Anatomy of desire
December 8, 2008
Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great asked him: ‘What can I do for you?’, he replied: ‘Please step out of my sun’.
Diogenes could have asked for anything — wealth, power, fame. But he chose to sit in the sun. What a fabulous example of philosophical asceticism!
Philosophers through the ages agree that to change ourselves for the better, we must get a grip on our desires. Does this mean limiting our desire, desiring less? Perhaps it simply means distinguishing good and bad desires — desiring those things that make us happy and healthy and rejecting the contrary.
Creating futures
July 27, 2008
The future that we’ve been counting on for decades is unsustainable. Our task today, as individuals and societies, is to create a new vision of the future.
Bobby Kennedy said: ‘The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present’.
It is time we told a new story about ourselves. Are we the late-born children of the oil age, helpless and trembling on the brink of collapse? Or are we the early members of that heroic generation tasked with changing the world – the first generation of a new era of globalized co-operation and eco-consciousness?
Be warned: how you respond may change your life.
Heraclitus on change
April 7, 2008
What does it mean to live in a world of change? Heraclitus’ answer is: to live in a world of constant change is to be constantly changing.
This vision of life is evident in Heraclitus’ epigram on the river of flux:
‘We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not’ (B49a).
The idea seems to be that no one can step into the same river twice. This is because the river is constantly changing. But surely, one might respond, a river only changes within its banks? If one accepts that a river is defined by its course, it remains the same river irrespective on how much changes goes on between its banks.
This may be right but it misses Heraclitus’ point. What Heraclitus is saying is that, along the banks, the material substance of the river is constantly changing. If you stand on the side of the Danube, the water that you see before you is not the same water from moment to moment. If the river is this water – the water that flows past the banks – then the Danube is not the same river from moment to moment. We step into Danube, we step out again. When we step into it again, we step into different water, and thus effectively, a different river.
Furthermore, we step into and out of the river as different beings.
Most interpretations of Heraclitus’s river fragment focus on the idea of the river in a state of flux. But Heraclitus says more than this in this fragment: ‘We are and are not’.
The river changes and so do you!
We are familiar with the principle of biological generation and corruption. Heraclitus puzzled over this principle two thousand years before the birth of the modern biological sciences and drew its ultimate lesson for the human condition. As material beings, we live in a world of flux. Moreover, we are flux. As physical bodies, we are growing and dying all the time, consuming light and resources to replicate our structure, while shedding matter continuously.
Change and death are omnipresent features of the natural world. Perhaps this is what Heraclitus means when he says we are living our death and dying our life.
Reflections on empowerment
February 19, 2008
Don’t underestimate the desire to think and learn. You know what Parmenides said — thinking and being are the same.
Don’t underestimate the wonder in discovering a new sentiment or passion. Do you remember the first time you fell in love?
Don’t underestimate the value of learning a new activity, or acquiring the ability to tackle a new task. These things can transform lives.
Don’t underestimate the human need to be and belong. To say ‘I am…’ and have that mean something… It gives meaning to life.
What do these things have in common? They are forms of empowerment.
No one knows what they are capable of thinking, feeling, doing, or being. The adventure of life is to find out.
