Beating the opponent at his own game. The pluck and courage of the underdog to outwit and overcome. Why does this strike everyone (I’m talking to you, Western culture) as a good trope? Underdog becomes top dog, it’s still a dog. To change our thinking could mean getting out of the game entirely. To…
equivocation, ambivalence
These “mixed feelings” of yours. If you have no reason to feel the way you do, and yet you do, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no reason (you are irrational), or that you’re wrong to feel that way (you are mistaken), or that you should feel otherwise (you are dissolute). But it might. It’s worth investigating….
Review of Jill Stauffer (2015) Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard
My review of Jill Stauffer’s excellent and important book, with a special focus on what it means for counselling. Ethical Loneliness addresses the “failure of just-minded people to hear well – from those who have suffered – what recovery or reconciliation require” through a fundamentally philosophical question: what does it mean that we could…
QA 59. To be a comrade
What did it mean: to join the Party? Brecht says it best. I was not an exploiter, so I could grasp it. To dedicate oneself to a more human society. For justice and peace, bread and roses. Against exploitation and oppression. Against all odds. To understand the indivisibility of freedom. To adopt José Martí’s willingness to…
QA 58. “But it doesn’t work like that!”
Annals of philosophical counselling/practice with others “But it doesn’t work like that!” I say this in response to some proposed scheme or strategy of yours. I mean that, in terms of what you want to achieve, what you are doing seems either futile or malicious because you have a mistaken view about what’s going on….
QA 57. “Need I remind anyone, again?”
Between 1987 and 1990, my husband Rob and I ran a safe house for the liberation movement in apartheid South Africa. We were part of what we would later learn was named Operation Vula, short for Vul’indlela (“Open the road” in Zulu). Its aim was to infiltrate exiled leaders of the African National Congress/Umkhonto we…
New article: TO CHANGE OUR THINKING: PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE FOR DIFFICULT TIMES
South African Journal of Philosophy, 35 (2), 2016, pp 123–131. You can find it here or there. The self-confidence of the human being, freedom, has first of all to be aroused again in the hearts of these people. Karl Marx ABSTRACT: If a time of crisis calls for a new mode of thinking, philosophical practice…
QA 56. Four touchstones for thinking about peace
For Nelson Mandela’s birthday, and because I’m reading Thula Simpson’s Umkhonto We Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle, thinking about and respecting the lives of everyone who stood against apartheid, those whose names are known or unknown, remembered or forgotten. Thinking that the aim of the struggle was peace, and how we’re not there yet. Thinking…
hiatus
I’m still here philosophising, counselling, writing… just tending other fields so long… Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) 24 Paragons of Filial Piety: Taishun Tending the Fields Assisted by Elephants, 1840. Oban yoko-e.
QA 55. Tenebrae
Tenebrae (L. darkness) is the only Christian service I ever trusted. It’s made up of psalms of grief and lamentations of the lost and forsaken. The evening of Holy Saturday. The messiah is crucified, god has abandoned his people to their enemies. Why God? There are no signs for us to see; there is no prophet…
