Writing
Essays, reflections, and marginalia
Essays
The Denial of Death argues that every culture is a scheme for denying mortality, and its author was finishing it under a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Ernest Becker argued that every culture is a scheme for denying death. Here is what his theory claims, what it explains, and how his own dying tested it.
Essays
In the spring of 1864 a government censor deleted the chapter where Fyodor Dostoevsky made his case for faith, and the book that reached readers kept its blasphemy and lost its cure.
A government censor cut the chapter where Dostoevsky argued for faith, so Notes from Underground reached readers with its despair but not its cure.
Essays
The Herculaneum scrolls, carbonised by Vesuvius in 79 AD and now being read by machine, are the library of the one ancient school whose own books went uncopied while its enemies' account of it survived.
AI just read a Herculaneum scroll end to end. How forged letters, Cicero and a thousand years of uncopied parchment turned Epicurus into a glutton.
Essays
A man can do what he wills but cannot will what he wills. Schopenhauer proved it in 1839, watched blame collapse, and then did the thing no modern hard determinist does: he said what should stand in the empty space.
Schopenhauer's 1839 prize essay proved a man can do what he wills but cannot will what he wills. Here is the argument, and why it ends in pity, not blame.
Essays
Socrates went to his death claiming ignorance. Twenty-four centuries later, we still haven't answered his question.
Socrates was executed for claiming ignorance. Plato spent fifty years circling the question his teacher raised at trial: what is knowledge, and can human beings have it? Twenty-four centuries later, surrounded by more information than Socrates could have imagined, we are still sitting in the cave.
Essays
One morning, Gregor Samsa woke transformed. A century later, we're still trapped in his nightmare.
Essays
The 19th century's most anxious thinker had a message for the age of self-optimization
You can't think your way into a life. This is what Kierkegaard understood, and it's what makes him so difficult to accept.
Essays
There's a moment in everyone's life when the carefully constructed image we present to the world starts to crack.
Essays
One of Dostoevsky's most famous quotes is also his most misunderstood
There's a particular kind of suffering that Dostoevsky understood better than almost anyone: the suffering of trying to be rational about everything.
Essays
On July 27, 1656, the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam pronounced a cherem against one of its most brilliant young scholars.