Category: Studies
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The word understand means position. In Old English, understandan is composed of under and standan. Yet under did not simply mean beneath. It could also mean among, between, in the presence of, or in proximity to something. To understand was therefore not to grasp an idea, but to stand within it. The image is spatial before it is conceptual. One stands among things, takes…
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“My reading has left impressions upon me as much as I have left impressions upon the books. A tattered copy of E. Starkie’s B. and a heavily marginalia-laden copy of B.’s Reflections have accompanied me for years, shaping me much as prolonged sitting shapes an armchair. The cushion bears the imprint of the body only briefly, but the chair…
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Inaction: Reading Hadot on Plotinus in the First Hours of the Year By Justin Loke “When people are too weak for contemplation, they switch to action, which is a mere shadow of contemplation and of reason. Since, owing to the weakness of their souls, their faculty of contemplation is insufficient, they cannot grasp the object…
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The Retreat of Reality: On Agamben’s What is Real? (2018) by Justin Loke For much of Western thought, reality was understood as something necessary, of necessity: things happened for reasons, and even if humans did not yet know those reasons, they were assumed to exist. This view goes back to Aristotle, who described reality in…
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“ […] A medieval glossary explains the meaning of the neologism dementicare, which was beginning to substitute the more literary oblivisci in common usage, as follows: dementicatis: oblivioni traditdistis. The forgotten is not simply cancelled or left aside: it is handed over to oblivion. The pattern of this unformulable tradition was set out by Hölderlin…
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“It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of…
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The word caesuras comes from the Latin caesura, which means “a cutting” or “a break.” It is built from the verb caedere, meaning to cut, to strike, even to kill. The term Caesarean section is commonly believed to come from the birth of Julius Caesar, but this is almost certainly a legend. The real origin…
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Whenever we speak about a person or a thing, we unknowingly perform two moves. First, we name it (“Katie,” “this person here”), which singles it out. Second, we say something about it (“she is kind,” “she is tall”), which assumes that there is already a stable “someone” underneath our words. Aristotle Aristotle noticed this and…
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to ti ēn einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) Every person carries within them a quiet shape, a way their life has carved them into who they are. It is not just the fact that they exist, but the particular texture of their existence: the small decisions, the losses survived, the habits formed, the joys that…
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