Category: philosophical counseling
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The only 3 ways of making a living: Reflections on sustaining life
Yesterday, I had a breakthrough in how I think about economic relationships when these are understood in the most basic terms possible. The occasion for my thinking about this question is my upcoming fall course, ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life,’ at Kaos Pilots. There are three principal questions that make up the course I’ll be teaching:
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Plenitude: The Romantic feeling of joy
Against the postmodern view that the aim of art is to desecrate what is higher, to transgress sacred boundaries, or to disrupt the status quo, I posit that contemplative art glorifies while active art makes what is more plentiful. The tradition espousing the fullness of being is, of course, Romanticism. For all his bluster against Romanticism as…
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Rejecting art as transgression
It was about five years ago, in 2009, that Roger Scruton’s essay, ‘Beauty and Desecration,’ appeared in City Journal. What is remarkable about the essay is that we had nearly forgotten that art was, until quite recently, not at all concerned with the transgressive and provocative. In fact, it is only after 1930, according to Scruton, that the…
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Envy and admiration: Some important remarks about higher forms of life
1. Now more clearly than before, it occurs to me that all higher forms of life will require renunciation. At the moment of severance, the renunciant points to the lower, gives it a name, and frees himself from its hold. As Hadot shows in his work on ancient philosophy, the ancient philosopher must sever himself from…
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A schema of higher forms of life
He climbs on high–him we should praise! –Nietzsche, ‘Higher Men,’ Gay Science Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves–or with both at once. –Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life If I want to know that I’m not…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 
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