“Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”
*
If you are tempted to make a sacrifice, ask yourself if the sacrifice is greater than the sacrificed.
Much that demands sacrifices is unworthy of sacrifice, and consumes value at a net loss to the whole.
When we suffer from a situation — and by “from”, I mean the suffering literally comes from the situation by way of oneself — we lose perspective and our concern constricts around the locus of pain, the self.
We forget that the suffering self is only a topical symptom of a situation.
If we escape the situation, the pain goes away. We might leave the situation to rot. Or we escape to a comfortable perch inside the situation but outside participation in the pain and comfortably contribute to advance the degradation of the whole.
*
A hand injects morphine into a painful gangrenous point on a leg and revels in its distance and comfort. And from that same distant comfort it admires its own benevolence. Perhaps the hand would be more urgent and thoughtful — and less offensive to the leg — if it understood “self” a little less stupidly? If it recognized its own substantial involvement in the pain? If it realized itself and the afflicted leg were joined at the torso and share a heart? If it were less inclined to indulge in pity?
*
A person can be comfortable, or a person can be consequential, or a person can be neither.
What most of us want is that impossible fourth option, being comfortable and consequential. The expectation of comfortable consequentiality seduces us to having neither.
*
A mirror is a machine which produces artificial space. The most artificial and most highly valued space it produces is that which stands between I and me.
*
A dog seized some meat from the butcher shop and ran away with it until he came to a river. When the dog was crossing the river, he saw the reflection of the meat in the water, and it seemed much larger than the meat he was carrying. He dropped his own piece of meat in order to try to snatch at the reflection. When the reflection disappeared, the dog went to grab the meat he had dropped but he was not able to find it anywhere, since a passing raven had immediately snatched the meat and gobbled it up. The dog lamented his sorry condition and said, ‘Woe is me! I foolishly abandoned what I had in order to grab at a phantom, and thus I ended up losing both that phantom and what I had to begin with.’
*
At first glance, altruism seems beautiful and good.
At second glance, altruism becomes nonsensical.
But on even closer inspection, altruism turns out to be vile.
We cannot help but operate out of pure self-interest.
The real question is the depth and breadth of “your self”.
*
A Christ incapable of spending a hellish night alone in Gethsemane and knowing God-forsakenness on the cross would not be able to speak from your heart. He would have to speak from beyond, like his Father.
*
Next time you notice that a new mood has overcome you while interacting with someone, or when you notice that you converse easily with one person and are shut down by another, try a different interpretive mode. Experiment with saying: “I am now experiencing participation in a different, larger self which transcends I, but which involves I, and is felt by I as if it were I.”
‘Science’ as prejudice. — It follows from the laws that govern rank-ordering that scholars, insofar as they belong to the intellectual middle class, are not even allowed to catch sight of the truly great problems and question marks; moreover, their courage and eyes simply don’t reach that far — and above all, the need that makes them scholars, their inner expectations and wish that things might be such and such, their fear and hope, too soon find rest and satisfaction. What makes, for instance, the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer rave in his own way and makes him draw a line of hope, a horizon which defines what is desirable; that definitive reconciliation of ‘egoism and altruism’ about which he spins fables — this almost nauseates the likes of us: a human race that adopts as its ultimate perspective such a Spencerian perspective would strike us as deserving of contempt, of annihilation! But that he had to view as his highest hope what to others counts and should count only as a disgusting possibility is a question mark that Spencer would have been unable to foresee. So, too, it is with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content: the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thought, in human valuations — a ‘world of truth’ that can be grasped entirely with the help of our four-cornered little human reason — What? Do we really want to demote existence in this way to an exercise in arithmetic and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one shouldn’t want to strip it of its ambiguous character: that, gentlemen, is what good taste demands — above all, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon! That the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which you have a right; one by which one can do research and go on scientifically in your sense of the term (you really mean mechanistically?) — one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else — that is a crudity and naivety, assuming it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not be quite probable, conversely, that precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence — what is most apparent; its skin and its sensualization — would be grasped first and might even be the only thing that let itself be grasped? Thus, a ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might still be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world, i.e. one of those most lacking in significance. This to the ear and conscience of Mr. Mechanic, who nowadays likes to pass as a philosopher and insists that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and final laws on which existence may be built, as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas — how absurd such a ‘scientific’ evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!
Cognition is knowledge that grasps the known. Wisdom is knowledge knows how we are grasped.
Cognition stands beside, observing the convex being that constitutes the world. Wisdom stands inside, participating in the concave being that comprises the world.
Cognition masters objects. Wisdom pursues subjects.
*
The best being stands upon a broad ground of cognition, under a high dome of wisdom.
*
Renee Guenon, from the Great Triad:
‘Heaven covers, Earth supports’; so runs the traditional formula which defines with great conciseness the roles of these two complementary principles, and which symbolically defines their positions, respectively higher and lower, in relation to the ‘ten thousand beings’, that is, to the totality of universal manifestation. Thus are indicated, on one hand, the ‘non-acting’ character of the activity of Heaven or Purusha, and on the other hand the passivity of Earth or Prakriti, which is properly a ‘ground’, or ‘support’ of manifestation, and consequently also a plane of resistance and arrest for the celestial forces or influences acting in a descending direction.
What does concrete reality mean?
Concrete: con– ‘together’ + crescere ‘grow.’
*
The seeming solidity of reality rests on the concretization of experience.
*
The noumena of experience (noumenon: Greek, literally ‘(something) conceived,’ from noien ‘conceive, apprehend.’) — the idea of entities being in themselves apart from what they are to us — is what metaphysics attempts to understand. There exist many varieties of metaphysics, ranging from the crudest — positive objectification of metaphysical entities that stand in parallel existence to the mundane physical world (“objects” lacking normal properties of objects such as materiality) — to negative skepticism (reveling in the certainty that one can always and easily free oneself from the bonds of any unpleasant determinate knowledge,), to more sophisticated relational approaches.
Metaphysics is based on the experience of exophany. Phenomena (Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view,’ based on phainein ‘to show’) are experienced as showing us something (noumena) beyond what appears. In the end, what we “have” is what appears and the feeling of exophany.
We cannot doubt exophany. As Charles Peirce said: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”
And here’s something else that’s important. Love is essentially exophanic. Love always draws us beyond or beneath what is experienced, beyond experience. And love is what makes us prefer life to death. What would make us want to reject exophany in general, or deny some particular dimension or pole of it?
The distinction of noumena from phenomena points to another concept: the Transcendent. There is also that which might one day manifest to us phenomenally but has not, and there is also that which never will.
Only the tiniest bit of the Transcendent concerns us, but that doesn’t matter. There is no practical difference to us between the Transcendent and noumena and exophany. To us it is all one, and in itself it is all one.
Our job is to make things concrete with as little exclusion or reduction as possible, and this means we must occasionally get a little abstract. We have quite a few noumenal human beings around us who are still invalidated as enemies who still have something to show us around whom we must extend our community with whom we can grow together in concrete life.
Some people, when they need a concept that represents that which transcends the individual, reach for objectivity.
Unfortunately the popularization of science has done to the word “objectivity” what the popularization of Christianity did to the word “love”. Both idea have had their elusive precision rolled through the filth of language and life for so long that they have become dung-balls of emotional and conceptual associations. In Jung’s language they’ve become “concrete”. (Concrete: con– ‘together’ + crescere ‘grow.’)
Objectivity transcends the individual when, through dialogue, it binds people together in its pursuit of agreement on what is.
When objectivity becomes simply the obvious “what is” that is comprehended when one glances at stuff, it not only does not transcend the individual, it constricts and isolates the individual.
Only when science is conceived as a method for pursuing one particular kind of knowledge does it produce something transcendent. When science degrades into a reductionistic metaphysic — materialism — it produces vulgarity, or rather, it stops resisting vulgarity.
When love becomes the emotion that overtakes people when they become attracted to some other, it not only fails to transcend the other, it causes individuals to fixate not on the other’s otherness, but on what the other arouses within the individual.
Only when love is conceived as the practice of pursuing the sharing of being does it produce something transcendent. When love degrades into stimulation of one’s own roiling emotions through pursuit of interchangeable others, one’s involvements become more and more self-involved.
The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.
What is lacking is:
*
Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.
Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.
But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.
*
We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.
We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.
*
Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.
We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.
*
Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”
Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”
Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”
Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”
Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”
Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”
Is experience essentially individual?
*
Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive. The world is seen as together.
Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.
Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.
Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.
Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.
*
On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.
*
Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.
There is an infinite number of ways to inhabit the world. Each is true as far as it goes, and none are true enough for long.
A friend of mine confessed that while he has sympathy for others he lacks empathy.
What does this mean? Here is how I took it: He is able to sympathize with isolated and momentary feelings that another person has. Something in him resonates and participates in the experience of feeling with the other. But empathy involves constellations of feeling that endure over time. To empathize would be to really get that other person’s persistent experience of the world as a whole.
When we sympathize we feelingly relate spirit-to-spirit, part-to-part, atomistically.
When we empathize we feelingly relate soul-to-soul, whole-to-whole, holistically.
Admittedly, I might have him wrong, so I won’t assume yet that I have understood what he meant. This is only my first understanding, and while this understanding seems to me to be true and plausible and coherent, that only distinguishes it from confusion. Misunderstanding is tricky because it is nearly indistinguishable from understanding. The most reliable indication of whether you understand or misunderstand the other is whether the other agrees with your understanding. The question is not whether your understanding of what was said was true, it is whether it is true as the other meant it. (The author is far from dead — but he is in no position to dictate to you what is or is not true. He is, however, qualified to tell you if you understood what we was trying to say as he meant it.)
It is too easy to superimpose one’s own way of seeing on the experience of the other. It is too easy to grasp isolated facts from a person’s world-view and mistake that for understanding the person’s philosophy or literary world. Understanding is not grasped. Understanding grasps.
(Hermeneutics is the discipline of recognizing and avoiding the deep habit of misunderstanding.)
The understanding of a person is a non-objective co-participation, which encompasses feeling (empathy), perception, thinking and modes of action. It manifests as a never-perfect but ever-perfecting sharing this mysterious world we share and don’t share.
Incidentally, this understanding is what I refer to as synesis, and it is the most important thing in the whole world.
We speak with people.
We use objects.
*
To the degree we are inclined to speak with an object, we personify it.
To the degree we are inclined to use people, we objectify them.
*
When we speak with a person we enter into and participate in relationship. We are immersed, we effect change, we are changed, and we are woven together.
When we use an object we do something to it or with it. We stand apart and effect change without being changed, and we remain independent.
*
When we command a subordinate this is less like speaking with a person than it is like using an object.
When we craft with a tool this is less like using an object than it is like speaking with a person.
*
One’s taste in leadership reveals one’s relationship with people and objects.
One’s taste in work reveals one’s relationship with people and objects.
*
Power means that you can insist that others speak with you as a person. You are to be reckoned with.
Power means that you can relate to people as objects. Your wish is their command.
*
One reveals one’s relationship with people and objects through choice of words.
When people insist on being related to as people they have often insisted on the prohibition of their old object-status names. Out of respect of the person’s personhood, the object-status names are abandoned.
The prohibited object-status names are so objectionable I won’t even risk listing them.
(If you want to learn more about objectionable object-status names see Human Resources.)
From Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought:
The persimmon is a strange fruit. If you eat it before it is fully ripe, it tastes just awful. Its astringency makes your mouth pucker up. Actually, you can’t eat it unripe; if you tried, you would just have to spit it out and throw the whole thing away. Buddhist practice is like this too: if you don’t let it really ripen, it cannot nourish your life. That is why I hope that people will begin to practice and then continue until their practice is really ripe.
The persimmon has another characteristic that is very interesting, but to understand it, you have to know something about the Oriental persimmon. There are two types of persimmon trees, the sweet persimmon — amagaki in Japanese-and the bitter, mouth-puckering persimmon, called shibugaki. When you plant seeds from a sweet persimmon tree, all the saplings come up as astringent persimmon trees. Now, if I said that if you planted seeds from a sweet persimmon, all the saplings would become sweet persimmon trees, anyone could understand, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Without exception, all the saplings planted from sweet persimmon seeds are bitter. If you want to grow a sweet persimmon tree, what do you do? Well, first you have to cut a branch from a sweet persimmon tree, and then you graft it onto an astringent persimmon trunk. In time, the branch will bear sweet fruit.
I used to wonder how that first sweet persimmon tree came about. If the saplings from the seeds from a sweet persimmon all come up astringent, where did that first sweet persimmon come from? One day I had the opportunity to ask a botanist who specializes in fruit trees, and he told me this: First of all, the Oriental persimmon is an indigenous Japanese fruit; it goes back thousands of years. It takes many years to grow a sweet persimmon: even the fruit of a tree forty or fifty years old will be astringent. That means we’re talking about a tree that’s at least one hundred years old. Around that time, the first sweet branches on an astringent tree begin to ripen. Those branches are then cut off the tree and are grafted onto a younger astringent one. What took over one hundred years to grow on one tree is then transferred to another one to continue there.
In a way, Buddhism and our own lives are just like that. If you leave humanity as it is, it has an astringent quality no matter what country or what part of the world you look at. It just so happened, however, that several thousand years ago in India, in the culture of that day, a sweet persimmon was born; that was Buddhism. Or, more precisely, it was Shakyamuni Buddha who was born — like a branch on an astringent persimmon tree that after many, many years had finally borne sweet fruit. After a time, a branch was cut off that Indian tree and grafted onto the astringent rootstock that was the Chinese people of those days. From there, a branch bearing sweet fruit was brought to Japan and planted in that barbaric country. More recently, branches of those Asian trees have been grafted onto trees native to American soil.
Now, one thing about big old trees is that they wither easily. For the most part, there is not much Buddhism left in Asia today, except for Southeast Asia and some places in Central Asia, like Tibet. Japan is one of the few places you can find it, as withered and dried up as it may be. Now the sweet persimmon is being nurtured in America, and it needs to be tended and cultivated so it can flower and ripen here. It doesn’t happen without care and attention.
What I am saying also applies to your individual life. I would like for as many of you as possible to become sweet persimmon branches bearing the sweet fruit of a compassionate life, finding a true way to live as you settle on your astringent roots that are, after all, your own life, and your family, coworkers, and society.
I have had only one concern in my life: helping to discover and mark a true way of life for humanity. That is why I became a monk. Over the years I’ve never wished to become famous by the usual standards of fame. The only thing that matters to me is just to be an example of a true way of life that is possible for anyone anywhere in the world.
Many people who consider themselves anti-authoritarians seek out oppressed people and try to help them. As always with human behavior, beneath the uniformity of appearance, different spirits are at work seeking different aims.
Person A, humiliated by subjugation, takes issue with the character with the subjugation. Perhaps it is exploitative, or cruel, or destructive, or otherwise immoral. Person A gives to charity, does volunteer work, perhaps makes a career as a social worker, or distorts some other profession into a form of social work. (90+% of teachers today have no idea that they are not educators, but social workers specialized in skills training. “But how is that not education?” Exactly. As I said: no idea.) But beneficiaries of all this benevolence will never be helped enough to reciprocate, nor to gain enough power to challenge the benefactors. In fact, what is happening is Person A is subjugating weaker people, but in a nicer (or otherwise morally superior) way. Person A gets to regain lost respect by getting to play the part of the (moral) subjugator for a change. And so it goes down the line, until there are no more layers of socially sanctioned subjugation. So the very bottom layer subjugates through child abuse or crime.
Person B has a very different motive. Person B seeks the subjugated and marginalized in order to find allies against the subjugating power, which has become oppressive, or ugly or boring or otherwise objectionable. Person B wants equals and is willing to invest individual power in collective power.
And Person B hides half a zillion sub-doppelgangers, as well. Is it any wonder that every political union, however unified and dominant it seems, inevitably factionalizes, fragments, decays and finds itself in the place of the marginalized, powerless and must relearn the art of appealing to others to make alliances…
The convection current of history (I will draw this one day):
The process repeats.
*
To authentically help a person — to equalize power — is to put oneself at the mercy of the other. And people who have been powerless for a long time often have no idea how to use power responsibly. Often the newly empowered person will exercise new power against the benefactor, not out of “evil” but out of sheer disorientated exuberance.
Preface. Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. The dogmatists’ philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia…
…
6. Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he –) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds –), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time — and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering {herrschsuchtig}: and as such it attempts to philosophize. — To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different — “better,” if you like –, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist: — it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is — that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.
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205. The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a rough game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game …..
…
230. Perhaps what I have said here of a “fundamental will of the spirit” may not be immediately comprehensible: allow me to explain. —
That commanding something which the people calls “spirit” wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of “external world.” Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the arrangement of new things within old divisions — growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.
This same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its “digestive power,” to speak in a metaphor — and indeed “the spirit” is more like a stomach than anything else.
It is here that there also belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a mischievous notion that such and such is not the case, that it is only being allowed to pass for the case, a joy in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exultant enjoyment of the capricious narrowness and secrecy of a nook-and-corner, of the all too close, of the foreground, of the exaggerated, diminished, displaced, beautified, an enjoyment of the capriciousness of all these expressions of power.
Finally there also belongs here that not altogether innocent readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that continual pressing and pushing of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and cunning of its masks, it enjoys too the sense of being safe that this brings — for it is precisely through its protean arts that it is best concealed and protected.
This will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the superficial — for every surface is a cloak — is counteracted by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound, many-sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for long enough his own view of himself, as he should have, and is accustomed to stern discipline and stern language. He will say “there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit” — let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of that.
In fact, it would be nicer if, instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with an “extravagant honesty” — we free, very free spirits — and perhaps that will actually one day be our posthumous fame? In the meantime — for it will be a long time before that happens — we ourselves are likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and valences of this sort: all our labor hitherto has spoiled us for this taste and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful — there is something about them that makes one’s pride swell. But we hermits and marmots long ago became convinced that this worthy verbal pomp too belongs among the ancient false finery, lumber and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and varnish too the terrible basic text homo natura must again be discerned.
For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura {natural man}. To confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him “you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!” — that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task — who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently: “why knowledge at all?” — Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer ….
231. Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve” — as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning — only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later — we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are — rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.” — Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty compliments I may perhaps be more readily permitted to utter a few truths about “woman as such”: assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent these are only — my truths. —
If you buy what you are selling from yourself, thinking “If I won’t buy it from myself, how can I expect someone else to buy it from me?” — at best you are deluding yourself. You aren’t motivated to buy from yourself by any motive your customer will ever share. And at worse you are deceiving them. You are pretending that you are buying your own product because you believe in it, when in fact you are buying it solely to help you sell it.
A better approach is to ask yourself honestly: “If I haven’t sold myself on my own offering, how can I expect anyone else to be sold on it?” Then realize: “I haven’t figured out what is compellingly awesome about my offering.”
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There’s many ways to understand any one thing. Some ways of understanding are more compelling than others.
The best practice for finding new ways to understand, and to assess the persuasive force of an understanding is dialogue.
It’s easy to do arithmetic. It is difficult to link numbers to meaning.
Heaven help the bean counter who knows nothing about beans.
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Often hyper-analytical folks use the formal mechanics of thought as a red herring to distract attention away from the poverty of their thinking, or to overwhelm or dazzle or intimidate anyone tempted to question their conclusions. They’ll present their arithmetical correctness, logical facility, copious metrics as representative of the whole, when if fact the whole is assembled piecemeal, with many exclusions and omissions at just the critical points where the strongest links are needed.
Look closer: how do all these numbers and models and arguments link up with lived reality? Often what you will find is a facile reductionism: what is treated as relevant is limited to what can be effortlessly measured.
Quantification is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must know what to measure and how to measure it. This means rooting quantities in qualities.
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The mania for quantifiability can lead some “hard-bitten realists” to exclude precisely the aspects of reality most crucial to their success.
Consider this: Isn’t the “soft” and “squishy” aspects of business in fact the true substance of economy? Isn’t every dollar a quantum of desire? Not that we can run businesses without mathematical rigor, it’s just rigor, while indisputably necessary, is not sufficient for running a successful business.
And education was, until very recently, seen as the cultivation of human beings, of citizens capable of political responsibility — not about ability to perform particular tasks (i.e. training). Not that skills-training is dispensable — training is necessary in education, but not sufficient.
But perversely, often in the name of realism, the very reality — the cornerstone — of these pursuits is rejected. As if we have to choose between formal, objective rigor or qualitative judgment, but can’t have both!
And romantics unwittingly play into the either-or antithesis, and compensate for excessive quantitativeness with rejection of quantification. The conflict is not one versus the other, but one-versus-other versus both together in meaningful relation.
Quantity and quality understood together as a related whole — that is what is needed. But this is exceedingly difficult. It requires a well-constructed team, and real leadership.
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The tendency toward quantitative reductionism is destroying business and education.
A particularly ludicrous example: To assess writing proficiency, elementary school students are asked to write an essay on some topic. The essays are scored by counting the number of words. The ones who write the most words are the most proficient. I am not kidding.
The logic is this: who is to decide what is and is not “good” writing? At least we can all agree on a word count. Never mind that absolutely nobody can really agree that verbosity equals good writing. That kind of question is too rarely asked.
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Very few individuals can cover by themselves the full range of quantitative and qualitative factors relevant to the life of an organization.
This is why it is so important for people with very different sensibilities to be able to converse and share and complement one another. The desire of leaders to encompass within their own minds the entirety of an organization’s intellectual scope leads to organizational mediocrity. In a sense a leader who is humble will be greater than the leader who exalts himself as intellectually superior to his organization. A mediocre leader only knows how to lead the like-minded. An inferior leader reduces everyone to his own limited terms.
Every organization needs to acquire the core capability of authentic dialogue.
*
(That opening remark “heaven help” is a Chinese allusion.)
This is yet another attempt at a comprehensible, practical and understandable account of the trigram (of the I Ching).
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Earth
Observations are unified in comprehension (com- “together” -prehendere “grasp”). Comprehension is objective.
Yin earth is that which is observed without comprehension. (Chaos.)
Changing yin earth is the first glimmer of comprehension of that which is observed. (Birth of a paradigm.)
Yang earth is the comprehension of that which is observed. (Normal science.)
Changing yang earth is skepticism toward comprehension of that which is observed. (Scientific crisis.)
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Heaven
Understanding unifies experience. Understanding is subjective. (Under all “objects” stands that by which the objects exist to us. See the first line of the Dhammapada, or verse 29 of the Gospel of Thomas or anything by any famous philosopher whose name begins with the letter H.)
Yang heaven experiences the world in a unified and sustained understanding. (Nobility.)
Changing yang heaven begins to doubt, and experiences the world in increasingly incoherent and wavering understanding. (Loss of faith. Danger of reactionary hubris.)
Yin heaven doubts, and experiences the world in fragmentary and fleeting understandings. (Akrasia.)
Changing yin heaven begins to understand, experiences the world in increasingly unified and sustained understandings. (Insight.)
*
Man
Action is animated by understanding and directed by comprehension:
Yang man acts upon the world instinctive sureness.
Changing yang man acts upon the world with wavering instincts and diminishing confidence.
Yin man withdraws from the world and abstains from action.
Changing yin man learns how to act upon the world.