Category: meditation

• October 25, 2012

  The puzzle of self-transformation (metanoia)

  Self-transformation (metanoia) is something of a puzzle. On the one hand, self-transformation is ‘final,’ final in that it carries us into a completely new state of being. From this vantage point, we are different persons, more whole and more fulfilled. On the other hand, self-transformation is ongoing, not quite reached, always underway. Thus, philosophizing is…
• October 22, 2012

  On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’

  I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…
• 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…