Ideas
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Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?
Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone: The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who
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What Do You Believe?
What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. The narrative we choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply aspire
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Civilization and Its Discontents
It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that
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Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries
I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B
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Heroes of the Fourth Turning
I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a
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Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments
All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however,
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Eagleton on “Theory”
'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble. But it is as much a revealing a symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities