the UK riots
At New Public Thinking, my friend Dougald writes with great insight about the UK riots. For example, The genuinely radical response to something like #riotcleanup is not to knock it down, but to broaden out the story, to take it deeper. Rather than abuse people for their desire to take positive action and to make…
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On a ‘very different’ St. Benedict for our time
Let us read the final paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s radiant book together: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
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On Beckett’s bad jokes
Beckett got it wrong because he got there too late. And then all he could do, all he could think to do was to tell a joke. The joke is that one must strive–with no view that toward which one must strive; that one must be patient without hope; courageous without reason; must keep to one’s…
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On the danger of sentimentality
To be sentimental is to feel more than one ought. The sentimental man has no good reason to feel as he does, and thus there is no depth, nor can there be, to his feeling. The emotion, like a sensation, flits over him, is cheaply had, and then readily returns to the air. He watches…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 