Tag: Contemplative Life

• 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 4, 2014

  The contemplative life: Three ways of life available to us in modernity

  The title of my fall course at Kaos Pilots is ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life.’ I want to think further about the sorts of things I’ll be teaching. Five things can be said immediately about this relationship. First, each is sui generis: the good life is unto itself, sustaining life unto itself. Second, the good life is…
• 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.…