Tag: Ethics

• December 11, 2013

  Aspects of reality

  What aspects of the way things are reveal themselves to us, provided we are open and provided also that we perceive these features rightly? Recall that we are attuning ourselves to the three-fold nature of reality. 1.) Infinity is absolute stillness. 2.) Totality flows out of infinity. (Or: infinity flows through totality.) 3.) The finite…
• July 1, 2013

  Why is Kenko disillusioned?

  All around Kenko are signs of late autumn. The flowers, irregularly strewn yet carefully placed, so completely matches Kenko’s  aesthetic ideas of simplicity, irregularity, and incompleteness–not to mention his ascetic notion of the value of exclusion–that he is taken aback. That a man could live like this is… if not wisdom, then at least admirable.…
• April 4, 2013

  The Daoist ethic without principles

  ‘Now the Taoist ideal,’ writes the ever-quarky Raymond Smullyan in his best Lewis Carroll The Tao is Silent, ‘is not so much to feel that he shouldn’t be moral (which is, of course, a morality all its own), but rather to be independent, free, unentangled from moral “principles”‘ (112). The poem from the first chapter of the…
• January 30, 2013

  Doing what comes naturally

  If it isn’t easy to do, then it’s not the thing to do. Deliberations require lack of spontaneity and struggle a lack of understanding, but graceful action comes quite naturally. Cutting wood is only hard until the trunk and I are on friendly terms and then the neck yields to the axe’s touch. Being courageous is…
• December 10, 2012

  On sex, clumsiness, and adverbs

  Typically, we associate awkwardness, clumsiness, inelegance, and gracelessness with poor aesthetic performances alone, but could aesthetic considerations have any connection to ethical considerations? Could there be a point at which clumsiness cancelled out a good deed entirely? Sometimes we may think that what makes a good deed good is that the individual has the right…