Category: philosophical counseling
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Campus Wars: A Culture of Decadence?
By now, most of us are familiar with the controversies, starting back in the fall of 2016, surrounding gender and race on college campuses in Canada and the US. One fairly recent incident bears mentioning: the conservative political commentator Heather Mac Donald gave a speech at Claremont McKenna College. The site where the speech was to be…
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Being an Odd Ball
I am an odd ball. Hoinacki, Ivan Illich’s buddy: I suspect that to enjoy this quietly exciting and ever-changing contact with reality, one needs to seek some kind of marginality from the mainstream: physical places in which to drop out, psychical realms in which to dwell apart, spiritual disciplines through which to reach and practice…
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‘It’s Not At All Hard To Be Misanthropic Today…’
It’s not at all hard to be misanthropic today because it’s plain to see that most human beings don’t care about each other or about other sentient beings all that much, let alone about what Daoists beautifully call the “ten thousand things.” Industrial civilization has ravaged the planet in only 250 years, causing global temperatures…
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The Three Gifts of the East, the West, and Ancient Greece
Some epigrams may, if we don’t dismiss them as mere caricatures, reveal to us certain truths about the East and the West. So the American poet and deep ecologist Gary Snyder: “The mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.” So D.T. Suzuki translating, in…
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Experience Junkies and Experience Machines
In my philosophy practice and in my daily life, I keep coming across what my wife Alexandra has aptly termed “experience junkies.” Some experience junkies want to have a steady flow of moderately pleasant experiences. Others want to have supreme highs. Others, actually, want to experience the greatest highs and the deepest lows of human life. As one man put it…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 