As I have argued in a previous essay,1 Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man seeks to establish the necessity of beauty for human life by offering two kinds of argument. The first argument turns on the salutary political effects of beauty, and the second on the concept of beauty itself, arguing that it …
True to its title, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man examines beauty’s role in individual and cultural development. At its most general level, the Aesthetic Letters investigates two key questions: (1) What is beauty? (2) And what are its effects on human life? Inspired by Kant, Schiller attempts to answer the first …
1. Deconstruction in the Evangelical Church The term “deconstruction” has taken on a life of its own in Evangelical Christian circles. I can remember being both surprised and annoyed when sitting in these churches and hearing pastors rail against postmodern philosophers as if they were prophets of the antichrist. Their animosity surprised me, because I …
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious has become a cultural commonplace. We recognize when our co-workers, friends, and family act unconsciously, repeatedly manifesting meaningful patterns of action they claim to be purely accidental. Wider society also capitalizes on the unconscious by designing its propaganda (marketing) to appeal to our deep longings that rarely …
The term ‘synchronicity’ was coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to designate a relation between events that is both (i) explanatory and (ii) non-causal.[1] Consider the events x, in which a is F, and y, in which b is G. According to Jung’s terminology x and y would be synchronous, if a’s being F explained …