If you start drowning your natural instincts come to the rescue: Your arms and legs automatically and independently move faster and faster as if directed by an intelligence of their own. Your body somehow knows it should consume all your energy flailing, kicking and heaving your body. Without any prompting, your heart races wildly and your lungs do their damnedest to hyperventilate. If somebody swims near you, your body starts climbing over them like a ladder to get your mouth over the surface for a lungful of air.

We do not have to remember or reason or reflect or execute on a plan. Our own nature takes over and rescues us.

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Collective being is just as real as individual being and it has its own instincts. We participate in collective being in our own ways and interpret the collectivity out of it habitually.

As long as we see things this way, as individuals we might walk upright, but collectively we’re still half-walking on our knuckles.

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The noun form of “being” ought to be considered a gerund.

A human is a human on the basis of biology.

A “human being” lives out his human being on the basis of a choice: that choice is between expansive consciousness and expansive responsibility or individual constriction within the merely apparent.

Through each individual human’s choice, humanity as a whole is faced with the choice of human being. We are collectively deliberating right now, at this moment, and you are part of it, one way or the other.

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Romanticism: Our instincts are nature and nature is good. Greed, panic, aggression, xenophobia, superstition – all natural, all good?

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“Any action is better than no action.”: The distinctive voice of panic.

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Popular conservatism, like popular liberalism, is a variety of romanticism. Some instincts are deemed natural and good and are permitted to run rampant. Other instincts are considered unnatural or otherwise morally illegitimate and are exiled.

The character of a popular political form is determind by 1) which instincts are exiled and voiceless, 2) which instincts remain to speak and dictate terms, and 3) what kind of phantom fills the chairs of the exiled instincts at the table of self.

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• Thesis: Morality is unconditional, independent of context.
• Antithesis: Morality is conditional, dependent on contect.
• Synthesis: Morality is essentially context. It is the fact that every being has a context of other beings, and is itself the context of other beings. Morality is expanding integrity of being.

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If you don’t understand something completely, it is most productive to believe that you understand none of it. The little you think you understand is likely what is obstructing your understanding of the remainder.

Linearity is refusal to let go of error. Linearity wants progress, but it sees progress negatively, in terms of how far away it is from where it started, not how close has it come to a destination. The question of “toward what?” is secondary to “how far?” There’s an element of panic in linearity. It is aimless flight from, not movement toward.

(Linearity is a pretty good instinct for rabbits and rodents, but an aspiring thinker or a leader has to overcome it.)

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I am against most forms and conceptions of moralism, because we have outgrown them. Most of us have our hands full of idle or destructive nonsense, and the rest of us have our fists clenched against nonsense. What’s needed are open hands with distinguishing fingers and our trademark opposing thumb, which always approaches from the other side to close and lock our grip.

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Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is. Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from being deprived for so long of clean air and free movement:–these chains, however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals. – We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains, and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man may be given freedom of the spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. – With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon – by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the heavens brighten above them and heard the words: “On earth peace, good will toward men.” – It is still the age of the individual. 

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