The personal website of D.T. Sheffler
In the last essay , I explored the meaning of the word ψυχή in the paradoxical saying of Jesus that the man who seeks to save his ψυχή will end up losing it while the man who loses it will end up finding it. Although martyrdom is certainly a high calling, I argued that this saying means more than the sacrifice of one’s life. It means the sacrifice of one’s very self. Giving oneself, giving one’s…
Of all the many difficult sayings of Jesus, one in particular troubles my soul. Versions of it appear in all four gospels (Matthew 16:24–27, Mark 8:34–37, Luke 8:23–25, John 12:24–25), and I have been able to quote it since childhood. After years of meditation, however, I’m less and less confident that I know what Jesus means. For the sake of completeness, I will give both the full Greek and my…
Several weeks ago, I wrote a rather gloomy essay about the feeling of being trapped in the contemporary marketing machine. After a recent conversation, however, I started to realized just how good I have it and just how practically possible it is to emancipate oneself from the tyranny of the attention economy. In this recent conversation, both my wife and I realize how unusual it is that neither…
In a previous essay , I suggested that the difference between sensibles and intelligibles is not so much a matter of the material versus the immaterial but a matter of distinct modes of consciousness by which we access different kinds of reality. We grasp sensibles with our senses, but we grasp intelligibles with our intelligence. According to Plato, this leads to a categorical distinction between…
A few months ago, I went to a screening of Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Le Samuraï (1967), starring a young Alain Delon. No one could have known at the time of the screening that Delon would pass away just a few weeks later on the 18th of August at the age of 88. Since then, I have watched several of his films, and collectively they trouble my soul with many questions about the relationship…
Previously , we have discussed the differences between sensibles and intelligibles, using the example of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debbie.” Individual performances of this song are “sensibles,” while the song itself, the deep structure that remains the same across multiple performances, is an “intelligible.” In the last essay , we examined the way that Plato uses the terms εἶδος and ἴδεα to refer to…
The yellow brass of the old candlestick Reflects the dirty window’s cloudy sun. The candle wax a blue of robin’s egg Or daylight sky that softens into dusk. The artless colors catch and hold the eye, A pair unsought like sudden lovers wed. A pressure dark, a force unnamed, a tide That pulls and pulls is pulling here again. One calls it “Beauty” true enough, But saying so will make the moment said,…
In the last essay , we discussed the difficulties with the Greek words that are often translated as “form” and why we should resist the temptation to reify “the Forms” into a class of super-objects in a distant heaven somewhere. Instead, I argued that we could translate the synonyms εἶδος ( eidos ) and ἰδέα ( idea ) as the “look” or “character” of something that allows us to mentally grasp what…
In the last two essays, we have discussed the patterns or structures that our minds latch onto and that we have called “the intelligibles.” Those familiar with Platonism will by now have noticed that I have studiously avoided using the term “Form.” When we speak of “Plato’s Theory of the Forms,” students often have some mixed up ideas about what this means. They often imagine perfect versions of…
In last week’s essay , we thought about the way that one and the same song can be performed in different ways on many different occasions. I advanced the paradoxical claim that the song itself , the thing that is one in all its many performances, is not something we hear with our ears but rather something we grasp with our minds. This week, we will add some nuance to this claim and introduce some…