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The Bong Sau Allegory
You can’t overpower everything with muscular strength, so you must learn to react accordingly, with good technique.
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One Year On, Part One: Philosophy as Therapy
This website is one year old. One year on, I think and feel very differently about things: this shows it’s done its work.
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The Allegory of Martial Arts, Bad Fortune, and the Sceptic
Philosophy is routinely dismissed as good-for-nothing: an old and out-dated discipline that serves no useful purpose. It is not alone.
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Mental Health Aspect Blindness
Something I’ve observed in people’s reactions and judgements about mental health is like a kind of colour blindness. It shows itself as an inability to discern a difference between two things that are obviously different. They cannot discern the difference between someone who is lazy and someone who is dangerously depressed, or the difference between someone who is nervous and someone who is struggling with anxiety. And because they can’t discern the difference, they treat one as if it were no different from the other. […]
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Shadow Chasing
Over the past few years – having made an attempt to pursue philosophy as a way of life, to take it seriously and digest its lessons and not only treat it as an academic discipline – I’ve come to see new depths in old ideas. One example of this is the cynical little detail in Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’. There, Plato suggests that these poor souls – imprisoned in a dark cave of ignorance and only able to look at the shadows on the wall in front of them – would esteem those who are best at discerning the…
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The Musician Allegory
As a musician, to play out of tune and not realise it is one thing. But to realise that you are playing out of tune and to keep playing: that is absurd. Such a person is ridiculous. If you realise that you are playing out of tune, you stop playing. You don’t start playing again until you have tuned yourself up.
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Healthy Cynicism
I’m not sure if Cynicism is healthy because I’m not sure what health is. But I do think that Cynicism has a healthy role to play: it is a healthy corrective to the nonsense of this world, the world that we have made for ourselves. My doubt serves as an introduction to a typically philosopher’s question. Not ‘is this or that thing healthy?’, which is a question we leave to the scientists, but ‘what is healthy’? What is the essence or best idea that we have of ‘health’? Here are some paradoxical answers characteristic of a Cynic’s idea: It is…
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Craft Your Nature
As natural as it should be to live in accordance with nature, we don’t take to it naturally. It takes practice and training and an amount of philosophical education to understand what nature requires and to align your will with those requirements. Our untrained nature often leads us astray. We’re naturally inclined to follow our desires for pleasure, for example, and will follow this desire far beyond any natural requirements, not realising these to be the small seeds of mistakes that will grow into entire forests; forests in which we will eventually get lost. We don’t like being poor. We…
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Align Your Will with Nature
Diogenes the Cynic sees a mouse, happily running about, not looking for money or prestige, and finds a lesson in the mouse’s behaviour: Diogenes says the gods have given us an easy life but we’ve made it difficult for ourselves by overlaying it with nonsense. Even in Diogenes’ time, to talk of ‘the gods providing’ would be taken metaphorically. This is all the more true in our more secular time. So we can replace ‘the gods’ with ‘nature’ here and the effect is the same. Nature has given us a relatively easy life but we’ve overlaid it with nonsense. We…
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Philosophy is a Magic Spell
Philosophy is like a kind of magic spell: you only need to say the right words in the right order and with the right intent you can change your world. Philosophy can turn poverty into wealth and sickness into health; it can free you from constraints, from the power of tyrants, from the fear of harm; it can protect you from yourself and warn you of errors before you make them; it can turn bad fortune into good. It is like a protective shield that makes you invulnerable to misfortune. Its effectiveness is limited to certain types of things. It…
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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