1. Respect will crush you.
2. Infinity is stranger than magnificent.
3. Everything in the world is the world inside-out.
4. Everything in the world is a blend of being.
5. Before the beginning, you stood on the surface of the Heaven looking up into Earths.
6. Truth is something we use well or use poorly for a bewildering variety of purposes. Gnosis is a kind of truth with limited applications.
7. Gnosis is a kind of truth that is true within its limits, but which does not grasp the limits of truth.

Most of the ideas I’ve believed, I still believe, but I have changed how I believe in them.

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I believe in personality type, in archetypes, in symbols.

I even believe in seasons of the soul, and the existence of distinctive, identifiable energies associated with these seasons.

These things do exist, and I treat them as real.

But real, how?

One of the many ways I could characterize my philosophical work: building a collection of ontological conceptions, one of which is metaphysics.

Yes, metaphysics can be seen as belonging to metaphysics. And vice versa. And that is one of my ontological acquisitions.

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That the Earth revolves around the Sun, doesn’t change the fact that each morning the Sun rises in the East.

Which way you conceive the relationship of self, Earth and Sun depends on why you are thinking.

And there are also reasons to think about how both are true in different times, and that as much as the cosmological and scientific perspective has its reasons for being thought out: and certainly not only in order to choose between abiding in a cosmos or in a universe.

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What we think is constrained by how we think, and how we think is directed by why we think.

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It is easier to talk about a rock than it is to talk about a belief. It is easier to talk about a belief than it is to talk about beliefs.

It gets harder and harder to speak clearly as you leave behind the world of objectivity. We can all make sense to one another if we stick to rocks.

Metaphysics is less important than ontological ethics: the mapping of rights to types of beings. The pragmatic cash value of a metaphysic may be its ontological ethic. (Or maybe a metaphysic is just the theoretical residue of an ontological ethic?)

What gets a hearing and what just gets told? What is responded to and what is simply manipulated?

This line of thought gives the aesthetic notion “truth to materials” an ethical dimension.

The working title of the book in my head “Backpack”, but now I’m thinking of calling it “Kit”.

1. The goal of the Booj Party is to establish arrangements favorable to the largest and most stable middle-class. The ideal is universal middle class status for anyone who will work to attain it.
2. Why universal middle-class? Because this is the state of even distribution of power, and even distribution of power is the condition most favorable to freedom.
3. Freedom is not in having, but in doing. The test of freedom: How much of the time do you feel you are working for a life you want? Freedom and motivation and prosperity all go together.
4. The greatest threat to freedom is power concentrations.
5. Power concentrations come in many forms, including money, authority, equipment, expertise, privilege. A concentration of any kind of power can be exploited to serve the accumulation of all other kinds.
6. Big Government and Corporate Hegemony are only two manifestations of power concentration. To see danger in only one or the other is become an accomplice of power concentration and an unwitting opponent of freedom.
7. Rights have no existence beyond agreement that they exist. Rights are sustained only by equal distribution of power. We negotiate with entities who have leverage, who resist us or who make us resist. Those who cannot negotiate are summarily used.
8. The world owes us a living if we all believe it ought to. A dollar has value if we agree it does. The world owes us the right to accumulate unlimited wealth and power exponentially if we agree that is the way things should be.
9. The question is not what is right and wrong, but rather what kind of world do we want to inhabit and how we must live to create and sustain it. In other words: ethos and ethics.
10. A large middle class exists if we choose to make it exist. If we passively allow “nature” to unfold as it unfolds, power will concentrate as naturally as a car will naturally drive off the road if it is not steered.
11. Human being is naturally artificial. There is no given natural human order to discover. There is only a range of viable imperfect artificial arrangements with patterns of harmony and cacophony — which can only be known through irreversible experiments.
12. Avoidance of power concentrations is not the same thing as enforced equality. The goal is not sameness, but dynamic balance.

I have a hunch that Michel Serres might have discovered an unprecedented form of mysticism.

From Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks: “A new way of thinking — which is always a new way of measuring and pre-supposes the availability of a new yardstick, a new scale of feelings — feels itself to contradict all other ways of thinking and, resisting them, continually says ‘That is wrong’. Looked at more subtly, such a ‘That is wrong’ really only means ‘I feel nothing of myself in it’, ‘I don’t care about it’, ‘I don’t understand how you can fail to feel with me’.”

For some people self-respect is conditional, and for others self-respect is absolute.

Some people self-determine the conditions for their own self-respect, and others never give it a thought.

Some people set difficult conditions for self-respect and work hard to win it, while others just respect or disrespect instinctively or indiscriminately.

Some people prefer to respect, and others don’t.

Some people like it that humanity self-invents. Others prefer to see the changes humanity undergoes as natural mechanics, or as the unfolding of a predestined plan, or as a process of degradation, or as wrestling with a riddle, or as a chain of necessary accidents. Other people deny that significant enduring change happens. Others just live their lives.

Epistemological pluralism situates human beings in a world that can be known only partially. And one’s partiality determines one’s focus of attention and one’s experimental activities. The truth one finds in the world and integrates as a body of knowledge depends entirely on how one lives out life. Different ways of living necessarily yield different and often conflicting bodies of partial truth. The more faithfully, comprehensively and rigorously we pursue, observe and order truth, the more it will diverge.

Ontological pluralism adheres to a taoist metaphysic, though not necessarily a taoist ethic (te).

Ethical pluralism ethic asserts that the testimony of different conceptions of truth ought to be treated as valid.

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My own ethical pluralism aims at a world where I and those around me share a world we can comprehend, act within, and care about.

That last point: creating a world we can care about together is the cornerstone of this ethic.

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The world can become many things to us.

We can make it explicable or mysterious.

We can make it an epic project, or an endless game.

We can make it something  we love, or we can make it into something we endure.

We make what the world becomes, and we make who humanity becomes.

Humanity is always the child and parent of humanity.

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Human nature is artificiality.

The only question that matters is the quality of our art.

To Michel Serres and to all
of those who are crossing
his Northwest Passage

– Inscription from Latour’s Pasteurization of France

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What is Serres’ Northwest Passage? From Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour:

This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable … It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had.

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The dualism of material and mind which has been productive for centuries has led the Western world into paralysis. We can’t resolve it by simply denying the fact of the duality, because even if we negate the What of the thought, the How of the thought survives it in our way of doing our thinking. We have to find new mind-movements — dances — that permit new lifeworlds (or networks of lifeworlds) to arise.

But we cannot understand these new movements by our old movements. We have to stop for a moment, then start in a different direction, with different movements. Groping, stumbling, stammering, in a shifty, shadowy terrain, guided by our fingertips and the star of perplexity. That’s how it’s done.

The perceptible forms of art are the last step of a much longer process of intellectual-spiritual transformation and discovery. This process often feels like pure shit, and sensible people avoid it. But an artist who aspires to create something unprecedented cannot avoid this ordeal, because this is the only way to discover a new way to perceive and live out life.

This — and nothing else — is what genius is: the discovery and development of new forms of life that naturally and urgently externalize themselves through creation of forms.

Whoever it was who re-assignment of the word “genius” to high IQ did our culture a disservice. Genius cannot be measured, only detected, because it is always hits us from an angle we don’t know how to expect. What IQ measures is not genius, but ingenuity, our ability to manipulate systems of objects, which includes not only physical objects but intellectual ones as well, such as concepts, techniques and stylistic elements.

For the last 30-some years art has tried to get by on mere ingenuity. Ambitious artists play archeologist and anthropologist, digging and rummaging through other times and places for exotic influences to excite their ingenuity.

This method reliably yields recombinations of stylistic elements useful on making things that might be perceived as new or at least fresh by an audience bored with the artistic products they’ve been consuming — but this approach cannot make the audience itself feel new and see life as new.

And even this modest accomplishment has an expiration date. Sooner or later, the limited spiritual resources of history will be depleted, and a sense that everything that could be has been sets in and we suffer an Ecclesiastes effect.

Until artists learn to find the world beyond art interesting, the world of art will grow less and less interesting. Until artists find meaning in engaging in the whole of life and struggling with it, their art will engage nobody, because it will present no challenge worth a struggle.

I’m starting to disbelieve in the common belief that Levinas is the heir of Buber, who has somehow made Buber obsolete. I don’t believe they share moral vision. Maybe the most important evidence is the experience of reading them, which could not be less similar despite their common material. Buber is an electrifying read, where Levinas is crushingly heavy and darkening.

Part of me enjoys thinking of Levinas as unbearably good (as a representative of Paul’s notion of the impossibility of Law), but another part of me thinks he is unbearable because his moral vision is ruinous.

Levinas might be the foremost advocate of the process by which the best are stripped of all conviction leaving the worst unsupervised and prone to unscrupulous conviction violent intensification.

The Other is indispensable to the central self, but that does not give it precedent. This might shed some light on the ancient insistence in Chinese thought that heaven must outrank earth (to put it as acceptably as possible).

When the center no longer holds, the best lack all conviction, because only what holds to the center is worthy of conviction.

Continue reading Thoughts on Yeats →

Ideologues make Trojan horses of factual account packed with ethical valuations.

Once you learn to open the horse and force out the passengers, you can accept gifts from your enemies.

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While all religions attempt accounts for the same metaphysical sphere of reality — at least to the degree of acknowledging its existence — they assume sharply divergent ethical stances. Religions seem alike only when lumped together and opposed to strictly scientific accounts of reality, similarly to how all classical music sounds the same to ears accustomed to popular music.

Perhaps there’s another stratum of truth above ethical principles where variety converges again into unity. Even if this is the case, it does not serve the purposes of the perennialist peacenik crowd who plaster their vehicles with “coexist” bumper stickers, reject the hard-edged formalities of religion in favor of a nebulous spirituality of passive vegged-out bliss.

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Denial of difference does not accomplish peace.

Treating peace as something that should already be, and would already be if it weren’t for the viciousness of our neighbor, is violent and will incite violence.

If your neighbor thinks a point of disagreement is important and you disagree, you have not settled the disagreement, except in your own mind. You have deepened and intensified the disagreement through disrespect. Respect requires belief in what stands beyond your own mind and its current horizons.

Respectfully acknowledging differences, taking them seriously, working with them, learning from them, changing in response to what we learn — that is how peace is accomplished.

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Peaceful unity is accomplished through working together toward a permanently transcendent universal.

Because people who love to think rarely interact with others who love to think, many thinkers fail to cultivate their social-thinking graces. If the thinker is authentic, he behaves inconsiderately. If the thinker actively attempts considerateness he easily falls into thought-obstructing social conventions such as meeting etiquette, or  jokey banter, or polite pleasantries.

Because of this, thinkers often continue to think in isolation, even if they know other thinkers.

The transcendent and the transcendental are alike only in that they are not phenomenal. To confuse them is a big childish mistake.