For the last few weeks I’ve been making my way through the dense prose of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the most important work to come out of the existentialist school of philosophy. Why? Partly for no better reason than that a cheap paperback copy happened to turn up in the philosophy section of a…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
On Occult Literature: A Diversion of Sorts
It so happens that last week’s post on reading books by dead people had a curious echo. In a forum I frequent where occultism is the subject of discussion, an earnest young person put up a plaintive post, asking why so much classic occult literature is so boring to read. As usual in such forums,…
The Choice of a Canon
Last week’s post on the spooky dimensions of reading—the one-on-one encounter, in the silent places of the mind, with another person’s thinking—sparked a lively discussion on the comments page, and no shortage of interesting questions. One of the points that was brought up repeatedly, though, focused on one of the points that I didn’t address…
A Tune for Mountain Dulcimer
For some time now I’ve been thinking about one of the core patterns underlying recent history here in the United States. It’s a pattern that can be traced from colonial times onward, and it offers unexpected insights into the mess the United States is in just now; the one difficulty with it is that nearly…
The Truths We Have In Common
In recent posts here on Ecosophia.net, I’ve sketched out the way that the era of abstraction in which we’ve all grown up has foundered, following patterns that were old before our civilization was born. We’ve talked about the way that the abstract generalizations that started out helping to make sense of on-the-ground realities have been…
An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018
This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…
A Rhetorical Education
Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick. Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided. Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate…
Zeno’s Laughter
We really are going to have to start a conversation about ethics, aren’t we? Last week’s post on the fallacy of claiming that there’s one and only one proper diet for all human beings everywhere brought a pretty fair barrage of pushback. Now of course this wasn’t any kind of surprise; it’s an odd fact…
A Dangerous Year
‘Tis the season for making predictions about the events lurking in wait for us all in the upcoming year, and I see no reason to demur from that common if risky habit. Those of my readers who’ve been following my blog since the days of The Archdruid Report know that my method in making these…
Systems That Suck Less
Last week’s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I’d used the wrong definition of socialism. That’s actually worth addressing here, because it will help clear the…