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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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Rustic
I read other philosophers and they are like symphonies, or at least etudes. I read myself and it is like hill country blues: rough and slightly out of tune, rustic and not urbane, repetitive, unsophisticated, improvised and full of duff notes. It’s not clean but distorted. I play badly. To the refined ear these are bad sounds, but these days I have no interest in playing any other way.
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The Form and Purpose of Philosophical Irony
The essence of philosophical irony is to say one thing while showing something else, for the purpose that is the purpose of all philosophy: the pursuit of wisdom. For example, were I to say something like: ‘Having children is bad because they cost a lot of money.’ On the face of it, what is said here is literally true: children do cost a lot of money. But what is shown here goes against what is said, because someone with an ear for tone might recognise the point being made: some reasons are too shallow to deserve serious consideration.
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Product and Purpose Postscript: Brand Confusion
In the terms-of-today we’d say my writing shows some brand confusion. And it does, because I am confused. Were someone to ask me what my business is, in writing what I do, I wouldn’t know what to say.
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Product and Purpose
Some people fail to see a distinction between the product of an activity and its purpose. This isn’t always and everywhere a failure to see things as they really are, since sometimes there is no distinction to be drawn. But when it is a failure it can lead to serious consequences. Because what follows from it: to come to define something’s purpose by its most visible product and then measure its value in those terms.
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Attend to What Matters: Eutukhéō or ‘fortunate’
‘If you attend to what matters you will recognise how fortunate you are and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.’
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Attend to What Matters: Grief
My dog died recently. This will mean different things to different people.
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Attend to What Matters: Freedom
My life is currently very constrained. I am occupied with looking after our 18-month old daughter. When she is awake, I am fully occupied; when she is asleep, I am on call and cannot go further than the effective range of the baby monitor.
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Attend to What Matters: Fear
I had reason to refocus on this idea on a recent trip to the dentist. I haven’t had much dental work in my life, but when I have, I am one of those people for whom the anaesthetic never really works properly the first or second (or sometimes third or fourth) time. I know this, having been taught it by repeated experience, but of course any dentist encountering me for the first time must learn it for themselves.
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Attend to What Matters: Willpower
My earliest pre-philosophical application of the idea was ‘willpower’. As a younger person, caught up in the lust for admiration that is characteristic of some younger people, I was very motivated to be physically fit, strong, and attractive. To this end, I understood the need for diet and exercise. But these are difficult things to do, requiring a degree of discipline and a willingness to subject yourself to suffering.
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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