Deep
Inquiry
Two traditions in conversation. One question held long enough to show its depth.
These essays assume the reader has already begun the conversation. They are longer, slower, and more demanding than the accessible posts. Not because difficulty is a virtue, but because some questions don't yield to a short treatment.
Each piece brings two or more thinkers into contact around a single question. The goal is not to settle the question. It is to hold it long enough that something new becomes visible.
Every Deep Inquiry piece brings at least two thinkers or traditions into the same frame. The conversation between them is the essay.
These are not quick reads. Set aside 20 to 35 minutes. The length is not padding. It is the minimum space the question requires.
A Deep Inquiry essay ends where the question opens, not where it closes. The point is to leave the reader with a sharper version of the question they came in with.
What the Stoics and the Taoists Both Noticed About Stillness
Marcus Aurelius counseled the retreating mind. Lao Tzu wrote that the usefulness of a wheel is its empty center. Separated by five centuries and thousands of miles, they arrived at something very similar. But the paths they took, and what they believed about the relationship between stillness and action, are not the same. This essay follows both threads to see where they converge and where they part.
The Stoics found stillness by turning inward against the world. The Taoists found it by moving with the world so completely that resistance became unnecessary.
Orwell and Dostoevsky on What Power Does to the People Who Hold It
One wrote in the shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union. The other set his novels in Tsarist Russia a century earlier. Both understood that power doesn't simply corrupt. It reveals. This essay traces the moral psychology of power through two of its sharpest literary witnesses.
Marcus Aurelius and Chuang Tzu on the Shape of Freedom
Marcus thought freedom was won by detachment from external things. Chuang Tzu thought it came from dissolving the self that needed detachment in the first place. This is a difference in kind, not degree, and it changes everything about how each tradition approaches what it means to live well.
Camus and Rumi on What Death Asks of the Living
Camus met death with revolt. Rumi met it with longing. These are not simply different temperaments. They rest on different accounts of what the self is, what the world is, and what a human being is capable of. Following both accounts to their conclusions puts the question of mortality in unusually sharp relief.
Nietzsche and Confucius on What Virtue Requires of Us
Nietzsche thought virtue imposed by society was a disguised form of resentment. Confucius thought virtue cultivated within society was the highest expression of human capacity. The disagreement goes all the way down, to the question of whether the self precedes the community or is constituted by it.
Hume and Nagarjuna on Whether There Is a Self at All
Hume looked inward for a stable self and found only a bundle of perceptions. Nagarjuna argued that nothing, including the self, possesses inherent existence. Two philosophers who never read each other arrived at positions that, on this question, are remarkably close, and their differences are just as interesting as their convergences.