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- The ambiguity of moral life is torture — the torturous prose of a Henry James novel, for instance, is a linguistic approximation of heavily valanced guilt, shame, and confusion of Being a moral agent.
- Moral passion is rare. Moral indignation is common. #MeToo Twitter is largely indignation. The students from Parkland HS touring the country — that seems to me like moral passion. Maybe I’m wrong.
- Academic philosophy is an oxymoron.
- It is 65 degrees today — in late February. Life in New York proceeds as if this isn’t a really dire sign of ecological crisis. Systems blindness.
- My most common fantasy is being able to write full-time. My most common fear is never being able to write full-time. The notion — the concept — of full-time, implies that I’m stuck thinking of my activity as a Being in economic terms; that I’ve fully internalized economic imperatives, economic time. I can’t just write — I have to write in a certain way, for certain reasons, with certain results.
- The strongest argument against capitalism is simply that it turns our inner-lives into torment — hell. In terms of argumentative weight, inequality for some is nothing compared to damnation for all.
- In ancient terms, tragedy meant: character is fate. In modern terms, tragedy means: economics is fate. The ancients had the Gods, we have monetary systems. Gusts of wind, flows of capital.
- The great German romantics could become philosophy teachers more or less by offering classes at a University; today, if I wanted to teach philosophy based purely on demand, on interest from lay people, I would be called a charlatan. Specialization and professionalization in the realm of ideas simply means less ideas.
