I’ve nearly finished reading The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin. I didn’t have any particular plans to comment on the insights and delicately ironic prose of Professor Boorstin until I read these words: For while Eliot, reformer though he was, still thought and talked about “subjects” of study, Hall, Dewey, and their … [Read more…]
I’ve just started to read Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time and lines of thought came to life before I’d even finished Hilary Putnam’s foreword for the 1991 reprinting of an English translation by the University of California Press. I’ll probably write multiple essays on this subject of the direction of time, though it doesn’t … [Read more…]
[This is an essay which I though had been posted on 2012/06/02, but I left it in draft status. I don’t think this glitch in publishing date matters much.] In an essay I published in April of 2012, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I quoted Jacques Barzun from The House of Intellect: We [in the United States] … [Read more…]
There is likely a tendency for scientifically literate laymen, such as myself, to think of quantum effects in terms of the forces and particles of interaction, of potential, rather than in terms of what some might label `brute matter’. Miracles of scientific measurement and experimentation are almost to be expected nowadays and, lo and behold, … [Read more…]
In my last posted essay, “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”: Ends and Means., I tried to distinguish between ends of shorter- or longer-term. I came to a humbling conclusion that we can’t shape the future but only “intend towards the goals of a good human life and also good communal lives, morally well-ordered lives with … [Read more…]
Josef Pieper makes this qualification to the separation of leisure and culture from the pursuance of (mostly practical) goods: [T]his is not to say that there is no sort of connection between the fulfilment of the `common good’ and the philosophy taught in a country! Only the relationship can never be established or regulated from … [Read more…]
I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper … [Read more…]
I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being: God manifested … [Read more…]