Ideally, we would all have a place in the world. What each of us is (role) and who each of us is (way of perceiving, conceiving, feeling and acting) would coincide enough that the world would give us a purpose as it took from us our kind of service.

Because of the implicit philosophy we have inherited from three centuries of alienated thought, we no longer have any expectation that this is possible or permissible.

We’re all social deists. We believe that the clockwork of “how things are” will — and must — play itself out according to its own mechanical principles. We’re all as skeptical as scientists with no trust in good faith, but only in inescapably compelling proofs. We believe only when someone is able to force us to believe.

The fact that a moral vision of life cannot be formed in these conditions only proves that moral visions are merely subjective imaginings.

*

People who hate philosophy hate it because they are loyal to a philosophy.

Hostility toward philosophy is actually hostilities of philosophies, in the plural.

(Actually, a philosophy that exists without awareness of other philosophies is not really a philosophy, but a totalistic conception of experience, a pre-philosophy.)

*

A philosophy is a totalistic conception of experience that knows that it is a totalistic conception of experience, and which, therefore has a transcendent background placed behind it: the possibility of consequential otherwise. Out of concern for this otherwise, it self-examines and attempts to make itself explicit.

A totalistic conception of experience that does not know that it is a totalistic conception of experience — or suspecting it may be, does everything it can to suppress full recognition of the fact — and which grasps no background beyond itself: the universe.

*

A philosophy that exists without knowledge of other philosophies is as real and invisible as a subject who exists without knowledge of other subjects.

An autistic person is unaware of subjects beyond himself because all that exists to him is his own subjectivity, and this results in a world of objects.

The Enlightenment was the submergence of humankind in collective autism.

*

Around each philosophy is a stretch of hellish oblivion known as perplexity.

Part of why we do not want to acknowledge other philosophies is out of fear of perplexity.

Perplexity corresponds to the state of chaos into which each infant is thrown at birth, which slowly articulates into a world.

*

Babies are born into perplexity. That is why they cry.

*

If someone claims enlightenment or rebirth or being “born again” ask what their death was like, and about the limbo they endured as they emerged from chaos into this new world they inhabit. Because this is how to distinguish transfiguration of the world and subsequent metanoia from a mere change of opinion about the world and how one ought to behave in it.

*

We cannot live as human beings until we transcend the vision of the Enlightenment.

We cannot transcend the Enlightenment until we become willing to endure perplexity.

But we will not become fully perplexed until we start listening to one another and learning. Learning means to redraw the outlines of our knowledge: to reconfigure our gists.

But according to the Enlightenment we already know all we need to know in outline. And to believe this is to preclude learning. This is the circular life of the Enlightenment, and of all stable philosophies.