Preface Inspired by Cicero’s dialogues and the letters of Seneca, I have sought to compare the ideas of Alasdair MacIntyre, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche in a speculative chat on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and how both relate to the process of judgment in both spheres. Although this piece is an attempt to be humorous, I treat these very Continue Reading …
Playing God: The Rise of the Actor and the Decline of Tragic Art
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that, through his protégé Euripides, Socrates had injected into Greek tragedy the seed of questioning doubt that brought an end to the religious animus of drama, the fire that fueled its creation and sustained it. Thus, cold reason killed tragedy. Although he would later modify this view, it remains a powerful and influential Continue Reading …
The Real Redneck
The return to the soil, to nature, is a recurring preoccupation of the civilized. Whenever a society reaches a state of high development it seems a repeating pattern that a segment of the population begins to yearn for the good ol’ days of yore. Ironically, even the ancients knew this temptation. Recall Cicero’s lament: “O the times! O the morals!” But even the Greeks reached a Continue Reading …
Please Patronize Me
A rather rotund man hunches over a walking stick disdainfully in the reception room of an obviously powerful and busy Grand Signor. The man is but one of many individuals crowded together uncomfortably, some attempting to pass the time as entertainingly as possible, others patiently waiting their turn to be called for an audience. At the end of a great hall a door is open Continue Reading …
The Genre of Despair
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated Continue Reading …