Wholly Orders: Recent Episodes
James Landes
In the face of even unbearable stupidity and evil, the contemplative path retains an essential relationship to truth before any accidental or derivative considerations.
Civilization ultimately rests not upon the transient, but rather upon the permanent things.
For this very reason, the role of the contemplative, unlike that of the ideologue, is essential to civilization.
What on earth has happened to 'good disagreement'? Where has it gone? On the proper end of disagreement and the present crisis in thinking in the West.
On the need of common sense, as a counter to ideology and the groundless thinking of our time. Reflections inspired by Samuel Johnson, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
For modern man, the all-too-often shunned option of living in truth, in the sense of engaging reality, rather than fleeing from it into his own ideas, offers a choice that amounts to a desperately needed conversion in a profound philosophical sense. By conversion here one speaks of the act of restoring the connection between thinking and reality.
A meditation on the modern rejection of transcendence. Consideration of Nietzschean nihilism, and the rash judgment of the present generation. Belloc, not Nietzsche, was correct about the trajectory of modern thinking and civilization. On the need for a return to a philosophy grounded in being and objective truth.
The rejection of objective truth leads to tyranny. The modern reduction of ontology has left Western thought dangerously adrift.
Consideration of reason in relation to common sense, sanity, and the intellect, with the aim of addressing intellectual maladies of the present generation.
The tenuous relationship to truth in modern thought, considered in relation to the lack of moral courage in the present age.
Prudence helps one to maintain sobriety and sanity in the face of "scientism" and other ideological nonsense. Tradition, with its focus on the permanent things and on the eternal dimension of being, allows us to maintain thinking itself in the true sense of philosophy.
Sober pessimism is our defense against the extremes of both despair and the folly of utopian thought.
On the importance of contemplation and the cultivation of virtue in an age that encourages neither. And how this relates to tradition and the canon.
We cannot deny the radical secularism with which we are surrounded. But we should defy it.
We must choose between faith and the world, but this is not to be mistaken as a choice between faith and philosophy. Not at all.
Greetings and welcome to Wholly Orders, a poetic and philosophical exploration of tradition.