Tag: philosophy

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Later Philosophy

John Michael Greer140 Comments

At the end of the last thrilling episode of our journey through the tangled wilderness of The Nibelung’s Ring, Richard Wagner, fleeing from the kingdom of Saxony with a price on his head, had just reached safety in Switzerland.  There he would remain, scraping by on the money he could make from writing and trying…

Against Enchantment 3: Jean Gebser

John Michael Greer129 Comments

In the months just passed I’ve pursued an exploration of the myth of disenchantment—the notion that our civilization, for the first time in human history, has shaken off the comforting daydreams of myth and magic in order to see the universe in all its cold and uncaring reality.  So far, in the course of that…

Against Enchantment 2: Owen Barfield

John Michael Greer150 Comments

Last month’s exploration of the history of enchantment began with a look at the other side of the equation—the disenchantment of the world mapped out by Max Weber—and then a survey of the ways that enchantment and disenchantment were understood by Ken Wilber, one of the modern thinkers who’s built a theory of history on…

Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber

John Michael Greer187 Comments

Two weeks ago we talked about Max Weber’s claim that the disenchantment of the world is one of the basic elements of modernity, Jason Josephson-Storm’s counterargument that Weber was engaged in an attempt to erase the presence of magic and enchantment in modernity, and the way that Weber’s claim, inaccurate as it is, expresses one…

The Unmanageable Future

John Michael Greer289 Comments

Explorers into unknown territory face plenty of risks. One that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves is the possibility that they know less about the country ahead than they think. Inaccurate maps, jumbled records, travelers’ tales that got garbled in transmission or were made up in the first place:  all these and more have…

On Domed Cities and Doomed Dreams

John Michael Greer284 Comments

Recently I’ve been reading the writings of the American philosopher William James. You won’t  see much discussion of his work among philosophers nowadays, and that’s not just because he happened to be white and male.  He had the bad luck to reach maturity as Western philosophy was in its death throes, and he added to…

The Care of the Mind

John Michael Greer262 Comments

Before we begin, a preliminary note is in order.  Yes, I heard about what’s happening with the US election. I write my posts in advance, and this one was finished days before the votes started being counted. We’ll discuss the election over on my Dreamwidth journal once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles.…

The Worlds We Live In

John Michael Greer173 Comments

I’m sure many of my readers noticed that last month’s posts were talking about the same thing from two different angles. The first of those posts looked at the weird conviction on the part of America’s well-to-do classes that the people below them have no right to their own reasons for, say, voting for a…

Bad Faith and Worse Hairstyles

John Michael Greer244 Comments

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…

Zeno’s Laughter

John Michael Greer267 Comments

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…