He wrote nothing. He claimed to know nothing. He taught by pretending not to teach, questioned by pretending not to have answers, and led the most examined life in the history of Western philosophy — and then, when Athens offered him the choice between his life and his vocation, he chose the vocation. He wasContinue reading “The Gadfly and the Hemlock: Who We Are According to Socrates”
Tag Archives: Philosophy
One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: Who We Are According to Albert Camus
He is the last philosopher in this series and the one who answers the question the series has been building toward. Not the question of what the self is, or how it is made, or what it is condemned to. The question that Sartre’s radical freedom leaves ringing in the air: given all of thisContinue reading “One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: Who We Are According to Albert Camus”
Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X
Taste, Technology and What Happened to the Individual Eye I think About This A Lot… by Birgitte Hahn-Etc There comes a point in middle age when one catches oneself looking at a group of twenty-somethings and thinking something one had promised never to think: Why are they all dressed like that? This is treacherous territory.Continue reading “Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X”
Condemned to Be Free: Who We Are According to Jean-Paul Sartre
Every philosopher in this series has made demands. Kierkegaard demanded genuine decision. Beauvoir demanded resistance to structural power. Nietzsche demanded value-creation in the void. Heidegger demanded ownership of one’s own being. Sartre takes all of these demands, strips away every remaining support, and arrives at the most terrifying and the most liberating position in theContinue reading “Condemned to Be Free: Who We Are According to Jean-Paul Sartre”
The Cult of More
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”
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”
