RE: http://www.firstprinciplesjour...284&theme=home&loc=f Schall has become my favorite here. He's got me to realize I must be a philosopher. I often neglect practical matters (like matching my socks) ... preoccupied instead with how there can be anything at all. Most folk are not philosophers because they approach the world seeking utility. We become philosphers when we lay ourselves open to the essence of a world functioning in and around us; before and after us.
This Schall article really is a keeper. I can't read enough of him. His On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs is a favorite.
Now if I may get philosophical for a moment. Among professionals, the optometrist is the closest to a philosopher - far closer than most of today's professors, it seems. This is because philosophy is an optic: it's the art of seeing the ultimate in all things, even the most ordinary. This in part explains, as Schall mentions, the loneliness of the philosopher, since he's constantly surrounded by those trained to focus only on the ephemeral and who accordingly dismiss his concern with the transcendent. Such has always been the case, of course, but I suspect that the true philosopher's alienation has reached its deepest depths in the steamroller of today's Brave New World, whose chief business is the mass production of flat souls. See? I've read Bloom. haha....
I've read Bloom as well, and Strauss. Who says that we have more flat souls now than ever before? Did the ordinary human being in any time or at any place have a soul that was not flat? Or should we question the whole notion that the souls of moderns are flatter than those of anyone else? Flat souls remind me of Last Men, and I know plenty of Straussians who find themselves in the realm of the Last Men, a position that is hard for me to distinguish from just plain old snobbery, as in "I can read Greek and you can't."
A tree is known by its fruit. This age produces no Beethovens, Mozarts, Bachs, Dantes, Virgils, Aristotles, Platos.... But it does produce fine plastics, computer chips, and many other sterile things.
