Tag: Beauty

• July 17, 2014

  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…
• April 23, 2014

  Overcoming sexual desire: On Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life

  This is the seventh set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. A summary of Sloterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * Sloterdijk has written a book on anthropotechnics. He wants to redescribe human beings as those creatures who train themselves–some doing so explicitly, most implicitly–to…
• March 26, 2014

  Concordance: The world’s beauty and beauty of soul

  There is a concordance between the world’s beauty and the beauty of one’s soul. Beauty makes itself available. Only, the soul must be ready. The ready soul is a beautiful soul. Beauty of soul is not easy to achieve. Yet once achieved, concordance is achieved.
• February 20, 2014

  ‘Why be gentle?’

  ‘Why be gentle?’ my philosophical friend asked me. ‘That is a good question,’ I said. * At the beginning of Theaetetus, Socrates asks Theodorus whether there are any good young men whom he knows. Theodorus replies, Yes, Socrates, I have become acquainted with one very remarkable Athenian youth, whom I commend to you as well worthy…
• January 24, 2014

  ‘I look at the desert and I am besotted…’

  I look at the desert and I am besotted. Only, a dove atop a Joshua tree below copper-sage boulders. Near dusk, my fingers as singular as hers.