I think about this a lot…by Bergotte Greed, Consumption and the Failure of Enough Late capitalism has produced one of the strangest societies in history: we have more of almost everything and yet live inside a permanent rhetoric of lack. We have too many clothes, too much furniture, too much technology, too much food, tooContinue reading “The Cult of More”
Tag Archives: Philosophy
Thrown Into the Open: Who We Are According to Martin Heidegger
He asked the most fundamental question in the history of philosophy — what does it mean to be? — with a depth and a rigour that nobody before him had quite managed. He was also a member of the Nazi party who never adequately recanted. Both of these things are true, and the essay thatContinue reading “Thrown Into the Open: Who We Are According to Martin Heidegger”
The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza
He was excommunicated at twenty-three by the Jewish community that raised him, in terms so severe that no record of the reason survives. He spent the rest of his life grinding lenses and thinking, alone, in a sequence of Dutch boarding houses. What he produced was the most complete and most radical philosophical system inContinue reading “The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza”
Would You Live It Again? Who We Are According to Friedrich Nietzsche
He has been claimed by fascists, by bodybuilders, by management consultants, and by every nineteen-year-old who has ever felt misunderstood. He would have been appalled by all of them. What Nietzsche actually said — about God, about values, about the self, and about whether you would choose your life again if you had to chooseContinue reading “Would You Live It Again? Who We Are According to Friedrich Nietzsche”
One Is Not Born: Who We Are According to Simone de Beauvoir
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”
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 