“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.” – Charles S. Peirce

Excerpt from Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”:

But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.

The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, and as unique — even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case — is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modem. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart — not only the so-called unconscious which is accessible to relative objectification, but also the psychic stream itself, which can never, in fact, be grasped as an object. This look is a reductive one because it tries to contract the manifold person, who is nourished by the microcosmic richness of the possible, to some schematically surveyable and recurrent structures. And this look is a deriving one because it supposes it can grasp what a man has become, or even is becoming, in genetic formulae, and it thinks that even the dynamic central principle of the individual in this becoming can be represented by a general concept. An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is levelled down.

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Personality typologies are a valuable tool for understanding human souls (especially in youth), but they are something to be mastered then transcended. Otherwise, become a device for permanently arresting maturity – of satisfactory semi-involvement for the sake of safe semi-alienation – of re-creating an artificial autistic state, where one is the sole soul in a world of behaving psychological objects.

Existentialism is artificial autism.

The best truths are ephemeral. The best truths cannot be possessed. It would be truer to say they possess us. They take us up when we are worthy of them, and they drop us when we think they are ours to own. We enter into a relationship with the best truths, and attempts to possess destroy this relationship.

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We inhabit the best truths like a garden is inhabited. An inhabitant participates in and is a participant of the habitat. We are living things among the living things who constitute the garden. The garden encloses and involves us as parts and participants of itself.

We, however, prefer our “objective” truths. An object can be mastered and possessed. An apple can be grasped in our hands, held up against the sky and seen whole, turned and examined on all sides. We can eat that apple and subsume it and force it to be “me”. It is true: some truths are like this, like objects, objective. The best truths, however, are not. The best truths are subjective – and whatever is genuinely subjective is holistic and transcendent.

*

Modernity acknowledges subjectivity, but excludes it from the sphere of truth. Modernity acknowledges only objective truth.

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Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.

Instinct, individual, interhuman, social… Logos.

Can a person’s relationship with truth evolve beyond the face-to-face fascination characteristic of youthful love and arrive at a mature turning together with the loved one toward the world?

The deepest figure-ground reversal: the philosophy which formerly had been a foreground feature seen against the background of reality now passes into the background. Reality, now in the foreground, is seen against the undergirding philosophy.

How could someone in that state teach philosophy?

I just hung this painting of the Hongwu Emperor in my office. It sounds like the emperor was a total son-of-a-bitch, but I like the painting. I like the dragon emblem on his shirt.

I think W was a parody (or a sub-mediocre example) of this kind of man.

Let me tell you the story of Right Hand, Left Hand. It’s a tale of Good and Evil.

HATE… it was with this hand that CAIN iced his brother.

LOVE… these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand, the hand of love.

The story of life is this: STATIC.

One hand is always fighting the other hand. And the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the Right Hand, LOVE, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the Right Hand’s coming back. Yeah, he’s got the Left Hand on the ROPES, now. That’s right. Yeah. BOOM. That’s a DEVASTATING right and HATE is hurt. DOWN! OH! OH! Left Hand, HATE, KO’ed by LOVE.

If I love you, I love you.

But, If I hate you…

I just finished rereading Buber’s “Distance and Relation”, and it made me want to list the ways other people can exist to one another.

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Another person can be nonexistent, latent in the environment: unnoticed, in blind irrelevance.

Another person can exist as an object that emerges from the environment: noticed, but relevant functionally, not a subject. (Never forget: symbols are functional…)

Another person can exist as a person in principle: a subject-within-an-object, but the subject is one in whom we are not involved. We leave the subject sealed inside the object until the subjectivity makes itself relevant to us. (Note regarding William Ayers: Fear makes what is feared instantly relevant. Terrorism is the method of using fear to make one’s systematically disregarded subjectivity relevant to those who wish to ignore it out of existence.)

Another person can exist merely psychologically: a subject which is experienced by means of its behavior. The behavior can be studied as behavior or it can be comprehended empathetically, but in the end the other person is grasped as a subject-within-an-object and reduced to objective terms, a perceptual/behavioral system. The person is rendered functionally predictable, and, wherever necessary, subjectively irrelevant.

Another person can be a person, present to us: a subject with whom we engage as a subject, whose subjectivity we know directly through the changes we experience in our own subjectivity. What exactly does a change in one’s subjectivity look like? When one’s objective world changes all at once, as a whole. When one would write different poetry or compose different songs for his involvement in the other. In this other person, nothing can be dismissed as irrelevant: whatever is relevant to this other is by definition relevant to us, and not out of duty but spontaneously, for no reason at all.

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I am going to post the entire final section of this essay in the comments of this post. I already posted a large chunk of it yesterday, but when I looked at it again I realized the part I posted, while rich in insight, lacked the practical force of the whole.

A single heavily cross-referenced entry on this blog could take hours or days to read if one were to follow the links into the companion wiki, and then to follow the chains and lattices and constellations of thought within the wiki to grasp the entry within its philosophical context – which really is the only way to achieve authentic understanding. Obviously, nobody can put that much time and effort into reading a blog. I think the best approach is the one most people will take anyway: to read the passage straight through, and to click links placed at those points where meaning is felt to be especially concentrated. The best policy is to follow one’s urgency, through bliss and dread alike.

From “Distance and Relation”:

The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one – the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way. That this capacity lies so immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness and questionableness of the human race: actual humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds. On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for confirmation, without devotion for being and becoming, again and again mars the truth of the life between man and man.

. . .

Within the setting of the world at a distance and the making it independent, yet also essentially reaching beyond this and in the proper sense not able to be included in it, is the fact of man’s himself being set at a distance and made independent as ‘the others’. Our fellow men, it is true, live round about us as components of the independent world over against us, but in so far as we grasp each one as a human being he ceases to be a component and is there in his self-being as I am; his being at a distance does not exist merely for me, but it cannot be separated from the fact of my being at a distance for him. The first movement of human life puts men into mutual existence which is fundamental and even. But the second movement puts them into mutual relation with me which happens from time to time and by no means in an even way, but depends on our carrying it out. Relation is fulfilled in a full making present when I think of the other not merely as this very one, but experience, in the particular approximation of the given moment, the experience belonging to him as this very one. Here and now for the first time does the other become a self for me, and the making independent of his being which was carried out in the first movement of distancing is shown in a new highly pregnant sense as a presupposition – a presupposition of this ‘becoming a self for me’, which is, however, to be understood not in a psychological but in a strictly ontological sense, and should therefore rather be called ‘becoming a self with me’. But it is ontologically complete only when the other knows that he is made present by me in his self and when this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently in the mutuality of the making present – in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other – together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation.

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. The human person needs confirmation because man as man needs it. An animal does not need to be confirmed, for it is what it is unquestionably. It is different with man: Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.

Some ideas I find myself reconsidering regularly, from oldest to newest:

• A fragment from one of Rilke’s letters, on the need for a lover to love the distance between himself and the beloved
• Zeno’s paradoxes
•  C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”
• Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”

With the first three, reconsideration usually means renewed hostility – I come back at the ideas with new attacks.

Today, however, I returned to the Rilke passage and found myself affirming it slightly more than I have been able to recently, though with a style of reservation that only seems diplomatic: the statement is true relatively, but in a way where it must seem absolutely true until it runs its full course and finds its own limits. It is a truth that can be transcended to greater truth, but which must be passed through in order that the greater truth can be known at all.

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I’ve been deeply disturbed to discover that Martin Buber somehow has become more foundational to my thought than Nietzsche. Yet, I love Nietzsche more. And I have to remember that reading Nietzsche I came to Buber’s beliefs on my own – Buber said the beliefs and gave me companionship where I’d arrived. Nietzsche advocated apartness. Buber advocated togetherness, but from the ground Nietzsche led us to in our apartness. Nietzsche taught yin heaven. He gave his reader a starry midnight sky, but a sky set in a finite duration: an open darkness into which the new sun could rise and close the infinity with bright, human blue. Buber is the still-knowing day, and I share that day. The day will end, but at this moment night is only a memory and a certainty of the future.

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Increasingly, I refute things like this: “This is true, but not true enough.”

Increasingly, I suspect all truths will someday come to be seen as not true enough.

If this is true, what is the sense of refuting what we already know to be refutable? When do we stop?

(Doesn’t skepticism have an unexamined and absurd faith in one particular vision of truth? Is skepticism skeptical enough about skepticism?)

At some point does it make sense to stop courageously at the surface? When do we stop asking and start affirming? And when we affirm, in what role are we affirming? Who are we as affirmers if we affirm what we could just as easily break?

1: Tao
2: Yang, Yin
3: Heaven, Man, Earth
4: East, South, West, North

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or

4: Dawn, Noon, Sunset, Midnight

or

4: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

or

4: Birth, Youth, Adulthood, Senescene

or

4: Intoxication, Delusion, Anxiety, Perplexity

The purpose of ethics: cultivation of ethos. An ethic, through practice, creates or preserves a particular world-view.

The ethic of ethics is morality: namaste/shalom/gassho/I-thou.

Morality can sometimes demand the self-sacrifice of an ethic.

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I was thinking about those little praying hand sculptures, fingers touching, chopped off at the wrist. It is the front half of a gassho, touching at the extremities, but missing the unity of the body to whom the hands belong.

All moods would prefer to find their source outside one’s own being. An example: dread would rather be fear.

People who never fail to find a particular object for each holistic state of the soul are prisoners in a poem. This can happen at the level of the individual, or it can happen collectively. A whole reality can degenerate into condensations of holistic irritability. Look around.

It is impossible to understand Nietzsche’s attitude toward pity if you don’t understand his counter-ideal: joying-with.It is tempting to interpret all of Nietzsche’s affirmations of aggression, hostility, and devil’s advocacy as Nietzsche’s affirmations of his own highest ideals – as a complement to his own pitilessness. I see his presentation of evil as both necessary and, from a certain altitude, as a form of good (or from a certain depth, pre-good) as “justice with open eyes”, a redemption of evil. His renunciation of pity is not indifference to the pain of others, but rather a refusal to indulge in the expedient of keeping another company in misery, and increasing the amount of misery in the world.Some passages:

Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.

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The first thought of the day. – The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

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The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals, and among them it is accessible only to the choicest exemplars: thus a rare humanum: so that there have been philosophers who have denied the existence of joying with.

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… And, although I will keep quiet here about some things, I do not wish to keep quiet about my morality, which tells me: Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today! And let the clamour of today, the noise of war and revolutions, be but a murmur to you. You will also want to help but only those whose distress you properly understand because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the way you help yourself. I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, more full of gaiety. I want to teach them what is today understood by so few least of all by these preachers of compassion: to share not pain, but joy!

Nietzsche is one of the most benevolent and morally expansive men who ever lived, and if you read him with that understanding, he reads very differently. The experience will persuade and change you.

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir

According to Wikipedia “shalom” means the same thing as “namaste”.

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Ram Dass on namaste: “I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.”

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The idea of upaya as Noble Lie – a reality-distorting lie – is diabolical. It despises the thouness of the Other.

True upaya is mytho-poetic truth that permits the understanding of the the most profoundly meaningful words to degrade gracefully in the ears of the hearer, to simplify without falsification. Within upaya the most sophisticated and the least sophisticated can speak with one another and agree to the furthest extent, and the agreement can continuously grow together within the shared forms of the community. Upaya is the spine of community that connects crown and vestigial tail.

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If I were to discover that Nietzsche disagrees with me on this point, I would have to reverently reject him.

I am out to de-romanticize religion, but not in order to explain it out of existence. I de-romanticize religion so it can pervade ordinary life and consecrate it.

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Romanticism externalizes and reveres what ought to be desired, pursued, penetrated and internalized. It worships when what is most needful is love. Romanticism’s style is to reject with enthusiastic pseudo-acceptance. It loves only masks of its own creation.