Tag: Experience

• April 18, 2013

  Hurry up: A parable

  Two men spend exactly two minutes looking at the cross section of a cutdown tree. Both men have the same sensory equipment (eyes, ears, tongues, etc.). Both have the same cognitive equipment (capacity for concentrating, attending,  inferring, etc.). Both are walking at the same rate and that rate is such as not to prove laborious…
• January 29, 2013

  ‘Luckiness is not getting what you want…’

  Luckiness is not getting what you want but realizing that it wasn’t worth wanting after all. This is called adulthood. Unluckiness is getting what you want, only to grow thoughtlessly into old age. This is called childhood. Also: prose.
• January 24, 2013

  Loneliness and presentness

  Yesterday, in the middle of a philosophical conversation about a conversation partner’s sense of loneliness, it occurred to me that loneliness just is the experience of not being present. Loneliness is the word we typically use to designate this nebulous feeling of lack: the other is not there, the past in which love was is…
• June 13, 2012

  Unphilosophical and philosophical eternity

  The Phenomenology of Exhaustion 1. Can one describe the lack or loss of eros? Of course. The experience would be felt as burdensome, pain-laden, leaden, tiresome, exhausted, a sense of separateness, of cleaving, of infinite matterlessness. Eros and Temporality 2. The distinction between eros and its lack may come down to that between two differing conceptions…
• February 9, 2012

  On intimacy and infidelity

  In her collection of short stories, Binocular Vision: New and Collected Stories, Edith Pearlman’s “Unravished bride” concerns a married man and married woman who, neither being married to each other, both nearly conclude that becoming intimate entails having sex. Their muddle is philosophical, having to do with the concepts they have inherited. Allow me some room…