Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To speak of the Will to Art is to interpret the world as having an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing, even though the outcome of this evolutionary process, due to its indeterminate nature, is unknowable in advance.
It is imperative that a very different conception of development should be adopted as quickly as possible. It is not difficult to imagine a sane, sustainable, just and fulfilling alternative.
This presentation gives an overview of Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of sufficiency, which he developed and practised during his famous simple living experiment at Walden Pond (1845-47). Dr Alexander uses Thoreau’s life story to explore the question: How much is enough?
The annual holiday celebrations have arrived and it seems a good time to think about what we are really celebrating. It seems the historic and religious significance of these holidays have been overshadowed by consumerism. Thanksgiving and Christmas have become celebrations of consumption filled with opportunities to eat, drink, and make merry with food and gifts.
Too much of our time in our hectic consumer society seems like “not life”—phony and artificial. We want, instead, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow,” as Thoreau puts it. And being involved with “real” things—things you can touch or taste or manipulate is attracting people.
Samuel Alexander has written an excellent introduction to Thoreau’s works. Just Enough Is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics not only summarises Thoreau’s ideas, it is also a pithy statement of Alexander’s work itself…
Technocornucopians see the world of the future as a great 3D printer with an unlimited supply reservoir.
We all play the domination / submission game. But another game is afoot. The partnership game. The more you learn to play it, the less beholden you will be to the con-games of Babylon.
When we met Logan Smith and Tammy Strobel in A Young Couple Find Freedom in Simple Living, they’d already gotten out of debt and simplified their lives.
Here’s a question: how many second gifts do you remember from your childhood Christmases? How many third or fourth gifts?
Social critic Philp Slater died this summer. His 1970 book "The Pursuit of Loneliness" "warned that a national cult of individualism and careerism threatened to turn America into a country of hypercompetitive loners ruled by tyrants.”(NY Times).
