Category: politics

• July 15, 2014

  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…
• July 14, 2014

  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…
• July 9, 2014

  My doubts about the ‘sharing’ economy

  On Twitter, my friend Dougald Hine brought Susie Cagle’s comic-laced article, ‘The Case Against Sharing: On Access, Scarcity, and Trust,’ to my attention. In this post, Cagle argues that the ‘sharing’ economy is only nominally so. The economic and historical conditions that make possible this ‘sharing’ economy cannot, she thinks, be lost sight of. She writes, ‘The…
• July 7, 2014

  The active life: Ways of life available to us in modernity

  More reflections on my fall course at Kaos Pilots * Given the distinction between the good life and sustaining life and given also that the former furnishes us with a reason for being while the latter, on its own, can only answer the question of how to go on, it follows that someone will be…
• July 1, 2014

  Pragmatist consulting: The art of bullshitting well

  ‘Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.’ –David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon…