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The “body” (literally) of the Western Tradition
Yesterday, I ranted on behalf of the classics; today I’m following up with the single most beautiful metaphor I have ever heard to explain–really, really explain–the Western tradition, our tradition....
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More on the liber in Liberal
Now that I’ve reclaimed the word Liberal from the barbarian hordes in American television and politics, I thought I should expand the topic so that we are all equally confused again. Liberal, we...
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Wu wei: doing by non-doing
One of the subtlest notions in my book is the Taoist idea of wu wei, or non-doing. It doesn’t come up often, but in one or two chapters, for two of the main characters and several of the minor ones, it...
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The greatest thinker of all time
The Hannibal Blog is starting a short series of posts to figure out who the greatest thinker of all time was/is. This is very tangentially related to my book, because some of the people I will...
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Greatest thinker NOT: Hegel
Yesterday I threw down the gauntlet: to look for and find the greatest thinker in world history. Today I want to kick off this series of posts by laying down some criteria for our search, with the aid...
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One-sided thinker: Ayn Rand
I’ve been meaning for a while to respond to Jacob’s nomination of Ayn Rand as the greatest thinker ever. You notice that Rand did not make it into my roster of great thinkers, and I want to explain...
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Free as Diogenes: a fantasy
One of my idols–and everybody has many and mutually contradictory idols–is Diogenes, the ancient Greek sage famous for living with no material possessions in a barrel. I have to be careful about saying...
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New thread: Socrates
The Hannibal Blog is kicking off yet another series, this one on Socrates. You’ve encountered Socrates before on this blog, as when he represented the “left leg” in this body metaphor of the Western...
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Good & bad conversations: Recognize Eris
I ended the previous post, the first in this series on Socrates, by suggesting that we “count all the other ways in which Socrates, like Hannibal, is relevant to us, today.” So let’s start with perhaps...
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The spoken and the written word
So Socrates loved good conversations, which he called dialectic, and disdained bad conversations, which he called eristic, as I described in the previous post of this series on Socrates. But that...
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The original “gadfly”: Socrates’ negativity
Socrates saw himself as “a gadfly to a horse”, where the horse was Athens–a “sluggish horse” in need of a bit of “stinging”. This the origin of our cliché. As we keep discovering in this thread on...
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Socrates, the cynics, idiots and me
Socrates’ most famous disciple was of course Plato. But his oldest disciple was a man named Antisthenes (above), who became the first of the cynics and the teacher of that Diogenes whom I so admire and...
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“Ought” vs “is”: Socrates and Callicles
One of the most momentous conversations in history you’ve never heard about took place between Socrates and a man named Callicles, and is recorded in Plato’s Gorgias. It is a surprisingly moving...
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Was Socrates an atheist?
Toward the end of my three-page article about “Socrates in America” in the Christmas issue of The Economist, there are these two lines: Socrates almost certainly was an atheist. As was his wont,...
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Greatest thinkers: Greeks or Germans?
The Hannibal Blog has featured many thinkers — in the threads on Socrates and Great Thinkers among others. Inevitably, Greeks and Germans have been somewhat disproportionately represented. So it is...
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Nietzsche: Bitter truth or happy illusion?
“If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.” So Friedrich Nietzsche, aged only 19, ends a touching letter to his younger...
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In praise of sublime Greek violence
Nietzsche turned 26 as the Franco-Prussian war was raging (above). He saw this bloodshed as a failure of culture. So he started thinking more deeply about culture and its most fundamental mandate:...
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Somewhere between Apollo & Dionysus
Friedrich Nietzsche not only loved Greek art and culture per se but he was also, as we discussed the other day, always searching for timeless lessons from the Greeks to help us understand modernity and...
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Patanjali in a lab coat
That modern science is somehow “catching up” with Eastern philosophy (logos uniting with mythos, as it were) is an old idea. At least 25 years old, if you date it to Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics,...
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The Buddhism of Christmas
Tis the season when my wife and I, as we behold our children reacting to packages and presents arriving in the mail, exchange knowing glances and mumble something about how “Buddhist” Christmas is....
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Storytelling and invidualism
I’ve long described myself as a classical liberal on this blog, and I’ve tried on occasion to define what that means — for example, with this doodle (above). Its point was to locate the unit of...
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The brain: How body makes spirit
We Westerners have traditionally viewed mind as separate from matter, spirit as separate from body. This assumption started with Plato and culminated in Descartes, who drew the sketch above. And the...
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