On Thursday night, in the course of conversation with some of my Brooklyn College colleagues, I confessed to having internalized a peculiar sort of ‘chilling effect’ induced by a heightened sensitivity to our modern surveillance state. To wit, I said something along the lines of “I would love to travel to Iran and Pakistan, butContinue reading “Self-Policing In Response To Pervasive Surveillance”
Author Archives: Samir Chopra
Simone Beauvoir On Psychotherapeutic Healing As Mutilation
In Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Mandarins (WW Norton, New York, 1954; 1999, pp. 64), Anne Dubreuilh, a practicing psychoanalyst wonders: Why does healing so often mean mutilating? What value does personal adjustment have in an unjust society?….My objective isn’t to give my patients a false feeling of inner peace; if I seek to deliver them from their personalContinue reading “Simone Beauvoir On Psychotherapeutic Healing As Mutilation”
Straight Trippin’: Sartre, Mescaline, Nausea, Crabs
In a previous post, I had wondered whether Jean-Paul Sartre‘s description of Roquentin’s ‘vision in the park’ in Nausea was an indication of psychedelic experiences in Sartre’s past:
Notes On Meditation Practice – II
Meditation induces two interesting forms of self-consciousness that do not arise during the actual sitting itself. They are, rather, ways of regarding the practice of meditation as it meshes with the rest of the meditator’s life. First, the meditator is self-consciously aware of the fact that he is one. The normal, ongoing processes of identityContinue reading “Notes On Meditation Practice – II”
Lessons From A Skeptic About Hobbes
During my first semester of teaching philosophy, in my class on Hobbes and social contract theory, I introduced my students to the usual excerpts from Leviathan: the passages in which Hobbes describes the severely attenuated and impoverished life that awaits those who live in a state of nature, how this creates the need for a sovereign maintainerContinue reading “Lessons From A Skeptic About Hobbes”
Writing Too Strong, Too Talented, To Endure
In Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International, New York, 2002, pp. 230), Martin Amis writes (on Maxim Gorky‘s relationship with Stalin and his death following his return from exile in Sorrento to a period of ‘recantation’ and self-debasement): Writers were pushed, sometimes physically, sometimes spiritually, into all kinds of unfamiliar shapes byContinue reading “Writing Too Strong, Too Talented, To Endure”
The Pleasures Of Books Never To Be Written
In ‘The Flaubert Apocrypha’ (from: Flaubert’s Parrot, Vintage International, New York, 1990, pp. 115-116), Julian Barnes writes: If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel which doesn’t come off, perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, whichContinue reading “The Pleasures Of Books Never To Be Written”
‘The Spring is The Autumn’
In ‘Henriette Wyeth: Scenes from a painter’s life’ (from A Certain Climate, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1988, pp. 164) Paul Horgan makes note of, and subsequently quotes Wyeth on, the wellsprings of her work: Ideas added to feeling, then, inform both her still lifes and portraits, and the most constant impulse is the desire to recordContinue reading “‘The Spring is The Autumn’”
On Avoiding An Embarrassing Meltdown In The Classroom
A week or so ago, I sensed trouble was afoot, that danger was brewing–pick your favored cliché–in my teaching work. I was growing steadily irritated, being driven to apoplexy by an insidious irritant: a student’s behavior had gotten under my skin. He could do nothing right; I found myself handing out imaginary dressing-downs in class,Continue reading “On Avoiding An Embarrassing Meltdown In The Classroom”
Robert Merton On The Importance Of Knowledge For Analyzing Social Actions
In ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 894-904) Robert Merton writes: The most obvious limitation to a correct anticipation of consequences of action is provided by the existing state of knowledge. The extent of this limitation may be best appreciated by assuming the simplest case whereContinue reading “Robert Merton On The Importance Of Knowledge For Analyzing Social Actions”
Samir Chopra 