Tag: Modern

• April 4, 2014

  ‘You must change your life’ or ‘You must change life’?

  This is the first set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). * ‘You must change your life,’ writes Peter Sloterdijk in his eponymous book of philosophy. His provocative project is to redescribe human beings in terms of forms of practice or training programs. Some programs are explicit (such as those…
• September 17, 2013

  The world does not need saving

  ‘The universe is sacred. / You cannot improve it. / If you try to change it, you will ruin it. / If you try to hold onto it, you will lose it.’–Laozi, Daodejing 29 The transition from pre-modernity to modernity brought about a profound change in consciousness. In premodernity, the world was sacred. As such, it…
• May 9, 2012

  Pascal’s dread (II)

  II Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and a Catholic apologist. C.S. Lewis was a converted Christian and a scholar of medieval literature. Both turned their eyes toward the cosmos. The medieval cosmos, they would have seen, was a delicate synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology. Aristotelianism insisted on the finite scope and spherical design;…
• September 7, 2011

  Wistfulness in these strange times…

  My roaming personal essay, “Wistfulness in These Strange Times,” has just been published in Spike Magazine. The piece adduces the reasons we have for being wistful, and it describes the economic situation modern workers are going through. The essay begins, This morning I awoke in a wistful mood. The birdsong coming through my bedroom window reminded me…