The longer I live, the more impressive Heraclitus becomes:

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.”

*

The simplicity of Heraclitus makes him strange. There are no argumentative folds in his philosophy. He makes the simplest, barest statements. There is no space for obfuscation or concealment.

When the surprises leap out of his philosophy and change the whole world at once, they could only have come from your own mind.

*

Heraclitus was called “the obscure” and the “weeping philosopher”.

*

Some things we have immediately in common:

• The phenomonal world
• Language
• Social-collaborative arrangements
• Inter-subjective relationships

“Two-horse team. – Unclear thinking and sentimental emotionalism are as frequently united with a ruthless will to self-assertion, to ascendancy at all cost, as is a warm benevolence and desire to help with the drive to clean and clear thinking, to moderation and restraint of feeling.”

Most people do not attempt to unify existence. One accepts diverse phenomena as fact.

Many people attempt to unify existence by controlling phenomena and forcing them into apparent unity.

More than a few people attempt to unify existence by deeming the diversity of phenomena irrelevant. Diversity is illusory. This is common mysticism.

Some people try to unify existence by accepting phenomena as phenomena, that is as appearance to a subject. This is a more profound form of mysticism, idealism.

Idealists accept the sense of beyondness embedded in existence – by this stage, beyondness is conceived metaphysically, not in the common exoticized form (which is rooted in an incapacity to see the ordinary world in a spiritual light, and so misunderstands metaphysics to be positing supernatural otherworld populated with supernatural entities) – in a variety of ways.

Some idealists preserve a properly mysterious noumenal being, taken to be the source of phenomena.

Some idealists deny all but phenomena as such. The sense of beyondness is absorbed as an experience. The noumenon is stripped out the content of the sense.

Some try to bracket out, and make irrelevant to discussion, without negation, everything that is not phenomenon. These are the phenomenologists.

Others examine phenomena to see what (if anything) can be known about what is beyond.

Others examine phenomena to see what (if anything) can be known about what is beyond, paying close attention to the forms of knowledge proper to that which seems beyond, versus that which seems immediately intelligible, and that which seems immediately self.

This, in my opinion, is where the gate to religion stands.

[I’ll keep refining this.]

Two inabilities that have plagued me from birth: 1) I am bad at coercing myself to do things I do not care about. In other words I have weak willpower. 2) I am bad at pretending to care when I do not care. I fake unconvincingly.

To succeed in the workplace I’ve had to pretty good at figuring out how to actually care about things. This skill of finding the meaning and worth of things has become more valuable than the activities I used to have to talk myself into doing.

*

If your production drains your energy away, you’ll try to compensate for the loss consuming. The consumption necessitates productivity. Lots of people desperately consuming makes the economy boom until it stops.

*

An economic depression is a collective psychological depression. An economy just can’t see why it ought to keep producing.

*

Too much “realism” creates a world that just can’t give a shit about itself, anymore. One day the realist’s impersonal numbers start dropping and keep dropping. They stare at the numbers and try to understand them mathematically. They are too realistic to realize the numbers are a shadow of life.

*

“Realistic” people are psychological fantasists.

*

Where realism is out of joint with the realities of human beings, realists make up and impose ethical principles to make human beings become more realistic. Much more ingenuity has been expended on the problem of making humans more realistic than on the problem of understanding the reality of humans. Realists pretend they simply observe the reality they actively create. They create it because they prefer it. They thrive on it.

*

The Roman Empire fell because it became indifferent to its continuance.

One whose world lacks friendship will fail to make friends. His environment will be a closed space filled up with dumb, obedient objects and noisy, disobedient bodies.

Over the weekend I stumbled upon two passages that reminded me of one another.

1) From Clifford Geertz’z “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged before through the provincial government) belonging to one of the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.

 If we ventured to approach someone (something one is powerfully inhibited from doing in such an atmosphere), he moved, negligently but definitely, away. If, seated or leaning against a wall, we had him trapped, he said nothing at all, or mumbled what for the Balinese is the ultimate nonword – “yes.” The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous amount of quite accurate information about who we were and what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.

This is, as I say, general in Bali. Everywhere else I have been in Indonesia, and more latterly in Morocco, when I have gone into a new village, people have poured out from all sides to take a very close look at me, and, often an all-too-probing feel as well. In Balinese villages, at least those away from the tourist circuit, nothing happens at all. People go on pounding, chatting, making offerings, staring into space, carrying baskets about while one drifts around feeling vaguely disembodied. And the same thing is true on the individual level. When you first meet a Balinese, he seems virtually not to relate to you at all; he is, in the term Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, “away.” Then-in a day, a week, a month (with some people the magic moment never comes) – he decides, for reasons I have never quite been able to fathom, that you are real, and then he becomes a warm, gay, sensitive, sympathetic, though, being Balinese, always precisely controlled, person. You have crossed, somehow, some moral or metaphysical shadow line. Though you are not exactly taken as a Balinese (one has to be born to that), you are at least regarded as a human being rather than a cloud or a gust of wind. The whole complexion of your relationship dramatically changes to, in the majority of cases, a gentle, almost affectionate one – a low-keyed, rather playful, rather mannered, rather bemused geniality.

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school.

2) From Yirmiyahu Yovel’s “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: the Cancioneros”:

Often, when we are disposed to read them that way, the novels and poems of another era can serve as cogent historical documents. Whether realistic or ironic, equivocal or crudely direct, complexly symbolic or outright vulgar, or a mix of the above, works of fiction will reward the curious intruder with knowledge, illustration, and insights of a kind that “factual” records and the no-less-tendentious chronicles often lack.

A particularly telling genre is the fifteenth-century Spanish Cancioneros: collections of vivid, popular poems that flourished parallel to the first converso generation (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, mostly by force or harsh pressure). The Cancioneros were often coarse and satirical but also on occasion speculative and intimately personal. Using unadorned language and simple rhyme, the poems dealt, sometimes irreverently, with current events, people, social habits, and institutions, and they also served their authors to quarrel, flatter, defame, and supplicate.

To the willing reader,4 the Cancioneros offer illuminating glances into the converso situation and its early dualities. Surprisingly, many authors of these poems were conversos of the first generation, as was the first compiler of their work, Juan Alfonso de Baena; a former Jew who had been converted to Catholicism during the riots of 1391. Several poems abound in Jewish concepts and Hispanized Hebrew idioms, which readers were presumed to understand. A good many poems attack and defend conversos, voice feuds among conversos, and otherwise articulate their mental and social complexities.

In one poem, the count of Paredes attacks an aspiring converso author, Juan Poeta (Juan of Valladolid), and in so doing offers a vignette of the converso poet, his many faces and unsettled identity:

Each of the following is his name – Juan, Simuel [Shemuel] and Reduan [Arabic name]. A moor, so he won’t be dead, A Christian, so he’ll have more worth, But a Jew he is for certain, As far as I can know.

This hostile image is not altogether incredible. The ending is quite revealing. The writer does not claim that Juan is a genuine Jew who merely puts on false masks but that all of his faces constitute his identity; although his Jewish persona appears to be dominant (or at least the most “certain”), this claim is immediately qualified (“as far as I can know”), for the converso’s most distinctive characteristic is that no one can know exactly who he is – perhaps not even himself.

For a while I thought conservatism was excessively masculine. Then for a while I thought conservatism was excessively feminine. Now I think conservatism is both at once: its ideal is maximum sexual divergence. In conservatism the men try to be as traditionally masculine as possible and the women as traditionally feminine as possible.

The divergence is far more exaggerated divergent than nature produces on its own (which is really no argument against it) and perhaps more divergent than is beneficial to culture (which is a very arguable argument, but one worth having).

In liberalism the men and women both attempt to synthesize the traditional qualities of masculinity and femininity.

The androgyny might be as unnatural as the conservatives sexual roles, but really – so what? We are human beings, and that being is naturally artificial. When we try to “be natural” there’s something artificial about it. Don’t most self-consciously natural people seem a little full of shit?

Pointing at the caricatures doesn’t accomplish anything. There are embarassing fakes and hypocrites on both sides.

It comes back to the arguable argument. What is our cultural ideal? What does amplifying sexual divergence accomplish? What does cultivating androgyny accomplish? Do we need one or the other, or do the two together have some integral purpose?

*

The Androgyne is a traditional symbol of primordial unity.

Have you ever been in a conversation like this?

You are trying to make yourself understood to another person. He is listening very carefully, responding point by point, and each point makes sense… but somehow you know you are not really being heard.

You attempt to express this feeling. The response is something to the tune of: “So, if I don’t agree with you, that means I don’t understand?”

At which point you try to defend yourself, stammering, groping, struggling for coherence. You know there’s something unfair about that characterization, but you can’t seem to answer it. You’re not persuaded at all that you are wrong, nor that the other is right, but you do not know how to argue your position. What you are trying to say eludes you, and it feels as if the elusiveness of your point is being exploited. You can’t prove that, either. You listen to yourself and hear how poorly you are representing yourself and you begin to despair.

Eventually you concede just to make the conversation end, just to avoid hearing yourself sound like an idiot.

“Excellent!” He says, “We have reached an agreement.”

This “agreement” is filed away like a Supreme Court decision. It will be used to settle future cases.

You were never persuaded, though. You were only somehow, mysteriously prevented from communicating. The more this happens the less you want to keep arguing. Silence is taken for agreement, but the silence is estrangement.

What is going on there?

You wanted dialogue, but what you got was debate.

*

Dialogue is an attempt by two or more parties to reach mutually persuasive common ground. One party or the other might be persuaded to the other’s original position, or they might arrive together at some kind of middle ground, or a synthesis might be discovered that transcends both positions. Each party goes out to the other and tries to see the other’s position in the best possible light (that is, as a whole, from its own perspective), including, most importantly the legitimate reasons why the other party prefers their own position.

Debate is an attempt by two or more parties to represent one’s own position as superior to that of the other. In general, the arguments are intended less for the opponent and more for the audience. The debater wishes to put his opponent in a position that will demonstrate to his supporters that their position is indeed the right one, and secondarily to undermine the the resolve of his opponents and weaken their resistance. Each party fortifies itself against the other and tries to put the other’s position in the worst possible light, to delegitimize it, and sometimes to cast doubt on the other party’s true intentions.

*

In dialogue:

1. The parties involved speak directly to one another.
2. The parties involved try to see the other’s position in the best light.
3. The intention is to arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome.
4. The process aims at unanimity.
5. The process is creative: it generates new possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to yield as much as they can to the other.
7. Trust is necessary and presupposed.
8. Often, the parties believe in pluralism – that multiple, legitimate ways to see the situation can exist side by side, with none being the sole or even objectively superior perspective

In debate:

1. The parties involved speak through one another to an audience, and primarily to those who share one’s perspective and  already actively or latently in agree.
2. The parties involved try to put the other’s position in the worst light.
3. The intention is to promote one’s own favored outcome, at the expense of the other
4. The process aims at convincing an overpowering majority.
5. The process is destructive: it eliminates flawed, weak or underdeveloped possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to win as much ground as possible from the other.
7. Trust is not necessary and sometimes active distrust is presupposed.
8. Often, at least one of the parties believe in objectivism – that the truth of a situation is what it is, and that conflicting opinions signal that someone is mistaken about, or is misrepresenting or distorting the objective truth.

*

Debate – ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin dis– (expressing reversal) + battere ‘to fight.’

Dialogue – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French dialoge, via Latin from Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with,’ from dia ‘through’ + legein ‘speak.’

*

Debate is pursuit of coersion without bloodshed. Dialogue is the pursuit of friendship.

Debate can win an argument, but it cannot win friendship.

*

A debate with no audience – what does that mean? Who does he mean to persuade, if not you, the partner in this discussion? Is he persuading himself that you are unreasonable and that dialogue with you is impossible?

*

A debate before a reasonable audience is won through reason. A debate before an unreasonable audience is lost through reason.

*

Am I arguing for dialogue? Obviously.

Am I arguing dialogicially for dialogue? Obviously not. This post is a one-sided debate. I am speaking to those who already agree with me. Dialogue with the unreasonable must be imposed. They must be politically forced to practice dialogue. As long as an unreasonable man believes he can undermine and circumvent dialogue, he will continue to attempt it.

*

I consider the defense of dialogue a chivalrous and deeply androgynous act.

*

Martin Buber:

I had a friend whom I account one of the most considerable men of our age. He was a master of conversation, and he loved it: his genuineness as a speaker was evident. But once it happened that he was sitting with two friends and with the three wives, and a conversation arose in which by its nature the women were clearly not joining, although their presence in fact had a great influence. The conversation among the men soon developed into a duel between two of them (I was the third). The other ‘duelist’, also a friend of mine, was of a noble nature; he too was a man of true conversation, but given more to objective fairness than to the play of the intellect, and a stranger to any controversy. The friend whom I have called a master of conversation did not speak with his usual composure and strength, but he scintillated, he fought, he triumphed. The dialogue was destroyed.

Sometimes we fail to find what we seek because we’ve pictured what we are seeking and reject what does not conform to that image.

When seeking objects or object-form knowledge (episteme), picturing what you are seeking is a good idea.

Wisdom – sophia – is different. Sophia is not graspable like episteme. Sophia is transcendence-form. Sophia is relational. You are in it, it exceeds you while involving you.

Transcendence-form is, by definition, radically surprising. If your destination is radical surprise,  preconditions equal preclusion. You’ll never arrive at the unexpected if reject it for failing to conform to your expectations.

*

Idol – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French idole, from Latin idolum ‘image, form’ (used in ecclesiastical Latin in the sense ‘idol’ ), from Greek eidolon, from eidos ‘form, shape.’

Ecstasy – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself,’ based on ek– ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place.’

*

Many people work on their lives as a pre-memory. They dwell in future perfect tense (a future past-tense).

When they are happy they are literally beside themselves:”Here I am, in this happy situation.”

Everything that happens to them is a story they’ll live out later while they’re telling it. They are only real as the presenter of who they mistake themselves for.

They need witnesses to their self-sufficiency, independence and wisdom to feel themselves self-sufficient, independent and wise. If you managed to bust them on it, they’d feel ashamed, but of precisely the wrong things.

*

“Borges and I”

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

– Jorge Luis Borges

*

There’s a peculiar shame to many writers’ personae.

*

Episteme grasps. It can grasp physical objects (the gross) and the types of knowledge that a mind can contain and comprehend (the subtle).

Sophia relates our own finite being to what contains us and transcends our comprehension. Sophia does not grasp – it feels the grasp that unifies the being and articulates the beings that constitute our world.

No self is epistemically known.

*

Eden was lost when we took episteme for sophia.

*

Facts about wisdom are not wisdom.

The conventional wisdom that warns us against living in the future or past and urges us instead to live in the present is unclear, confused and potentially misleading.

The present is essentially the dialogue of memory and anticipation. A present that excludes memory as past and anticipation as future is nonsensical.

To live in the present means to allow the past to be memory and to allow the future to be anticipation.

What we should avoid is a sense of past dominated by disappointed anticipations and a sense of future consumed with hope for happier memories of now.

*

We memorialize a person by preserving his tangible forms: his name, his image, the historical facts of this life.

We immortalize a person by living his spirit: his meaning, his way of seeing and loving.

An immortalized person will pull along his memory in his wake, because his memory will be loved.

An unloved memory will fade into oblivion. Nobody loves names, images and facts for their own sake.

“That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist [which is also translated as ‘mind’) — the grandest conception of all, and one which is due who know spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit knows itself to be for itself, then this self-production, the pure notion, is the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it gets its existential form. In this way it is in its existence aware of itself as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization, and the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element.

A self having knowledge purely of itself in the absolute antithesis of itself, this pure ether as such, is the very soil where science flourishes, is knowledge in universal form. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands from consciousness that it should feel at home in this element. But this element only attains its perfect meaning and acquires transparency through the process of gradually developing it. It is pure spirituality as the universal which assumes the shape of simple immediacy; and this simple element, existing with no apparent necessity for doing so. Let science be per se what it likes, in its relation to naïve immediate self-conscious life it presents the appearance of being a reversal of the latter; or, again, because naïve self-consciousness finds the principle of its reality in the certainty of itself, science bears the character of unreality, since consciousness ‘for itself’ is a state quite outside of science. [See Kuhn.] Science has for that reason to combine that other element of self-certainty with its own, or rather to show that the other element belongs to itself, and how it does so. When devoid of that sort of reality, science is merely the content of mind qua something implicit or potential (an sich); purpose, which at the start is no more than something internal; not spirit, but at first merely spiritual substance. This implicit moment (Ansich) has to find external expression, and become objective on its own account. This means nothing else than that this moment has to establish self-consciousness as one with itself.

*

If you want to spare your eyes and your mind,
Follow the sun from the shadows behind.

– Nietzsche