Month: May 2013
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Who are the teachers of virtue and inquiry?
‘If virtue can be taught,’ Socrates asks time and time again, ‘then who are the teachers of virtue?’ Yesterday I argued: 1. If we are living through unsettled time, it follows that inquiring is the most important genre of discourse. 2. We are living through unsettled time. 3. So, inquiring is the most important genre.…
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‘I don’t know… Let’s find out.’
Earlier this week, one conversation partner asked me to give him a better account of the art of inquiry. I replied that a certain genre of discourse would arise and would be suitable for a certain age. Panegyric and encomia would arise during, and be suitable for, a heroic age, since the poet’s job would…
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Can what really matters pass the test of being a joke?
‘How do you know that what you’re making–or what you’re thinking of making–really matters?’ This was the question that my friend Dougald Hine and I were discussing over Skype at the end of last week. We started joking, he recounted how he’d come up with the one liner that ‘there’s something joke-like about the nature…
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‘Yet here I am in my wretchedness’
The end of Chapter 6 of Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters is startling. It has been raining for 10 days, and one friend, Tsu Ysu, believes his friend Tsu Sang to be in a bad way. When he arrives at Tsu Sang’s house, he hears a lamentation. ‘O Mother! O Father! Is it heaven, or is it man?’
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Yen Hui’s progress
We read in The Inner Chapters of Yen Hui’s progress. He had given up ‘doing good and being right,’ but Confucius tells him this is ‘not quite enough.’ He goes away and returns. He had given up ‘ceremony and music,’ which is also good but ‘not quite enough.’ Sometime later, he comes back to Confucius, relating that ‘I…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 