In college I spent hours drawing. I did not know how a drawing would turn out. As I drew I drew in response to the drawing-in-progress, which perpetually surprised me in a twofold way: 1) in how the drawing unfolded before me, and 2) in the responses the drawing drew from me. Part of what kept me absorbed in the drawing was suspense of the unfolding.

As long as I stayed absorbed in the drawing of the drawing I was absolutely surefooted. The times I lapsed into reflection on myself and my abilities and drew as “myself who is drawing” everything fell apart. Nothing interesting would happen, my fingers had to be told what to do, the drawing and the drawing were ruined together.

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The artifact of the drawing feeds into the craft of the drawing, which produces the artifact.

Craft -> artifact -> craft -> artifact …

In conversation, what is heard feeds into what is said which produces what is heard.

Saying -> said -> saying -> said …

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Art creates itself through the artist. Conversation has itself through the interlocutors.

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Absorption is bliss. Craft is bliss.

Reading on in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity:

We must now indicate the terms which will state the deformalization or the concretization of the idea of infinity, this apparently wholly empty notion. The infinite in the finite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire – not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A Desire perfectly disinterested – goodness. But Desire and goodness concretely presuppose a relationship in which the Desirable arrests the “negativity” of the I that holds sway in the Same – puts an end to power and emprise. This is positively produced as the possession of a world I can bestow as a gift on the Other – that is, as a presence before a face. For the presence before a face, my orientation toward the Other, can lose the avidity proper to the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands. This relationship established over the things henceforth possibly common, that is, susceptible of being said, is the relationship of conversation. The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kathauto. It expresses itself. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its “form” the totality of its “content,” finally abolishing the distinction between form and content. This is not achieved by some sort of modification of the knowledge that thematizes, but precisely by “thematization” turning into conversation. The condition for theoretical truth and error is the word of the other, his expression, which every lie already presupposes. But the first content of expression is the expression itself. To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. The Aristotelian analysis of the intellect, which discovers the agent intellect coming in by the gates, absolutely exterior, and yet constituting, nowise compromising, the sovereign activity of reason, already substitutes for maieutics a transitive action of the master, since reason, without abdicating, is found to be in a position to receive.

Finally, infinity, overflowing the idea of infinity, puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question. It commands and judges it and brings it to its truth. The analysis of the idea of Infinity, to which we gain access only starting from an I, will be terminated with the surpassing of the subjective.

Sometimes I think draping some outlandish beliefs over my perceptions might veil some of life’s essential outlandishness and soften its terror. At least our own inventions are our own.

Four types of behavioral disciplines: moralism, behavioral aesthetics, ethics, morality.

1. Moralism is behavior disciplined to conformity with codified behavioral standards. Moralism is rational.
2. Behavioral aesthetics is behavior disciplined to satisfy one’s own spontaneous sense of goodness and rightness. Behavioral aesthetics can be original or derived, and it can have an introverted and/or extraverted character. On this basis, it would be possible to divide behavioral aesthetics into subtypes, but here what defines behavioral aesthetics is that the behavior is a thing to be experienced and judged on the qualities of the experience. (Obviously, but for the sake of parallelism) behavioral aesthetics is aesthetic.
3. Ethics is behavior disciplined for the purpose of preserving conditions that sustain and give constancy to one’s own existence. Ethics is practical.
4. Morality is behavior disciplined for the purpose of reconciliation with being that transcends one’s own existence. Morality is metaphysical.

Culture requires the coordination of all four types of behavioral disciplines.

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The big question of morality: how can something exist to a mind, when that something stands beyond its existence (including its experience of existence)?

It is possible to reduce the exophanic to mere experience: an experience of the transcendent announcing itself, while requiring nothing beyond the acknowledgment of beyondness. Are there other responses to the exophanic that could reveal the transcendent existence that announces itself through the exophanic experience?

It is possible to understand pain as an exophanic reflection in events and things, but it is also possible to understand the same pain as caused by those events and things.

Perspectivism begins with the idea that seeing involves both a seeing subject and a seen object. Nothing is seen apart from the seer – you – and that you, the seer, always necessarily see from a position relative to what is seen.

The position one takes relative to what is seen affects the line of sight of what is seen (the angle of approach), what is seen as immediate and what is seen as remote (the relevance of what is seen), and also what is not seen (the horizon of the perspective).

A note on angle of approach: this is the structured openness of the perspective, or the way particulars organize themselves within the whole. Angle of approach manifests most obviously in the formulation of explicit questions, but more often it manifests as implicit expectations one brings to a new understanding.

This leads to one other very important point. We all know the mind is wonderfully equipped to recognize what it expects when encountering the unexpected. That recognition can be perfectly innocent, unconscious and stupid… or it can be willfully imposed… or brittle and irritable… or semi-fictional… or it can become violent toward whatever threatens the apparent absolute fixity of a perspective, especially a perspective held for a long time – for so long that it has forgotten that it is not reality itself.

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The Buddhists teach that gods are mortal but they live for so long they forget their mortality, and die horrible, violent deaths.

“It takes a long time / but god dies, too / but not before he’ll stick it to you.”

(Please don’t be offended by the notion of God dying. We know God only by way of a god who can die, and as far as we humble humans are concerned they are one and the same.)

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The fundamental task of socialization is convincing a child, born into the center of the world, seeing the entire world arrayed around his centrality, and never for a moment seeing it otherwise, that he is not the center of the world. There is nothing more counter-intuitive. No wonder this lesson is learned more often unsoundly than it is soundly.

Not the center of the universe… how? Does this mean I ought to take myself for one of these other things I see around me, like a tree or a computer or a person or a stone? Am I actually an object who sees objects? Is my consciousness is a quality added to or emerging from my objecthood? Some are only able to reconcile their world-centeredness and the array of objects that constitute their world in this way, and all that remains is to accept this perspective or reject it.

From this perspective there are two fundamental attitudes one can take: accept the primacy of the subject who sees objects (what the Chinese called “the ten-thousand things”) or accept the primacy of the objects, one of which mysteriously possesses the quality of subjectivity, the capacity to see as well as being seen. From within the perspective of subject-object, this constitutes the limit of perspectives, but this itself is a product of perspective itself: the horizon of the perspective.

Now, ask yourself honestly: do I actually know any alternative to these two attitudes toward the world? If not, what attitude do you take toward the possibility that there are possibilities of which you cannot conceive? And rather than answer that question, now pay attention to how you feel. Do you feel irritation, impatience, a very strong desire to think about something else? Do you suddenly remember you have other things you need to do right now? When’s the last time you checked your email? Maybe you should return to this later. This is how perspectives protect themselves: infinite postponement by choreographed justifications and distractions. (“Oh, Martha…”)

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To engage in hermeneutics is to look for all those devices that help us close understanding prematurely and to mistake perspectives which stand beyond ours as standing within ours. Hermeneutics knows understanding not as facts, but navigation by facts (using facts as a navigator uses stars) to the vantage of a fellow seer, from which/whom the facts fall into order. To be able to explain the seeing of an other corresponds to empathy. Hermeneutics prior to Gadamer (at least according to Gadamer) was strictly empathetic in form. Starting with Gadamer hermeneutics became the practice of finding and seeing with.

Your desire must be disciplined, / And what you want to happen / In time, sacrificed.

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Satiation of longing is the desire we must sacrifice.

I as an individual – I as one of we – we as community – we as the entirety of humankind: We are essentially, eternally incomplete. Nothing can change it.

All we have is the permanent, futile, faithful pursuit of completion which is its own intrinsic reward.

Like every other cliche, that all-too-repeated zennism “the journey is the destination” is true.

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A surplus or a deficit placed next to infinity is revealed as two forms of incompletion.

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It is time to stop regarding the sense of incompleteness as a symptom of something gone wrong.

What has gone wrong is that view of incompleteness.

To believe in future satiety in completion is to succumb to romanticism, to immanentize the eschaton.

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Pain is one thing; how the pain is viewed is another.

Is there more suffering the pain of now or in the painful anticipation of future suffering?

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Or so it all seems from here.

I love the Jewish phenomenological philosophers. Their earnest truthfulness is only secondarily why I love them. What I love most is their vision of divinity within the inter-subjective. This could only have come out of a tradition who has known and overcome extremes of social vulnerability, and perhaps because of this origin the inter-subjective borders on a preoccupation, maybe even a distorting exaggeration. A more even balancing of the elements that constitute truth would not only be more true, it would also be a fuller realization of the Jewish ideal. It is possible that this adjustment, performed originally for the sake of respecting and recognizing other conceptions of truth, could reveal a broader, deeper, more ecumenical vision.

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What matters is not openness to any particular kind of truth but openness to reality in all its unexpected richness. Ideology can manifest in any number of forms, not only in the suppression of certain particular facts but also ontologically, by excluding or minimizing certain categories of being or experience from due consideration. For instance, a scientist can be non-ideological in regard to his scientific activity (capable of acknowledging and responding to experimental anomalies) while being a political or religious ideologue.

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There are cases where the horizon of a person’s perspective remains intact by virtue of never having been tested. Nobody is obligated to go out looking for a test, but at the same time the failure of the test is the refusal to accept the validity of the test when it comes to you. Ignorance has its own kind of innocence and guilt.

The essence of morality (in its relationship to phenomenological philosophy) from Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.

But the presentation and the development of the notions employed [in Totality and Infinity] owe everything to the phenomenological method. Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them are nevertheless, unbeknown to this naive thought, revealed to be implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons endow them with a meaning – such is the essential teaching of Husserl. What does it matter if in the Husserlian phenomenology taken literally these unsuspected horizons are in their turn interpreted as thoughts aiming at objects! What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives. The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore its concrete significance, constitutes a deduction – necessary and yet non-analytical. …  The signification that, in the present work, phenomenological deduction shows to underlie the theoretical thought concerning being and the panoramic exposition of being itself is not irrational. The aspiration to radical exteriority, thus called metaphysical, the respect for this metaphysical exteriority which, above all, we must “let be,” constitutes truth. It animates this work and evinces its allegiance to the intellectualism of reason. But theoretical thought, guided by the ideal of objectivity, does not exhaust this aspiration; it remains this side of its ambitions. If, as this book will show, ethical relations are to lead transcendence to its term, this is because the essential of ethics is in its transcendent intention, and because not every transcendent intention has the noesis-noema structure.

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Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong about morality a hundred times, but here is where I am.

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The desire to not know another for the sake of preserving one’s own understanding totality… this is to wish to rule one’s own world instead of serving in the world we share, which is infinite and mysterious but nonetheless not remote. Not only is it not remote, it is infinitely present if we can resist closing it out and explaining it away. Why do we close out the shared world? Because confrontation of the infinite arouses dread. Anyone who seeks comfort from “spirituality” and will not cross over the dark stretches of anxiety and perplexity which ring each understanding totality is not after spirituality, but comforting fantasies and distractions.

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I do in fact have a work ethic, but essential to that ethic is distinguishing between my work and that work that needs to be done in doing my work.

I have to learn to live on terms with the social, as opposed to the inter-human, to use Buber’s incredibly valuable distinction. I’ve tried to avoid and hide from and otherwise escape the social. I tried to pull a fast one and conflate the inter-human for the authentically social. I’ve tried to morally deny it (the old bitching about the herd/masses/mob move) behaving as if the inter-human is Good and the social is Evil, despite my professed but imperfectly practiced anti-moralistic method. And of course, I couldn’t help but abuse personality type again (an old habit) and typologically excuse myself from the social.

Most of my worst anxieties center around this theme.

1. I hate to address a group as a group, which means speaking formally as opposed to conversationally.
2. I hate reciting anything I already know, as opposed to freshly re-discovering truth in the act of speech.
3. I hate, hate, hate parties and large gatherings where inter-human relations are eclipsed by human-to-group interactions.
4. I hate representing any institution in the role of a representative of the institution. I prefer to be an individual who believes in the institution and remains entirely an individual who shares his thoughts on that insititution.
5. I’m getting pressure on every side, at home (to stop being a curmudgeonly hermit and to voluntarily leave the house on occasion) and at work (to step into a leadership role and also to give lots and lots of presentations in distant cities), and I hate the hell out of it all.

These hatreds and anxieties are so intensely unpleasant there’s no way they aren’t my next practical-philosophical problem.

This is going to suck and suck and suck and I hate it to death. Here we go.

Buber and Levinas make me feel very Jewish. I am tempted to say that I am already Jewish, but then I catch myself. To say that my disposition toward Judaism already qualifies me as being Jewish is to succumb to the excessive theorizing tendency of Protestant Christianity. In Judaism as I understand it, the Jewish disposition leads the Jew to encounter and engage the infinite and incomprehensible and world of radical Otherness Jewishly. (Levinas sees God as the Infinite Other.) The locus is the encounter with Otherness, and the disposition (which includes the fore-understanding) that leads the engagement and the resulting disposition that follows the engagement (which includes the new understanding) is part of the engagement. For Protestant Christianity, the disposition is the locus, and the engagment matters for the sake of perfecting the disposition. My natural (or my deeply-internalized nurtured) impulse is Christian. I am oriented toward the knowledge, not its practical application in living, but my knowledge is turning itself away from living for knowledge toward living for living.

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The thrust of Protestant Christianity is radically individualistic. Groups sub-denominate themselves by their protestations, all the way down to the individual ego, who further fragments himself into conflicting inner-factions of instincts and urges and appetites. The excessive individualism of modernity is simply Protestantism having thrust itself to its extreme. The modern individual doesn’t even have his own individual religion. Each of his moods has a religion – each of his moods is a religion – a different system of moral priorities, a different sense of who and what is relevant or irrelevant – all answerable only to itself.

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Am I an immanentist, now?

Nietzsche:

Always at home. – One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.

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Rumi (yet again):

Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

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Buber:

The science of man that makes use of the analytical method must accordingly always keep in view the boundary of such a contemplation, which stretches like a horizon around it. This duty makes the transposition of the method into life dubious; for it is excessively difficult to see where the boundary is in life.

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Nietzsche:

Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.

“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”

Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.

And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.

For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?

And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”

When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”

Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.

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Levinas:

The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity to reflect the case of an entity encountering on the outside nothing that limits it, overflowing every limit, and thereby infinite. The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity, for it is precisely in the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced. The idea of infinity is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me. It is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its own identity. Subjectivity realizes these impossible exigencies – the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain. This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated. Hence intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently non-adequation.

A surprise is a defiance of an expectation.

A superficial surprise can catch us unprepared practically, but the situation is readily understood.

A deeper surprise requires some thought. We need some time to make sense of the facts and the consequences.

A radical surprise catches us unprepared to understand: we are required to adjust how we understand in general in order to understand the surprise. We do not understand how to understand what imposes itself as needing understanding. A radical surprise hits us ontologically. Kinds of being which were once dismissed or undifferentiated from kinds of being are now vividly existent within our disrupted reality.

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The first radical surprise seems like a revelation of the truth. Its style is hot and it attracts heat-seekers.

A second radical surprise is as radically surprising as the first. The permanent fact of surprise emerges, and beyondness situates I within itself.

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One can prepare to defend one’s closed horizon against surprise (which means to be an ideologue), or be prepared for being unprepared, which is another way to say “be open”.

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The transcendent is by definition what is beyond experience and beyond explanation (since explanation draws on experience).

Active limited transcendence is what gives meaning to the transcendent. There was how you saw before, and there is how you see now– and by extension, there is how you see now and how you might come to see. It is the strangest kind of analogue.

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A person’s conception of transcendence is limited by the depth of the surprises they’ve undergone. The key is to examine the structure:

Romanticism, for instance, conceives of the transcendent in terms of nonsensical modifications of qualities of objects; the giveaway is the objective ontology to which every idea conforms. All they know and have at hand is the object-form. A romantic is prepared for bodiless bodies, silent sounds, invisible colors, all sorts of inexplicable forces acting on things.

The romantic is perfectly ignorant of spirit, and parades her ignorance ignorantly and innocently. She doesn’t even realize there’s a truth here against which lies are possible. Fundamentalists are a rustic variety of romantic – less imaginative, more practical, more irritable. They’d be less irritable if they were less practical. The god of the fundamentalists does not like being put to the test, because he tends to bomb them.

An atheist does not believe in the romantic god, but he lacks any alternative vision. Honestly forces him to deny; ontological stuntedness prevents him from finding what would force him to affirm.

Atheists and fundamentalists love to debate because they work at the same ontological depth.

Mysticism conceives of the transcendent in terms of the first surprise. A mystic turn away from the world toward the subjectivity that underlies it. In doing so, they turn away from what would surprise them yet again if they would turn back around. Mysticism is right, but not right enough.

Note for a future post: Maybe philosophy has believed in trickle-down intellectualism. We’d love to believe that humanity benefits when we have no regard for it: our greed is our benevolence, etc. I prefer an honest “I don’t give a shit.” I hope conservatism recovers its old reptilian honesty.