She wrote the book that changed what women thought they were allowed to want. She lived a life that her own philosophy would judge with considerable severity. She was the most important philosopher of freedom of the twentieth century, and she spent decades in the gravitational field of a man who made her smaller. TheContinue reading “One Is Not Born: Who We Are According to Simone de Beauvoir”
Tag Archives: Philosophy
The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard
He wrote under false names, spoke in riddles, and refused to give answers. He died at forty-two having produced, in a little over a decade, the most searching account of what it means to be a human being that Western philosophy has ever attempted. Kierkegaard did not want to make things easy for you. HeContinue reading “The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard”
Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”
To Whom Little Is Not Enough: On Sufficiency, Excess, and the Self That Cannot Stop Wanting
The Greeks had a precise diagnosis for the condition that defines our age. They called it pleonexia — the desire for more, the wanting that has no natural limit, the reaching that cannot stop because it does not know what it is reaching for. They considered it not merely a practical error but a moralContinue reading “To Whom Little Is Not Enough: On Sufficiency, Excess, and the Self That Cannot Stop Wanting”
My World of Interiors 