Ethics – Page 93 – Julian Baggini

A taste of the divine

October 21, 2012 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays, Food

We have taken our places. This evening’s performance, sold out months in advance, is about to begin. The programme, handwritten in a traditional script on a rolled parchment, tied with string, tells us to expect a prologue, two chapters and an epilogue, without interval. I’m nervous with anticipation but I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that it’s not because I am waiting for the curtain to rise on a Wagner opera or a Shakespeare play. I’m actually waiting for my dinner.

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Is there really no place like home?

October 21, 2012 Julian Baggini The Shrink and The Sage

If the price of a certain liberty and spreading out in the world is less of a sense of belonging, for many that price is worth paying. There are those for whom it is better to be moving and rootless than static and routeless.

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How travel limits our minds

October 1, 2012 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

The real problem with air travel is not the carbon footprint, the hassle of security checks, the tedium of the boarding gate, the soulless sprawl of the hire car lot, or Ryanair’s excessive excess charges and unavoidable fees for allegedly optional extras. The deeper issue is that how we travel reflects and shapes the way we think, and we have become a society of airheads.

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Do we need nature?

September 30, 2012 Julian Baggini The Shrink and The Sage

Getting close to nature is therefore not a simple matter of removing as much of the human touch as possible. It’s not the quantity of our intervention that counts, but the quality.

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Should we be afraid of weakness?

September 23, 2012 Julian Baggini The Shrink and The Sage

There is a poetic truth in Nietzsche’s final collapse into syphilitic madness. In tears, he flung his arms around a horse he had seen being flogged, both man and beast enduring suffering neither could overcome. In that moment, he showed that we can love the weak without them or us loving their weakness.

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