Tag: life
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Is Right Thinking Just Pollyannaism?
The Pollyanna objection to “thought power” has been, I trust, on your mind since you’ve been reading the last series of posts. The thought power thesis states that positive thinking is more powerful and truer than negative thinking, and it doesn’t flinch with regard to the twin implications. One, your life is “the product” of…
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Whatever Happened To Work, Friendship, & Family?
Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the…
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The Weirdest Thing
The weirdest thing that seems to happen has never actually happened. I seem to have woken up from the dream state and, as a result, I really do believe and feel that I am the waker, an individual with a life to lead. Chalk this mistake up as the weirdest weirdness there possibly is. After…
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Sustaining life is not the good life
I write this post after spending time this morning contemplating the nature of things. This post is not a ‘product’ of that contemplation. * In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor has some remarkable things to say about the disappearance of the higher forms of the good life during the passage to modernity. He argues that…
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On first words, last lines, and final thoughts
It was while lying in bed beneath the flowered sheets that I’d read to her the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway and we’d loved. “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” And it was while lying on the grass beside the northern spring lake that she’d read, less enthusiastically, the opening lines of To…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 