Psychology

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Jul 30
16 min

The heartbreak of staggering self-consciousness

Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was ...

Jul 19, 2019
7 min

A plea for honesty in discussions of sex and gender

A recent article of mine, called "Political Correctness Is Getting Out of Hand," elicited some angry emails. Not from people who disagree...

Dec 27, 2018
3 min

The meaning of life

[Excerpts from this book. See also this blog post, "Excerpts on happiness."] The meaning of life?— Life is not totally “meaningless.” Peo...

Jul 30, 2018
4 min

Old notes on etymology

The profundity of language.— You can gain great insight into the human condition, into the nature of the mind, by studying the evolution ...

Jul 22, 2018
2 min

Marxism and Meadism

August, 2007.-- Here’s one of the many parallels between Marxism and 'Meadism' [i.e., George Herbert Mead's system of thought]: “Human so...

May 26, 2018
3 min

Existentialist thoughts on David Foster Wallace

[From 2008. Copied here, somewhat irrelevantly, in recognition of the recent suicides that have been in the news.] Read an article in Rol...

May 20, 2018
11 min

D. W. Winnicott on playing

Here's a set of old notes on a classic book by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. I happen to be skeptical of psychoanalysis, since it la...

May 16, 2018
3 min

Random thoughts on the self

Phenomenological explorations of consciousness and the self have always fascinated me, and over the years I've taken reams of notes on th...

Mar 25, 2018
7 min

Excerpts on moral pathologies

[From Notes of an Underground Humanist.] How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s possible that so many white Souther...

Jul 14, 2016
6 min

"Awakenings," and the power of music

[From 2008.] Reading Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, which is about his experiences with post-encephalitic, Parkinsonian patients. It’s a good...

Jun 23, 2016
2 min

The utility of "God"

I attended my first Episcopalian service last night [in April 2010]. It was Maundy Thursday, so we did the whole foot-washing thing and t...

Jan 4, 2016
6 min

Two interpretations of love

Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1912), while dated and silly in some respects, is worth reading. Scheler is a semi-Nietzsche in his psycholog...

Sep 21, 2015
3 min

Fragments of humanism

L’enfer, c’est les autres?— Contrary to what Sartre pessimistically thought, if hell exists, it is not other people. It is the absence of...

Aug 8, 2015
3 min

Excerpts on happiness

It’s a cliché but it’s worth repeating: one cause of modern loneliness is the attitude of treating people as means to an end, namely happ...

Apr 18, 2015
3 min

In defense of Socrates

(This is the sequel to the blog post "From the Greeks to the Enlightenment." From my book Finding Our Compass.) Nietzsche ridiculed the S...

Feb 10, 2015
4 min

From the Greeks to the Enlightenment

The best way to think about the human task of living is that it should be, as Nietzsche said, a continual journey of self-overcoming. The...

Sep 27, 2014
3 min

Radical human nature

The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists. ...

Sep 15, 2014
3 min

Homo ludens vs. homo institutorum

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said it simply—one of those simple but profound truths worth remembering: “It is creative apperception ...

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