Author: Dan
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16. Life
We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish writer and intellectual. One of the 20th century’s […]
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15. The Plan Going Forward
At the end of my little writing challenge, I was worried about losing momentum. At the same time, I had to do some traveling, and the post-a-day schedule simply wasn’t tenable just in terms of the time commitment, to say nothing of the mental drain compounded by a worry that I’d run dry on topics […]
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14. The End
Well, I did it, successfully completed the little challenge I laid out for myself. Just some general observations. One thing that surprised me was that I didn’t run out of things to talk about. In fact, my biggest problem was the opposite. The posts that gave me the most difficulty did so precisely because I […]
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13. Sea and Forest
Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was presently to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based upon trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. Livy, The History of Rome Foundation establishes place and historical time.* Before foundation there is […]
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12. Reading Tea Leaves
Picking up some threads. Recall that Vico imagined the beginning of society as a consequence of the giants, degenerate humans in the aftermath of the Flood, first encountering thunder and lighting. This encounter terrified them and motivated the institution of marriage and burial. The god of thunder, of the sky, was the first god. Alongside […]
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11. History, Suffering, and Sin
Suffering is simultaneously one of the most manifest facts of history and its greatest offense. Therefore, any schema of history must offer an account of suffering, if it is to be in any way satisfying. I wonder a little bit here, consider this a meditation. Ancient history was essentially cyclical, seeing suffering as baked into […]
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10. Reifying the Model
The problem of abstraction is a perpetual one. We can’t help but abstract, thinking itself would be impossible without it, but despite its tremendous utility, abstraction leads us into trouble when we confuse our abstractions for things themselves. This confusion is an inversion of the hierarchy of being. Abstractions are constructions of our minds. They […]
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9. More notes on Genesis
Still banging my head against the wall on the post I mentioned yesterday, so continuing on with reflections on Genesis and beyond. In Lamech, violence intensifies as does alienation from God. He cries out, “Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain: but for Lamech seventy times sevenfold.” Note that it was God who decreed sevenfold […]
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8. Marauders, Walawbum
As so often happens, I started a series of posts without having a clear idea of where I was going, and, as often happens, I didn’t do a particularly good job taking notes on Ogburn, something I only realized after I lent the book away. So, the second post in this series on the Marauders […]
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7. Vico, Language, Barbarism
I mentioned yesterday that, for Vico, the degradation of civilization was tied to a sort of forgetting which began in the corruption of language. I promised to elaborate, so here we are. Recall that the foundation of civil society is exteriorized memory, preserved in things such as grave markers, statues, the structure of cities, and, […]
Dan Yingst 