In the chapter ‘Focus’ in his book of essays,The Examined Life, Robert Nozick writes: The ability and opportunity to focus our attention, to choose what we will pay attention to, is an important component of our autonomy. [p.122] In a footnote appended to this sentence, Nozick continues: What we presently focus upon is affected byContinue reading “The Soldier And The Policeman’s Trained Attention And Its Pathologies”
Tag Archives: rage
Matthew Arnold On Inequality
In his 1879 essay ‘Equality,’ Matthew Arnold wrote about inequality too: What the middle class sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the aristocratic class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach, with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury , seeming out utterly outContinue reading “Matthew Arnold On Inequality”
Marty Hart Comes Undone
The fourth episode of HBO’s True Detective–“Who Goes There”–is justifiably famous for director Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s epic six-minute tracking take of a gun battle gone spectacularly, violently wrong. There is another scene in the episode that should be just as famous: Marty Hart‘s epic, rage and profanity-filled meltdown on finding out his wife Maggie hasContinue reading “Marty Hart Comes Undone”
Shame, Rage, and Fascism
Jonathan Lear, in the course of a memorial address to the American Philosophical Association–dedicated to Bernard Williams–noted: For Williams, shame needs to be conceived in terms of its inner psychological structure, in particular, in terms of internal objects and our relations with those objects. The basic experience connected with shame is of being seen inContinue reading “Shame, Rage, and Fascism”
Samir Chopra 