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2018
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August
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- Diameter of a lie
- Disaster relief
- Twitter August 28th 2018
- Double agent zero
- Epictetus
- Handsome Desirability
- One eye open
- Fallacious appeals to authority
- The art of living
- Cheating at Poker
- The desensitization of identity
- Invulnerable
- Live in the Moment - Portugal. The Man
- Let it rain
- Kingdom of souls
- Anomie and enemy rules
- The art of Pretending
- Unspecial treatment
- In the reflection of signs
- Relentless Romantic
- Time in high definition
- Intellectual reputation
- My idea of judgment and authenticity
- phenomenology of singularity
- Vintage Habitat: in signals
- Navigation class (poetics)
- Walking on eggshells
- Dead nature
- Ulterior Motives
- Never looked better
- Taking objective turns
- Thought at wild
- Testing intuition
- The merit of a societal vagabond
- Conspiracy and double standards
- Bonding and the limits of intimidation
- Arcade Fire - Signs of Life
- Heavy (heavy) heart
- Thought for the day
- Heraclitus
- City with no Children - Arcade Fire 🔥
- The search for mankind
- The freedom to purge
- Arcade Fire ♥ - Here comes the night
- The Sacred - I
- Arcade Fire - Joan of Arc
- My favorite 🎶 video for all time... ♥
- Saturday Night - Yukon Blonde
- Bertrand Russell
- Philosophy of History
- Reverse Psychology in a box
- The ⛬ historian
- Time through nature
- Disarmament: a triangulation
- The vulgarity of riches
- Tattoos & Salad
- Heavy sleeper
- Trying too hard
- The Taste of Water
- The racial paradigm
- Gravity of the spirit
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August
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3 comments:
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We must consider what is the time for singing, what the time for play, and in whose presence: what will be unsuited to the occasion; whether our companions are to despise us, or we to despise ourselves: when to jest, and whom to mock at: in a word, how one ought to maintain one's character in society. Wherever you swerve from any of these principles, you suffer loss at once; not loss from without, but issuing from the very act itself. (Discourses 4.12.15–18, trans. Matheson)
The loss here is of course loss of eudaimonia.
Failing to 'remember who we are' will result in our failing to pursue those actions appropriate to our individual circumstances and commitments. Epictetus says that this happens because we forget what 'name' we have (son, brother, councillor, etc.), 'for each of these names, if rightly considered, always points to the acts appropriate to it' (Discourses 2.10.11, trans. Hard). To progress in the Discipline of Action, then, the prokoptôn must be conscious, moment by moment, of (a) which particular social role they are playing, and (b) which actions are required or appropriate for fulfilling that role to the highest standard.
And we should do this with a view to avoiding falling prey to subjective (and false) evaluations so that we can be free from deception and from making rash judgements about how to proceed in the first two disciplines. For if we make faulty evaluations we will end up (with respect to the first discipline) having desires for the wrong things (namely, 'indifferents'), and (with respect to the second discipline) acting inappropriately with regard to our duties and obligations. This is why Epictetus remarks that the third topic 'concerns the security of the other two' (Discourses 3.2.5, trans. Long).
The discipline of assent
What we must avoid, then, is adding to our impressions immediately and without proper evaluation any notion that something good or bad is at hand. For the only thing that is good is moral virtue, and the only harm that anyone can come to is to engage in affairs motivated by vice. Thus, to see the loss of a ship as a catastrophe would count as assenting to the wrong impression, for the impression that we have is that of just a ship being lost. To take the extra step of declaring that this is a misfortune and harmful would be to assent to an impression that is not in fact present, and would be a mistake. The loss of a ship, for a Stoic, is nothing more than a dispreferred indifferent, and does not constitute a harm.
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