Tag: Quietism

• October 15, 2013

  Philosophical horror: Making the world anew

  Perceiving political disorder, religious strife, social unrest, or economic collapse, philosophers have not infrequently regarded themselves as saviors who could, from out of the resources of the mind itself, create the world anew. This, argues Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, is what occurred to Descartes who, upon witnessing the Thirty Years’ War, believed that he could…
• May 16, 2013

  Yen Hui’s progress

  We read in The Inner Chapters of Yen Hui’s progress. He had given up ‘doing good and being right,’ but Confucius tells him this is ‘not quite enough.’ He goes away and returns. He had given up ‘ceremony and music,’ which is also good but ‘not quite enough.’ Sometime later, he comes back to Confucius, relating that ‘I…
• April 19, 2012

  On my becoming cozily parochial

  I believe that the modern moral question concerning what one should do is off the mark, and I believe the ancient ethical question of how my life is to fare is apropos and wisely worded. I am getting settled with the thought that self-cultivation is what matters to me most such that I have become…