Metahistory
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Grace in the Wilderness
If you want optimism, I don't have any for our society's near future. But hope I have, and here's a repost of an essay that explains my reason for it: Barfield and Nietzsche start from the same place—a recognition that the transcendent values of the West have dried up as a living source of meaning in
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The Great Transformation
Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West. When
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Depair as the Refusal to Become One’s Self
…the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles
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World War I and the End of the West
As the centennial of Guns of August approaches, I should imagine we'll be reading quite a bit about World War I and its implications, as we should. It was an absurd catastrophe, and it marked the death of the spirit of Enlightenment Modernity in Western and Central Europe. By the spirit of modernity I mean
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Basic Premises
I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my
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The Logos
From Wallace Stevens' 'Like a Primitive Orb' We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems.It is the huge, high harmony that soundsA little and a little, suddenlyBy means of a separate sense. It is and itIs not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,The breadth
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From Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0
This half hour RSA clip about Steve Fuller's book, Humanity 2.0 is worth watching. It establishes the state of the conversation about a transhuman future. Fuller is pushing up against the approach that I'm trying to develop here on this blog, but it's not what I'm talking about. I think his thinking, and the
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Belief and Cash Value
I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately, and I want to do something in the future that compares their epistemology to the one developed in Barfield's Saving the Appearances. [That's a heavy lift, and we'll see if I have the energy for it during the summer] I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because
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Wandering in the Wilderness II
I'm a little reluctant to do this, but since I've started with the Intro, why not put up Chapter one of Wandering in the Wilderness, entitled "The Shift from Outer to Inner". This chapter relies quite a bit on Owen Barfield's, I think, great book Saving the Appearances. I met and had a chance to
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Wandering in the Wilderness
Reader DS wrote me offline asking if I had written a book or anything that might help him understand the fuller context of what I write here, and I sent him the intro to a book entitled Wandering in the Wilderness I started around 2000-01. Back then I tried half-heartedly to find a publisher, but