Month: May 2013
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‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection’
Chuang Tsu observes, ‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection.’ I welcome Chuang Tsu’s thoughts, his humor and his lightness. His measure and delight. Kant and Locke wrote of knowing one’s limits, but Kant said nothing of stopping and would have been shocked by Chuang Tsu’s epigrammatic ending: that stopping when…
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Arguing is useless
In Chapter 2 of the Inner Chapters, Chuang Tsu says, ‘Words that argue miss the point.’ Arguing is useless, since there is no sense in wanting to be right and no change of heart in being proven wrong. Arguing makes a mockery of dispassion: niceties turned into traps in order to be sprung upon unprepared opponents.…
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Learning from Zen: Withdrawing from a way of thinking
‘Brushing off thoughts which arise is like washing off blood with blood. We remain impure because of being washed in blood….’ –Bankei, Diaho Shogen Kokushi Hogo, quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen ‘The new DSM would have everything right were it to forget such words as ‘diagnose’ and ‘treat’.’ –Zen Master One learns from a…
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On not owning a couch
The best thing that fairly well-to-do parents can do today would be to refuse the temptation to buy their children their first couch. A few recent tweets tell something of the story about the American precariat: ‘Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less’ http://nyti.ms/10xd0uG (More news about status of American #precariat) ‘The Idled Young Americans’:…
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Benedict or Cicero? Field philosophy or the monastic?
Day 1. A philosopher is neither a teller nor an adviser. Day 2. What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance Day 3. ‘Living’ philosophy: Field philosophy Scholars of Aristotle have long been divided over the answer Aristotle gives to the question of how best to live. Much of the Nicomachean Ethics points in…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 