When engaging with a fictional story, we can happily imagine worlds that are factually very different from our own. Science fiction, fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction: all of these present no significant hurdle to the imagination. But we seem to strongly resist imagining worlds that are morally very different from our own.
Spinoza’s Ethics is a passionate and radical revisioning of the nature of God, human existence, and the world that comes packaged as if it were a coldly rational geometric proof.
Sentimental artworks, and the people who indulge in them, are disappointingly incurious about the emotions involved. If the emotions are rational, and if they inform our thinking and deliberation, they warrant critical scrutiny every bit as much as thought does.
The peculiar predicament of philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we speak under the illusion that we’re making sense when in fact we’re mouthing empty words. The illusion of saying something profound is beguiling, which is why puncturing it, as he sees it, requires strength of character more than it requires intellect.
An ethics that recognizes the centrality of trust emphasizes our vulnerability and our interdependence. It also emphasizes the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another.
Most philosophers want to get to settled answers. The ironist, by contrast, speaks in the voice of Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
You can also find the beauty of travel in your own literal backyard (if you have one), on any city street, in a shopping mall, in a diner. That experience of being lifted outside of time, of seeing the world around you as strange and wonderful—you don’t need to book time off from work or get on a plane to experience it. You can find it right here and right now.
Outrage is the pleasure that dare not speak its name. As much as it’s bound up in feelings of anger and slighted justice, feelings of outrage are deeply satisfying.
If human social life is more densely structured and institutionalized than the social lives of other animals, that’s due at least in part to the fact that we’re very playful animals.
Clubbing a rockfish to death was wildly inconsistent with my habitual way of living. It’s precisely the inconsistency that intrigued me. I doubt that there’s any wholly consistent way to live and there’s much to be learned by applying pressure to deeply held principles.