Tag: Active Life

• October 9, 2014

  Kaos Pilots: Making a Difference

  Yesterday, I began to discuss what Kaos Pilots is; today I will discuss what it could become. I suggested that what could unify the school would be (i) the cultivation of character, (ii) the articulation of a finite set of final aims, and (iii) the attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of a set of prima facie competing…
• 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 8, 2014

  Distinguishing the active life from the contemplative life

  It is not so easy to draw a meaningful distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. Too strict and a way of life becomes suffocating. Too broad and it seems no difficult thing to shuttle back and forth between one and the other when, in reality, it seems rare that an individual can lead both…
• 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…
• May 28, 2013

  Marx’s error and our own

  Final days in Appalachia. Reminder of Marx’s error, of ours since Francis Bacon. Tao Te Ching 29 (Feng and English translation): ‘Do you think you can conquer the universe and improve it? / I do not believe this can be done.’ The second stanza unearths the source of our error. ‘The universe is sacred. / You cannot improve it.…