Incoming Links

• March 23rd, 2021

  In fact I write as a kind of escape. It's the thing I do that isn't taking care of a Toddler and a Household.

• March 7th, 2021

  I confront the world as a member of this Family, this Household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no ‘I’ apart from these. *

• Thread on Self and World and Exiting 2020

  there is something perpetually interesting about the desire to be a self, existing prior to and beyond outer relations and networks of activity, and the tension with the need for the outer I'm thinking about it in connection with the virus event and the Household

• 📙 After Virtue

  In my earlier example the agent’s activity may be part of the history both of the cycle of Household activity and of his marriage, two histories which have happened to intersect. The Household may have its own history stretching back through hundreds of years, as do the histories of some European farms, where the farm has had a life of its own, even though different families have in different periods inhabited it; and the marriage will certainly have its own history, a history which itself presupposes that a particular point has been reached in the history of the institution of marriage.

  The catalogue of the Virtues will therefore include the Virtues required to sustain the kind of Households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together and the Virtues necessary for philosophical enquiry about the character of the good.

  I confront the world as a member of this Family, this Household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no ‘I’ apart from these. To this it may be replied: what about my immortal soul? Surely in the eyes of God I am an individual, prior to and apart from my roles. This rejoinder embodies a misconception, which in part arises from a confusion between the Platonic notion of the soul and that of Catholic Christianity. For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must indeed possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity. What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church.

  Her heroines seek the good through seeking their own good in marriage. The restricted Households of Highbury and Mansfield Park have to serve as surrogates for the Greek city-state and the medieval kingdom.

• 📙 Beyond Order

  Whose career is going to take priority? When and why? How will the children be educated and disciplined, and by whom? Who does the cleaning? Who sets the table? Takes out the garbage? Cleans up the bathroom? How are the bank accounts set up and managed? Who shops for groceries? Clothes? Furniture? Who pays for what? Who adopts responsibility for the taxes? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Two hundred things, perhaps, to run a Household properly—as complex a problem as running a business, with the additional difficulty of trying to manage it with a Family member, much of it repeated daily. Your life is, after all, mostly composed of what is repeated routinely. You either negotiate responsibility for every single one of these duties or you play push and pull forever, while you battle it out nonverbally, with stubbornness, silence, and half-hearted attempts at “cooperation.” That is not going to do your romantic situation any good. It is of vital necessity, in consequence, to place the domestic part of the Household economy on firm ground.

• 📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

  In Homeric, Icelandic, and Irish heroic societies, moral life and social life were inseparable, for one’s social role and status, one’s work and deeds, and one’s relationships to Family and community were the main elements of personal identity. The Greek term “aretê,” which we translate as “Virtue” meant “excellence” in strength and skill as well as character, and courage, defined as “the quality necessary to sustain a Household and a community” was a central form of excellence

• 📙 The Master and His Emissary

  Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar, not in the sense of the inauthentically routine, but in the sense of the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the Household, those I care for.