Housekeeping
😐
For my spring housekeeping, I spent some time on catch-up cleaning and boxing up my accumulated clutter. My kitchen floor and bedroom look a lot nicer now. This week I’ll continue sorting through the clutter and try to get to some invoicing and investing research.
Spirituality
🤔
I started working on my spirituality statement. It’s an exploration of my personal views and style that I’m writing during Lent. So far I’ve jotted some thoughts on my purpose for doing the project and my idea of its scope. The basic idea is that clarity would help me navigate the complexities of life and resist both distraction and pressure, both from outside and inside myself. I know I can’t spell out everything I think in this area, so I’m aiming to hit the highlights, enough to give me direction. This week I’ll look at how my views developed.
Philosophy
🤓
Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy between the Lines took me on a fascinating dive into the relationship between philosophy and society. The book argues that philosophers up to the modern era hid their real positions in roundabout writing, so I was expecting it to be an interesting side trip into an unusual form of cryptography. It was, but in the process he examined the rather profound reasons they felt the need to write esoterically and why we find this idea so hard to accept.
Fundamentally it’s because earlier philosophers thought of society and philosophy as being at odds so that they had to be protected from each other, and now we believe they ultimately benefit each other. Esoteric writing was also meant as a teaching device to prompt aspiring philosophers to work through the issues on their own. There was a fourth purpose that came into play once philosophy was seen as a benefit—to nudge society gently in the philosopher’s preferred direction. Melzer also includes an intriguing discussion of Leo Strauss’s arguments against postmodernism (or historicism in his terminology), which Strauss held arose partly because the historicists failed to read earlier writings as esoteric.
Stormwater management
🙂
I took another walk at the local dam that’s my personal symbol for stormwater management. It was one of the first locations I visited after deciding it was a subject I wanted to pay attention to. I was in the area again last week, so I stopped by.
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