Tag Archives: libertine Gnosticism

Neither Athens nor Jerusalem

In 1867 Matthew Arnold wrote a book titled Culture and Anarchy in which he held up two saving springs of our civilization: Athens – from which we get the inner urge to “see things as they really are” – and … Continue reading

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The Stroke of Lightning

One time I asked the Swiss-French philosopher Jeanne Hersch what she thought the French model for romantic love was. Her response was instant: C’est Tristan. That twelfth-century tale, which exists in many versions, goes like this: Tristan, a Cornish knight, … Continue reading

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What Is Truth?

The question, famously put to Jesus by Pontius Pilate, was prompted by Jesus’ self-report that he had come to bear witness to the truth. Without capitalizing “Truth,” so that it acquires other-worldly sound-and-light effects – isn’t bearing witness to the … Continue reading

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The Transgressions of Jacob Taubes

The Transgressions of Jacob Taubes  Prominently featured in a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review is a biography titled Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Z. Muller.  The reviewer is Mark Lilla, … Continue reading

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Confessions

Confessions Last night I was trying to cope with a digestive disaster and wondering what on earth could have caused it, since it didn’t seem to have the usual obvious connection with food.  Two explanations presented themselves. First, a possible … Continue reading

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The Personal Meets the Political

The Personal Meets the Political I’m still reading A Dangerous Liaison, the book by Carole Seymour-Jones, about the great twentieth-century power couple, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.  In my previous blog on them, I focused on the inconsistency between … Continue reading

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, alienation, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, books, cities, class, conformism, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, ethics, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, femininity, feminism, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, institutional power, Jews, journalism, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, mind control, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, nineteenth-century, novels, ontology, oppression, past and future, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, roles, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, status, status of women, suffering, terror, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, time, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

End Time

End Time I’ve been reading a voluminous book by historian Richard Landes called Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millenial Experience. It’s exhaustive. Whew! With contagious verve and overwhelming scholarly exactitude, the book goes into the many ways in which … Continue reading

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