Category: de umbris idæarum
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Emma and the Philosophers
Fragments on reading Austen’s Emma through the lens of various philosophers. Emma and Kierkegaard Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Kierkegaard stresses that the second half of the command is just as important as the first: love of neighbor is grounded in and equal to (to exceed would be idolatry) our love of ourselves. […]
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Socrates vs. Dionysus
Harrison argues that the narrative, or a narrative, of the Symposium is Socrates’s triumph over Dionysus. The Symposium takes place at a Dionysian celebration of a Dionysian celebration, an after-party of the tragic festival. Here Socrates shows himself unaffected by wine, rebuffs and baffles (while entrancing) Alcibiades who comes from without in the form of […]
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Arguments from Conceivability
If abstractions are in fact real, not mere shadows, then their existence in the mind as abstractions suffices to demonstrate their reality. Thus, to conceive of something is to demonstrate the possibility of its existence. A problem here, beyond the fact that abstractions are mere shadows, is that it’s never quite clear what it means […]
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Reflection and Ressentiment
Ressentiment is characteristic of a reflexive age, which simultaneously gives it no productive outlet (as in ancient Greek ostracism where it was a negative mark of distinction). On top of this, the pervasive hollowness of the age, it’s foreclosing of our ability to address our inner wretchedness, makes resentment all the more intense. Add to […]
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Social Belonging and Abstraction
Social belonging is largely impossible in an age of reflection, because social belonging must consist of bonds between actual, concrete individuals, not between the individual and abstractions. As always, it must be remembered that abstractions do truly not exist. In our current reflective age, the dominant abstraction is “the public.” This is an abstraction that […]
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Kierkegaard, The Present Age
Kierkegaard describes his age as one of reflection, rather than of revolution. Ironically, he wrote this in 1846. Perhaps it wasn’t ironic, I don’t know enough about 1848 to say for sure. The mere fact that a revolution, or revolutions, occur does not mean that they are truly revolutionary, nor that we have escaped the […]
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The Abstract and the Universal
True knowledge–maybe understanding would be better–comes from moving from particulars to universals. We can’t simply jump to the universal, because universals are always and only instantiated in particulars. Tree doesn’t exist in the world independent of the trees themselves. We thus come to know Tree through trees. Since the ultimate ground of universals is the […]
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Punishment
One of Dante’s great insights* is that out punishments are simply when we receive what we’ve chosen. The fact that what we’ve chosen makes us miserable is not some arbitrary punishment delivered by an authority figure, but a consequence of there being a path to happiness and peace and us stepping off that path. We […]
Dan Yingst 