I’ve been reading Pierre Hadot’s book on Plotinus. It’s marvellous - only 100 pages long, yet so much wisdom and poetry in it. My favourite passage in it is when Hadot talks about the ‘levels of the self’.
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This week, I’ve been researching an ancient mnemonic technique called ‘the mind palace’, where people imprint a real or imagined building onto their memory - a palace, a mansion, a church, even a whole street - and then fill it with striking images, to which they attach bits of information they want to remember.
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A lot of modern technology, particularly social media, is a technology for selfing. This is why we're so addicted to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc (well, I am anyway). They're technologies for Selfing. Every post and tweet, we're making another little carving in the epic construction of our Public Self, then we wait to see how many likes we get.
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I want to explore the idea of Greek philosophy as a meeting-point between various humanisms, including Christian humanism, atheist or agnostic humanism, Islamic humanism and Jewish humanism.
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A few weeks ago, I woke up at 3am, for no particular reason, and lay in my bed listening to the city sleeping. My middle-class street in Tufnell Park was placid and at rest. Then I heard a woman sobbing, as she walked down the street.
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Angie Hobbs came and spoke at the London Philosophy Club earlier this month. She's an expert on Plato, and in her talk she used Platonism as a way of making sense of last year’s riots. She noted that many media commentators called the rioters ‘shameless’. This wasn’t true at all, she said. The rioters had a sense of shame and honour, it was just warped, or misdirected.
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