Category: ethics

• October 26, 2012

  Metanoia and radiance: A morning meditatio

  We are speaking again, as if for the first time or final day, about the puzzle of self-transformation. We say that self-transformation is final yet ongoing. We say also that it has an aim yet that its aim is not external but rather internal to the practice of philosophy. This makes self-transformation out to be…
• October 23, 2012

  Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (1)

  Near the end of our conversation yesterday, John Thackara, co-founder of Doors of Perception, used the word “stuck.” So had a man in Switzerland, students at Kaos Pilots, a woman in Berkeley… For nearly two years, “being stuck” or “feeling stuck” may be the phrase I hear most often to describe an individual’s or an…
• October 20, 2012

  Cavell on the skeptical moment

  Excerpt from Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life,” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. * I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument…
• October 19, 2012

  Philosophy as metanoetics

  Excerpt from Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. * [L]ife consists of the continuous practice of “death-and-resurrection.” Metanoesis is practicing, and also being made to practice, this “death-and-resurrection” according to criteria of the value and meaning of our existence, or, more correctly, of the valuelessness and meaninglessness of…
• October 18, 2012

  Spiritual exercise and metaphysical experience: A birthday meditation

  Yesterday afternoon on my birthday, we knocked on the door of a secret meditation room in Soho and no one answered. She knocked a second time and still no one answered. And yet why weren’t we disappointed? “Maybe this is the meditation,” I said as we walked away and laughed. The incident calls me back…