Category: philosophical counseling

• May 17, 2012

  Tree cutting

  Socrates’ greatness was to be able to play with children, and to consider that his time was thus well spent…. Socrates lives a human life simply and humbly. –Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone * Yesterday I bought bananas for Joan. She said she had plenty. Now I have four bananas to eat. The rain from the…
• May 16, 2012

  Fan of an altostratus, pastel and askew

  Her An hour ago, our skin, akin to clawed clay, came and combed in teeth of amethyst and bone–oh, you know, just a precipitous cappuccino. Me “Clawed clay” is so well described. I’d only add: the molten lava, like Jupiter’s eye and the top-hatted man holding up his rather sad umbrella. Her A chimney sweep’s…
• May 15, 2012

  Ethical life restored (VII)

  VII Silent of speech is nature’s course. Laozi, Daodejing, 23 Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech. In early May, my love Alexandra and I spent a…
• May 14, 2012

  Life is not like water (VI)

  VI We have been following nature’s course through modernity with a view to solving an enigma. How could it be so self-evident during earlier epochs that the virtuous person would, without question, live according to nature when it became just as self-evident in our time that the morally upright person would have to act contrary…
• May 12, 2012

  Kant’s tribunal (V)

  V One of Hegel’s enigmatic theses from the Preface to The Philosophy of Right is that the actual is rational. The contemporary scholar Robert Pippin glosses this proposition–rightly, in my view–as a demand that being be intelligible. As human beings, we long for order in reality so much so that is scarcely conceivable that we…