Sublime

In our descriptions of ourselves it is never clear whether we prefer to define ourselves by what we deem to be inconvertible, or by what can be converted; essentialism being on the side of the inconvertible, pragmatism taking the supposedly inconvertible to be a tyranny and a provocation.

Psychological egoism is a conspiracy theory of human motivation, and about as credible.

So without knowing what the greatest and most important things are, without unifying ideas, without infallibly coherent ideologies, what is to be done? What are people going to have, as we say, in common, or what are they going to want to have in common? And when, to paraphrase Kafka, we have so little in common with ourselves; why we have so littl

One way or another, we are all trying to figure it out. It’s just that I want to resist those who claim to have it figured out exactly and perfectly, and are out to compel the rest of us to see it the way they do. This passion to persuade is normally associated with the sales departments of religious and political systems.

It would seem, then, that to get rid of the subjective distinction between “me” and “my experience”-through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself–is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the “outside” world. The individual, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstract limits or terms of a concrete rea

Given that the universe is what it is – however you understand it – what are you going to do about it? How have you personally decided to respond? What story have you decided to live by? Whether or not you know it, you are already living by a story you are telling yourself. So, what difference does your story make? Upon whom does it impact? Are you

To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

Today you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is

no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. But that point is mismade in the statement that human beings d