Month: April 2015

• April 20, 2015

  Time to Get Tougher Ourselves

  The following character is not so easy to describe in a single word, yet one can get good at spotting him. He is strong, tough, courageous, brave, properly proud, free-spirited, lighthearted, dispassionate, hearty, lively, enlivened, thumatic, vibrant, bursting with life, ‘crazy,’ wild, bloodthirsty, full-throated and big-hearted, ruthlessly committed to discovering the truth, occasionally enraged or outrageous, a lover of…
• April 12, 2015

  Toughness, not meekness!

  There is too much giving in and folding up these days, too much softness and namby-pamby. What has been cultivated oh for many years is meekness as if all forms of power, even the power to live superabundantly, were corrupt. The great act crackling with tension is stifled summarily by the resentful complaint, and ‘every complaint,’ writes Nietzsche,…
• April 4, 2015

  Vulnerability on the wrong side of the ledger

  Claiming that vulnerability is a moral virtue makes the mistake of putting vulnerability on the wrong side of the ledger. An existential term, it is made to pose as an ethical concept. Jonathan Lear helps us see why this is the case. For in Radical Hope Lear advances the metaphysical thesis that human beings are finite erotic creatures. We are…
• April 3, 2015

  How could vulnerability be a moral virtue?

  I have heard the maxim–‘Be vulnerable’–and the laudatory remarks–‘So and so was very vulnerable.’–in creative leadership and entrepreneurial circles too many times to count. Vulnerability is meant to be a moral virtue. How can this be? We must return to the more familiar connotations of vulnerability. Saying that a baby is vulnerable means that he is susceptible to…