Something very short; a plug for a Sententiae Antiquae post. Continue reading
Spirit
The New Year, and Previous Years
It is important to make plans, because while novelties drive history (there are genuinely new things in the world all the time — we are not necessarily caged by the past, but are always open to the future), those novelties will spring up with weed-like haphazardness if we don’t direct them. So far as I can tell, I didn’t make a New Year’s plan or commitments last year on Into the Clarities. Continue reading
Excerpt #24 — Alasdair MacIntyre on The Nothingness of The Modern Self
Riffing off of the last excerpt post by David Bentley Hart, it seemed appropriate to list here a similarly themed excerpt from Alasdair MacIntyre about the modern self, and modern freedom.
Since I am nearing the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I thought to list just one passage from it here, and settled on this one because of its similarity to that excerpt.
Excerpt #23 — David Bentley Hart on Modern Freedom
We all talk about freedom, or freedoms: the modern period is shot through with liberating the individual from the tyrannical claims of the group, and various self-help and movement-politics trends position themselves as furthering the cause of freedom.
Talk of freedom –the concern for further spreading freedom-as-liberties, for maximizing personal freedom-as-autonomy– is everywhere today, and the pursuit and establishment of freedom are a hallmark of the modern period. Financial success and stability is marketed as offering freedom. The Stoic trend that has steadily risen in philosophically-oriented self-help fora concerning liberation from one’s own passions is one form of this concern for freedom — it simply turns the eyes of the individuals from liberation from external forces and conditions that enslave to liberation from internal masters. The LGBTQ movement is another form of this, overturning conventions and taboos for the sake of freedom. Fears about potential or actual threats against journalistic freedom are another form of this; concerns about religious freedom are another form of this; movements to bring about a state of greater economic parity between segments of the population are yet another form of this. I could go on.
The concern for freedom is everywhere. But what is freedom?
The Lure
Loki has nothing on Aphrodite;
the real trickster can start the siege of Ilium
and have you teary-eyed looking at old pictures
