Month: July 2014

• July 14, 2014

  A schema of higher forms of life

  He climbs on high–him we should praise! –Nietzsche, ‘Higher Men,’ Gay Science Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves–or with both at once. –Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life If I want to know that I’m not…
• July 12, 2014

  Horror: Airbnb ‘disrupting’ the evening meal

  During a recent conversation with my friend Pete Sims about my upcoming Kaos Pilots course, ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life,’ we spent some time discussing the case of Airbnb. Airbnb came to mind because I had recently written a post about a certain category mistake: those companies which urge us to take part in the ‘sharing’ economy…
• July 10, 2014

  How to know that I’m not wasting my life

  One needs some kind of perspicuous conceptual distinction between the good life and sustaining life if one hopes to be able to make any sense of one’s doubt concerning whether or not one is wasting one’s life. (I take ‘wasting my life’ to be a philosophical question raised most clearly, most existentially only within the confines of the modern age.)…
• July 9, 2014

  My doubts about the ‘sharing’ economy

  On Twitter, my friend Dougald Hine brought Susie Cagle’s comic-laced article, ‘The Case Against Sharing: On Access, Scarcity, and Trust,’ to my attention. In this post, Cagle argues that the ‘sharing’ economy is only nominally so. The economic and historical conditions that make possible this ‘sharing’ economy cannot, she thinks, be lost sight of. She writes, ‘The…
• July 8, 2014

  Distinguishing the active life from the contemplative life

  It is not so easy to draw a meaningful distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. Too strict and a way of life becomes suffocating. Too broad and it seems no difficult thing to shuttle back and forth between one and the other when, in reality, it seems rare that an individual can lead both…