Posts Tagged ‘ James S. Hans ’

Envy is Ignorance

This is more of Emerson. He has his romantic excesses, but it is hard to quarrel with this: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the [ READ MORE ]

Emerson on the Essential Self

As I said before, I am reading The Site of Our Lives, by James S Hans. He quotes Emerson on page 45: These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone one of [ READ MORE ]

Is Recovery Possible?

The answer is: yes, in theory. In practice, things are more difficult. Perhaps I should first state  what I am talking about: who is trying to recover from what? For most, this question will strike no response: they are not aware of any crisis – or that any response is necessary. For them, things just go [ READ MORE ]

The Urge to Destroy the World

This is going to be a difficult posting. My lead here is James S. Hans in his book The Question of Value, in its last chapter, which I am in the process of reading and rereading. And to be perfectly fair, the book The Master and his Emissary, which complements it. Hans does not consider the [ READ MORE ]

The Ubiquity of the Social Network

My scripture this morning is from James S. Hans’ The Question of Value, page 162. This is my third pass through this section, and I am determined to get it down. I have two criticisms of this guy, the brightest person I know: (1) he doesn’t appreciate the impact of technology – something Lewis Mumford is much [ READ MORE ]

The Discursive and the Recursive

This posting in pure James S. Hans, and what he says in his book The Question of Value. He says what many others are saying: we are one a one-way track to nowhere. But he does the best job of explained how this track was constructed. The only other book that comes close for me [ READ MORE ]

What Did Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche Have in Common?

This is a serious question – probably the toughest one I have ever attempted to answer – and I am not sure I can handle it – but of course I will try. My guide here is James S. Hans, a man you probably never heard of – and never will, since he seems to [ READ MORE ]

Once Again, I Fail to Become a Programmer

The one book I keep returning to, my personal bible, is The Question of Value, by James S. Hans. I keep wondering why no one else sees its enormous value. But I seem to be in a world where there are few of us. That is life: you have to take it as it is – wherever [ READ MORE ]

Appeasing the Ghosts of our Ancestors

We pride ourselves on being an advanced culture, not subject to superstitions like this. But perhaps we are even more superstitious than they were: we have the same compulsions but they have now become unconscious – a place we have created to protect ourselves from such forbidden knowledge. Freud, who discovered the unconscious, also discovered [ READ MORE ]

What is Different

From The Question of Value, page 119-120 Time emerges as different from timelessness; Finitude emerges as different from transcendence: The life instinct emerges as different from the death instinct; Man emerges as different from the world; Man as self-awareness emerges as different from man as body. He goes on to say that these dualities have different [ READ MORE ]

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