words

By “styles of loving” I am referring to the models used in “love research.” The broad concept “love” is sorted into a variety of baskets, such as responsible altruistic caretaking (agape), practical partnership (pragma), erotic intimacy (eros), and so on.

The unusual and little-used verb “to environ” means surround, enclose, envelop; literally, to form a ring around. “Environment,” the noun, means a set of circumstances (circum = around); the context, the physical conditions and external situations, that “surround” our persons and our lives.

From the Germans, English has obtained a word for it: doppelgänger. Someone walks the earth who is your twin, your alter ego, your shadow, another you, another likeness, who sometimes seems to be close by your side and is your other self. When you talk to yourself, scold yourself, stop yourself up, perhaps you are addressing your doppelgänger, not

If we drop the “-ology” and just stick with “telos,” we can get back to its first and original meaning (formulated by Aristotle): “that for the sake of which.”6 I go to the store to buy bread and milk. Not because I was pulled by a vision of the betterment of mankind; not because of a defined philosophy that governs all actions, including why I mar

Wisdom in Greek was sophia, as in our word “philosophy,” love of wisdom.

Mythological images and pathological problems refer to each other. Jung’s famous dictum makes this explicit: “The Gods have become diseases.” Nowhere does the god in the disease show more strongly and tersely than in the tightening heart pain of angina and the anxiety states that hold you back from free action. Both “angina” and “anxiety” derive fr

Ananke derives from a root that spreads through Old Egyptian, Akkadian, Chaldean, and Hebrew terms for “narrow,” “throat,” “strangle,” “constrict,” and the yokes and rings laid on the necks of captives.18 Ananke takes you by the throat, holds you prisoner, and drives you like a slave.

The daimon part is easy enough, for we have already accepted the translation of daimon as genius (Latin) and then transposed it into more modern terms such as “angel,” “soul,” “paradigm,” “image,” “fate,” “inner twin,” “acorn,” “life companion,” “guardian,” “heart’s calling.” This multiplicity and ambiguity inhere in the daimon itself as a personif

The daimon then becomes the source of human ethics, and the happy life—what the Greeks called eudaimonia—is the life that is good for the daimon. Not only does it bless us with its calling, we bless it with our style of following.