Category: philosophical counseling
-
Stop Holding Back!
Stop holding back! Just stop it! Stop giving up, giving in, shrinking back. Just–just stop with all the restraining! (We need retraining in overcoming restraining. Well, better go get a high paid consultant. Or some facilitator to ‘open the space’ and ‘hold the space’ and ‘take us through a process.’ Go on: can we finally admit…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Insistence itself is in the wrong
Your insistence begets your interlocutor’s (my) resistance, acquiescence, or consternation. You believe that P must be the right way of proceeding or Q is the right picture of the world and that we should act based on P or Q. And I react to your forceful, impactful words either by fighting against them (resistance), by giving in too easily yet…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 