When a person says he loves animals or nature, or that humans are just a kind of animal, a question involuntarily flashes through my mind: “Uh oh, does this person hate humanity, and is he using animals or nature as his antithetical ideal?”

Same thing for “realists”: “Uh oh, does this person hate aspects of reality he can’t comprehend and control, and is he dismissing those things he can touch but not grasp as unreal and invalid?”

Same thing for religious folks: “Uh oh, does this person hate this world, and is he subscribing to this alternative beyond-world only in order to disparage this one?”

Same thing for environmental crusaders: “Uh oh, does this person hate business, and is he using environmentalism mainly to condemn business from a new angle?”

Same thing for libertarians: “Uh oh, does this person hate human deliberation and all its messy defiance of clean schematisms, and is he adhering to an impracticable mechanical fantasy in order to treat fully-dimensional human deliberation — and worse, all deliberate collective action — as a political disease?”

This might be another of my typical self-educational revelations that’s literally a matter-of-course fact for those lucky enough to have had classes in this stuff, but:

Is any movement prefixed with “post-” claiming a Hegelian dialectical sublation of whatever’s been moved beyond?

So, an anti-modernist type, who has merely rejected modernism out of hand on moral/aesthetic grounds without fully coming to respectful (if disapproving) terms with it, is essentially different from one who has and has discovered within modernism its own self-negating principle? One operates from an antitheses (romanticism?), the other from what is claimed to be an overcoming of modernism and whatever is claimed to be its antithesis?

Hmmm.

• Demonstrate / articulate: To the degree that something is truly new, really communicating what it means requires iterative demonstration and articulation. Mute doing and empty saying spiral in toward articulate action and substantiated message.
• Authenticity / tact: Being yourself does not mean behaving the same way no matter who is present, and being responsive to others does not mean suppressing yourself. When either self or the other is suppressed the relationship is missing one of its essential terms. One must speak authentically as one’s self, but address the other specifically — that is, say it in such a way that it will be heard by this other person. This does not mean one seeks to please the other, only that one takes the other seriously as one who is there and is hearing in that person’s own way. Tact, as I am defining it here (admittedly oddly), might manifest as intentionally disturbing or angering the other.
• Actual / potential / metaphysical: Articulate every reality that can be articulated, but never reduce reality to what can be articulated. Perhaps the most important thing to be articulated is the relationship between word and the vastness of inarticulate reality. Words are entirely real, but they are not the entirety of reality. (They’re not even the entirety of our own reality (much less what is potentially our reality (much less what is real but will never be ours))). [It’s so liberating to use nested parentheses!]
• Objective / participatory: We want to pull up and out of what we know — maintain objective distance — when in fact we are involved with what we know and participatorily immersed in our knowing and our knowledge.

Years ago one of my uncle argued with me: “In every war, there is torture. In WWII, even, soldiers were known to torture captives. You are acting like this situation is something new.”

The whole problem with this argument is confusing a normative ideal with actual behavior. The difference is not in the behavior of soldiers, it is in the behavior of citizens in evaluating that behavior. And really, isn’t the purpose of a norm to influence actual behavior toward one actuality over another? And if that norm is not perfectly actualizable, is that even relevant to the value of the norm?

In our “realist” and intellectually lax society, we’ve lost this distinction in far too many places.

For instance, when reporting the news, a reporter’s bias is bound to creep in. However, when the norm in journalism is complete and undistorted reporting of the facts of a situation — however impossible this ideal is in actuality — to dispense with the norm on the basis of the continuing existence of distortion is to remove all restraint and to begin a slide from factual news, from which disagreeing parties can begin dialogue, to competing propagandas from which nothing but wholesale rejection of competing perspectives as such — facts and opinion alike — ad hominem — can result. This is a dangerous situation. Where dialogue ends, coercion begins, then violence.

Another case: “Change is inevitable.” Sure, change will happen no matter what we do. Nothing will last forever. But between instant and eternity is a vast range of durations. When we resist change — for instance, when we wish to preserve a favorable state of affairs, or when we try to stabilize our lives for the sake of our sanity and happiness — is it really a futile pursuit simply because that duration isn’t permanent? Does it really make sense to remove the brakes altogether simply because we can’t (and don’t want to) bring progress to a full halt? When we observe that change is inevitable and adjust our norm to fit the facts, we change the fact of our situation and change loses its moderation.

Another case: In hermeneutics, we will never perfectly understand what the author meant and we will always bring our own understanding to what we read, so — the author is dead. The author should not be “privileged”…

Another case: Nobody is perfect. So, let’s accept that and not even try…

Fact is, we are happy to reason this way only when justifies our own ends. But the entire point of reasoning is to reach agreements with others, to be able to make an appeal, and in exchange, we are required to respond to appeals. Only if these standards are applied consistently from case to case, from party to party, from I to you, from you to me, now and in the future are these reasons functioning as reason. Without this principle, reasons are rationalizations, justice is mere justification.

Now, obviously, in actuality we’re never entirely reasonable, but this is precisely why reason is so necessary as a normative ideal.

There’s knowledge, then there’s insight, then there’s post-insight knowledge, then there’s knowledge about the experience of insight in general, then there’s knowledge about the relationship between insight and knowledge. Then there’s putting all of this knowledge and insight into practice. And THEN there’s yet more insight, more  post-insight theoretical and practical knowledge, more knowledge about the relationship between practice (and the concrete) and insight and knowledge… etc.

The scientistic worldview is objective-reductionistic: superficially, it is metaphysical materialism (a world constituted of material and forces within space, of some nature or another); methodologically, it believes that both subjectivity and objectivity is an emergent property of the kinds of entities that can be observed from without and comprehended factually.

The religionistic (my coinage, I think) worldview is subjective-reductionistic: superficially, it is metaphysical idealism. Not only is it true that (quoting the Dhammapada) “mind precedes all phenomena and of mind are all phenomena made” — an indisputable fact, systematically passed over by the scientistic faithful — but that behind the phenomena is an essence (called “noumena”, “the thing in itself”) of the nature of mind or idea.

Both points of view are equally metaphysical and reductionistic. Then there’s phenomenalism that brackets all metaphysical projection and thinks within the terms of phenomena as such.

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, “Religion as a Cultural System” [available online]:

The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a threat to our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create, grasp, and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate (that is, genetically programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, not merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort of anxiety:

[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function and highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot construe — the “uncanny,” as it is popularly called. It need not be a new object; we do meet new things, and “understand” them promptly, if tentatively, by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly disorganized and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung [world view] and Lebensanschauung [life view]. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., as well as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal morale and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees, to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts. (Langer, Philosophy in a New Key)

There are at least three points where chaos — a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability — threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it — challenges with which any religion, however “primitive,” which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope.

My wife says only two things capture the full attention of all her 5th grade students: stories and music.

*

The quality of a story of captivation and transport, that the mind of the listener moves effortlessly with the movement of the narrative… isn’t that a quality we would like our lives to have?

*

When our lives make sense to us, isn’t that narrative cohesion more decisive than the cleanliness and systematic integrity of the factual parts? In fact, with the exception of a few exaggeratedly scrupulous souls, do people even worry about the epistemological stratum of truth at all? It’s not the substance of life: it’s part of the set. If the set doesn’t distract from the play, it’s good enough.

*

An idea to play with: part of what distinguishes paideia from mere technical training is that it imparts a collective narrative to the student, in addition to the more generally recognized practical and factual knowledge. This narrative provides the student with an overarching “why” capable of  unifying otherwise discrete meanings:

• the practical and factual are united as equipment for a desired life;
• individual self and the collective are united as belonging to a group;
• the momentary acting and interpreting self with the self projected in memory and anticipation as character who sees and accepts that he is seen.

Without this narrative,  the act of acquiring practical and factual knowledge is felt to be a meaningless chore which must be coerced from without; the self is alienated and experiences collectives as something to evade and ideally eventually to escape — (remember back when modernists complained of alienation, before it became cool to accept it nonchalantly?) — and a self instinctively shuts out the seeing/narrating others and claims all vision for himself (hubris) or tries to persist in the seeing/narrative of everyone else, and so is always reinventing, retransfiguring, reauthoring, revising, rediscovering what “really happened” (akrasia).

*

Meliorism is recognizing that a grand narrative is not discredited when it is credited to human beings.

*

This potential narrative unity of life which interprets phenomena morally (as possessing or signifying value) is what I’m talking about when I talk about the heaven yao of the trigram.

To Heidegger’s concept “clock time” we might add “map space” and “story self”.

How does a sense of truth develop?

One notion: To the conceptless vacuum of an infant’s mind, understanding is brought forth ex nihilo, as ideas are introduced one at a time, added one to the other, and a factual world is built up from simple, isolated observations to a systematic world view.

Another notion: The infant’s mind is a chaotic everything-at-once, and ideas are not added to the chaos, but are in fact articulated out of the chaos. A distinction is made within the chaos (the chaos is no longer only chaos but two related “jointed” parts within an order), and that distinction schematizes the infant’s world and gives it meaning. The distinction and that which is distinguished makes speaking about things possible. The world view is not built up from facts in intellectual empty space, rather, a conceptual schema divides the chaos into order. The ordered part of chaos is our world.

The remaining chaos is given many different names depending on its relationship to the order. Sometimes we don’t see it at all, sometimes we call it irrelevant, and sometimes we take a bit of the non-order as significant of the whole of the remaining chaos, and we call it mystery.

*

Each articulation of the world influences subsequent articulations: it makes some orders possible and makes others impossible. Every articulation runs its course and can go no further unless it backs up through questioning, and re-articulates reality along a new path with a new potentiality of development.

Each time we back up, we must reencounter the truth of the underlying chaos, we realize this solid ground beneath our feet is essentially liquid, and we feel as if we are suspended over an abyss. This feeling is angst: the threat to one’s world-order, which seizes holistically. We instinctively recoil from this experience and retreat back into what we know. If we ignore angst, and press further, we lose the option to retreat altogether. Here, there be dragons. We fall over the horizon of the ordered world into perplexity, back into the infant’s chaos. This experience is what is known as perplexity.

*

Thomas Kuhn was the popularizer of the word “paradigm” and the inventor of the concept of the “paradigm shift”, so grievously leveled-down by business consultants and politicians. Kuhn’s interest was the history of science. Paradigms are competing scientific articulations, expressed as metaphors or models, each with its own potentiality. “Normal science” is the disciplined development and playing-out of articulation systems. When a paradigm runs its course, when more and more anomalies appear (observations inexplicable in the terms of the paradigm), and these anomalies become harder and harder to dismiss as irrelevant or as experimental noise, a scientific crisis ensues. New paradigms are sought, articulated, tested and the ones that survive compete for dominance in the community, with many fascinating. Meanwhile many scientists remain faithful to the old paradigm and find new ways to apply it in order to explain the anomalies — often successfully. The conservatives are frequently right, and the boldly imaginative scientific iconoclasts are often crackpots.

In discovering and describing paradigm shifts, Kuhn triggered a philosophical paradigm shift. Science takes a peculiar attitude toward its objects. Practicing science a scientist immerses himself in a paradigm and interacts it as if the paradigm were reality itself. Scientists inhabit paradigms and think by and through them. Experiment and ordered observation of scientific phenomena requires submission to a paradigm. A paradigm does not serve the scientist who employs it; the paradigm employs the scientist, and works itself out through the efforts of scientists.

Kuhn robbed the world of the conceit that through science the world would finally arrive at the truth. Science only provides truthful relationships with reality. Scientific truth turned out to be one more metaphysical projection.

*

The things in our contemporary world that bear scrutiny rarely add up to to anything whole. They remain a complicated system, unintuitive in part and whole. Only the expert is qualified to grasp any of it, and that part is necessarily a sliver of a still incomprehensible whole.

Those things that do add up to an intuitive whole — where the parts relate back to the whole as its articulations, and the whole provides an intuitive unity of all the parts — on closer examination tend to fall apart, so one must blur one’s eyes to an increasing number of anomalies and apply principles with increasing arbitrariness to maintain any feeling at all that it is true.

It seems we must make a choice between a world of infinitely small truths and zero overarching unity, or having an overarching unity made of mythical concepts masquerading as fact.

This, however is a false choice.

If people understood that there are in fact multiple valid ways to conceive truth and that both the meaningful whole and the integrity of the parts are variable, and we accepted the freedom implied in this variability we could hold ourselves to higher standards of truth. That is, we could require that we do not stop pursuing an understanding when the understanding simply feels right, nor do we stop when we have found ways to connect the facts into a cohesive comprehensive system. We ought to require both. And we should not hesitate to revisit our conception of the truth when if fails at the level of whole and part.

I want to live in a world where Chuang Tzu’s “Way of Heaven” is more popular with businessmen than Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

I tried to edit it down to manageable length, but I gave up. I can’t believe how amazing it is. Here’s the whole damn thing:

It is the Way of Heaven to keep moving and to allow no piling up — hence the ten thousand things come to completion. It is the Way of the emperor to keep moving and to allow no piling up — hence the whole world repairs to his court. It is the Way of the sage to keep moving and to allow no piling up — hence all within the seas bow to him. Comprehending Heaven, conversant with the sage, walker in the six avenues and four frontiers of the Virtue of emperors and kings — the actions of such a man come naturally; dreamily, he never lacks stillness.

The sage is still not because he takes stillness to be good and therefore is still. The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind — that is the reason he is still. Water that is still gives back a clear image of beard and eyebrows; reposing in the water level, it offers a measure to the great carpenter. And if water in stillness possesses such clarity, how much more must pure spirit. The sage’s mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things.

Emptiness, stillness, limpidity, silence, inaction — these are the level of Heaven and earth, the substance of the Way and its Virtue. Therefore the emperor, the king, the sage rest in them. Resting, they may be empty; empty, they may be full; and fullness is completion. Empty, they may be still; still, they may move; moving, they may acquire. Still, they may rest in inaction; resting in inaction, they may demand success from those who are charged with activities. Resting in inaction, they may be merry; being merry, they may shun the place of care and anxiety, and the years of their life will be long.

Emptiness, stillness, limpidity, silence, inaction are the root of the ten thousand things. To understand them and face south is to become a ruler such as Yao was; to understand them and face north is to become a minister such as Shun was. To hold them in high station is the Virtue of emperors and kings, of the Son of Heaven; to hold them in lowly station is the way of the dark sage, the uncrowned king. Retire with them to a life of idle wandering and you will command first place among the recluses of the rivers and seas, the hills and forests. Come forward with them to succor the age and your success will be great, your name renowned, and the world will be united. In stillness you will be a sage, in action a king. Resting in inaction, you will be honored; of unwrought simplicity, your beauty will be such that no one in the world may vie with you.

He who has a clear understanding of the Virtue of Heaven and earth may be called the Great Source, the Great Ancestor. He harmonizes with Heaven; and by doing so he brings equitable accord to the world and harmonizes with men as well. To harmonize with men is called human joy; to harmonize with Heaven is called Heavenly joy. Chuang Tzu has said, “This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine — he passes judgment on the ten thousand things but he doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations but he doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity but he doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven, bears up the earth, carves and fashions countless forms, but he doesn’t think himself skilled.” This is what is called Heavenly joy.

So it is said, for him who understands Heavenly joy, life is the working of Heaven; death is the transformation of things. In stillness, he and the yin share a single Virtue; in motion, he and the yang share a single flow. Thus he who understands Heavenly joy incurs no wrath from Heaven, no opposition from man, no entanglement from things, no blame from the spirits. So it is said, his movement is of Heaven, his stillness of earth. With his single mind in repose, he is king of the world; the spirits do not afflict him; his soul knows no weariness. His single mind reposed, the ten thousand things submit — which is to say that his emptiness and stillness reach throughout Heaven and earth and penetrate the ten thousand things. This is what is called Heavenly joy. Heavenly joy is the mind of the sage, by which he shepherds the world.

The Virtue of emperors and kings takes Heaven and earth as its ancestor, the Way and its Virtue as its master, inaction as its constant rule. With inaction, you may make the world work for you and have leisure to spare; with action, you will find yourself working for the world and never will it be enough. Therefore the men of old prized inaction.

If superiors adopt inaction and inferiors adopt inaction as well, then inferior and superior will share the same virtue, and if inferior and superior share the same virtue, there will be none to act as minister. If inferiors adopt action and superiors adopt action as well, then superior and inferior will share the same way, and if superior and inferior share the same way, there will be none to act as lord. Superiors must adopt inaction and make the world work for them; inferiors must adopt action and work for the world. This is an unvarying truth.

Therefore the kings of the world in ancient times, though their knowledge encompassed all Heaven and earth, did not of themselves lay plans; though their power of discrimination embraced the ten thousand things, they did not of themselves expound any theories; though their abilities outshone all within the four seas, they did not of themselves act. Heaven does not give birth, yet the ten thousand things are transformed; earth does not sustain, yet the ten thousand things are nourished. The emperor and the king do not act, yet the world is benefited. So it is said, nothing so spiritual as Heaven, nothing so rich as earth, nothing so great as the emperor and the king. So it is said, the Virtue of the emperor and the king is the counterpart of Heaven and earth. This is the way to mount upon Heaven and earth, to make the ten thousand things gallop, to employ the mass of men.

The source rests with the superior, the trivia with the inferior; the essential resides in the ruler, the details in his ministers. The blandishments of the three armies and the five weapons — these are the trivia of Virtue. The doling out of rewards and punishments, benefit and loss, the five penalties — these are the trivia of public instruction. Rites and laws, weights, measures, the careful comparison of forms and names — these are the trivia of good government. The tones of bell and drum, the posturings of feather and tassel — these are the trivia of music. Lamentation and coarse garments, the mourning periods of varying lengths — these are the trivia of grief. These five trivia must wait for the movement of pure spirit, for the vitality of the mind’s art before they can command respect. The study of such trivia was known to antiquity but the men of old gave them no precedence.

The ruler precedes, the minister follows; the father precedes, the son follows; the older brother precedes, the younger brother follows; the senior precedes, the junior follows; the man precedes, the woman follows; the husband precedes, the wife follows. Honor and lowliness, precedence and following are part of the workings of Heaven and earth, and from them the sage draws his model.

Heaven is honorable, earth lowly — such are their ranks in spiritual enlightenment. Spring and summer precede, autumn and winter follow — such is the sequence of the four seasons. The ten thousand things change and grow, their roots and buds, each with its distinctive form, flourishing and decaying by degree, a constant flow of change and transformation. If Heaven and earth, the loftiest in spirituality, have yet their sequence of honorable and lowly, of preceder and follower, how much more must the way of man! In the ancestral temple, honor is determined by degree of kinship; in the court, by degree of nobility; in the village, by degree of seniority; in the administration of affairs, by degree of worth. This is the sequence of the Great Way.

If you speak of the Way and not of its sequence, then it is not a way; and if you speak of a way that is not a way, then how can anyone make his way by it? Therefore the men of ancient times who clearly understood the Great Way first made clear Heaven and then went on to the Way and its Virtue. Having made clear the Way and its Virtue, they went on to benevolence and righteousness. Having made clear benevolence and righteousness, they went on to the observance of duties. Having made clear the observance of duties, they went on to forms and names. Having made clear forms and names, they went on to the assignment of suitable offices. Having made clear the assignment of suitable offices, they went on to the scrutiny of performance. Having made clear the scrutiny of performance, they went on to the judgment of right and wrong. Having made clear the judgment of right and wrong, they went on to rewards and punishments. Having made clear rewards and punishments, they could be certain that stupid and wise were in their proper place, that eminent and lowly were rightly ranked, that good and worthy men as well as unworthy ones showed their true form, that all had duties suited to their abilities, that all acted in accordance with their titles. It was in this way that superiors were served, inferiors were shepherded, external things were ordered, the inner man was trained. Knowledge and scheming were unused, yet all found rest in Heaven. This was called the Great Peace, the Highest Government. Hence the book says, “There are forms and there are names.” Forms and names were known to antiquity, but the men of old gave them no precedence.

Those who spoke of the Great Way in ancient times could count to five in the sequence [described above] and pick out “forms and names,” or count to nine and discuss “rewards and punishments.” But to jump right in and talk about “forms and names” is to lack an understanding of the source; to jump right in and talk about “rewards and punishments” is to lack an understanding of the beginning. Those who stand the Way on its head before describing it, who turn it backwards before expounding it, may be brought to order by others, but how could they be capable of bringing others to order? Those who jump right in and talk about “forms and names,” “rewards and punishments,” have an understanding of the tools for bringing order, but no understanding of the way to bring order. They may work for the world, but they are not worthy to make the world work for them. They are rhetoricians, scholars cramped in one corner of learning. Rites and laws, weights and measures, the careful comparison of forms and names — the men of old had all these. They are the means by which those below serve those above, not the means by which those above shepherd those below.

Long ago Shun asked Yao, “As Heaven-appointed king, how do you use your mind?”

Yao replied, “I never abuse those who have nowhere to sue, nor reject the poor people. Grieving for the dead, comforting the orphan, pitying the widow — I use my mind in these things alone.”

Shun said, “Admirable, as far as admirableness goes. But not yet great.”

Yao said, “Then what should I do?”

Shun said, “Heaven raised on high, earth in peace, sun and moon shining, the four seasons marching — if you could be like the constant succession of day and night, the clouds which move, the rains that fall!”

“And to think I have been going to all this bustle and bother!” said Yao. “You are one who joins with Heaven; I am one who joins with man.”

Heaven and earth have been called great since ancient times, have been praised in chorus by the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun. The kings of the world in ancient times — what need had they for action? Heaven and earth was enough for them.

Confucius went west to deposit his works with the royal house of Chou. Tzu-lu advised him, saying, “I have heard that the Keeper of the Royal Archives is one Lao Tan, now retired and living at home. If you wish to deposit your works, you might try going to see him about it.”

“Excellent!” said Confucius, and went to see Lao Tan, but Lao Tan would not give permission. Thereupon Confucius unwrapped his Twelve Classics and began expounding them. Halfway through the exposition, Lao Tan said, “This will take forever! Just let me hear the gist of the thing”

“The gist of it,” said Confucius, “is benevolence and righteousness.”

“May I ask if benevolence and righteousness belong to the inborn nature of man?” said Lao Tan.

“Of course,” said Confucius. “If the gentleman lacks benevolence, he will get nowhere; if he lacks righteousness, he cannot even stay alive. Benevolence and righteousness are truly the inborn nature of man. What else could they be?”

Lao Tan said, “May I ask your definition of benevolence and righteousness?”

Confucius said, “To be glad and joyful in mind; to embrace universal love and be without partisanship — this is the true form of benevolence and righteousness.”

Lao Tan said, “Hmm — close-except for the last part. ‘Universal love’ — that’s a rather nebulous ideal, isn’t it? And to be without partisanship is already a kind of partisanship. Do you want to keep the world from losing its simplicity?

Heaven and earth hold fast to their constant ways, the sun and moon to their brightness, the stars and planets to their ranks, the birds and beasts to their flocks, the trees and shrubs to their stands. You have only to go along with Virtue in your actions, to follow the Way in your journey, and already you will be there. Why these flags of benevolence and righteousness so bravely upraised, as though you were beating a drum and searching for a lost child? Ah, you will bring confusion to the nature of man!”

Shih Ch’eng-ch’i went to see Lao Tzu. “I had heard that you were a sage,” he said, “and so, without minding how long the road was, I came to beg an interview — a hundred nights along the way, feet covered with calluses, and yet I did not dare to stop and rest. Now that I see you, though, I find you are no sage at all. Rat holes heaped with leftover grain and yet you turn your little sister out of the house, an unkind act indeed! More raw and cooked food in front of you than you can ever get through, and yet you go on endlessly hoarding goods!” Lao Tzu looked blank and made no reply.

The following day, Shih Ch’eng-ch’i came to see him again and said, “Yesterday I was very sharp with you, but now I have no heart for that sort of thing. I wonder why that is?”

Lao Tzu said, “Artful wisdom, the spirit-like sage — I hope I have shuffled off categories of that sort! If you’d called me an ox, I’d have said I was an ox; if you’d called me a horse, I’d have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you’ll only lay yourself open to double harassment. My submission is a constant submission; I do not submit because I think it time to submit.”

Shih Ch’eng-ch’i backed respectfully away so that he would not tread on Lao Tzu’s shadow, and then advanced once more in humble manner and asked how he should go about cultivating his person.

Lao Tzu said, “Your face is grim, your eyes are fierce, your forehead is broad, your mouth gaping, your manner overbearing, like a horse held back by a tether, watching for a chance to bolt, bounding off as though shot from a crossbow. Scrutinizing ever so carefully, crafty in wisdom, parading your arrogance — all this invites mistrust. Up in the borderlands a man like you would be taken for a thief!”

The Master said: The Way does not falter before the huge, is not forgetful of the tiny; therefore the ten thousand things are complete in it. Vast and ample, there is nothing it does not receive. Deep and profound, how can it be fathomed? Punishment and favor, benevolence and righteousness — these are trivia to the spirit, and yet who but the Perfect Man can put them in their rightful place?

When the Perfect Man rules the world, he has hold of a huge thing, does he not? — yet it is not enough to snare him in entanglement. He works the handles that control the world, but is not a party to the workings. He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and is unswayed by thoughts of gain. He ferrets out the truth of things and knows how to cling to the source. Therefore he can put Heaven and earth outside himself, forget the ten thousand things, and his spirit has no cause to be wearied. He dismisses benevolence and righteousness, rejects rites and music, for the mind of the Perfect Man knows where to find repose.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be value is not real value.

What you can look at and see are forms and colors; what you can listen to and hear are names and sounds. What a pity! — that the men of the world should suppose that form and color, name and sound are sufficient to convey the truth of a thing. It is because in the end they are not sufficient to convey truth that “those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.” But how can the world understand this!

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P’ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, “This book Your Grace is reading — may I venture to ask whose words are in it?”

“The words of the sages,” said the duke.

“Are the sages still alive?”

“Dead long ago,” said the duke.

“In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!”

“Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?” said Duke Huan. “If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it’s your life!”

Wheelwright P’ien said, “I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won’t take hold. But if they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. Not too gentle, not too hard — you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can’t put it into words, and yet there’s a knack to it somehow. I can’t teach it to my son, and he can’t learn it from me. So I’ve gone along for seventy years and at my age I’m still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.”

Some antitheses are best resolved through compromise, others through synthesis — but the antitheses that matter to me are those that are resolved through sublation.

To clarify: Compromise means finding a mid-point between the antitheses. Synthesis means analyzing the antitheses and identifying the most important elements and constructing a single coherent construction. Sublation means looking at the antitheses in order to discover a new way of seeing the problem that satisfies all involved to a greater degree than either of the antithetical positions did. The antithesis is obsoleted by a new and deeper conception.

The word “transcend” could also be used in place of “sublate”, but it carries too many mystical connotations. The word sublate, as I use it comes from Hegel, and is a translation of the word aufheben. According to Wikipedia:

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing (the German verb aufheben means both “to cancel” and “to keep”). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

When Spring comes and things are more cheerful, I’m going to finish reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind aka Phenomenology of Spirit. Geist means both spirit and mind, a fact worth pondering, especially considering that the nuttiest “Christian” Holy Geist-mongers out there have their roots in German-modified Christianity (which in turn was derived from Roman-modified Christianity, which was derived from Pauline Christianity, which developed separately from Petrine Christianity. And who even knows what Christ himself was thinking? And American fundamentalism is really a very recent theological movement [pdf], very American, very modern, very plebeian in every sense… and also rooted in socialism, believe it or not. And even many so-called “traditionalists” have embraced tradition from a fundamentally non-traditional Christian attitude akin to fundamantalism. Contemporary religion is a huge mess.

Some people seem born to do some particular activity. They’re naturally attracted to certain situations and participate in that situation for the intrinsic pleasure of the activity.

These activities can involve objects or people or ideas. Some people love to craft physical materials into artifacts of various kinds and function; others love to care for or organize or inspire or galvanize people; still others loves words or images or concepts or feelings or sounds or movements. The attractions to activities can be as peculiarly specific and nuanced as a man’s attraction to very particular women.* (See sexist note below.)

People like this are sometimes inclined to speak of destinies, or obsessions, or passions. For whatever reason, this quality is seen by many people as admirable, and for that reason, sometimes people who are not possessed by this quality will pretend that they do possess it.

Other people seem born to find their best advantage. They look out on the world and sense opportunities. They are attracted to situations where their actions can benefit themselves and people to whom they are loyal. The situations these people seek are far more variable than those sought by people of destiny.

When the people of opportunity encounter people of destiny, often they sense opportunity in harnessing their passions to particular collective ends, and wind up benefiting all involved. When this is pulled off well and the full potential of the situation is realized, the opportunity and individual destinies are fulfilled together, in a shared organizational destiny.

This situation is beyond wonderful and borders on magical. It is the true promise of the Free Market. I am not suggesting that there is no pain or strain or angst involved, but when all interests are aligned, all the many and intensely unpleasant elements of the effort are experienced as worthwhile. The suffering is tragic and affirming, not depressing and regrettable.

Often people will qualify or apologize for a worthwhile thing with “Well, it’s not perfect.” But really: who cares about flawlessness? Flawlessness is only decisive in the absence of overwhelming value. What matters is not absence of flaws, but the presence of something worth suffering for.

This brings me to my next point.I do not believe the promise of the Free Market can be fulfilled until a greater understanding is reached between opportunity and destiny. Mutual misunderstandings exist that have estranged the two groups, and that misunderstanding can be seen in the answers given to the question “What is worth suffering for?”

The person of destiny and the person of opportunity will give radically divergent answers to this question, and very often fails to grasp the fact that the answer that persuades and galvanizes him to action is perfectly unpersuasive and impractical or unclear or unspecific or uninspiring or depressing to the one he is attempting to reach. So the person of opportunity will paint a picture of future organizational success for its own sake, playing up the degree of that success, the quantity of opportunity fulfilled and he won’t understand that in framing things this way he has lost the passion of those whose passions are the instrument of his success. Or the person of destiny will speak of meaning and values and inspiration and try to raise up from within the souls of his colleagues the hopes of their destinies, to make it a matter of unconditional faith to press forward through the pain, and become so intoxicated with his vision that he fails to see the eyes of the opportunists glazing over at what seems to them a bunch of idealistic poetic mythologizing, or to put it less kindly, bullshit.

Another major problem: People of opportunity find it hard to believe a person of destiny might actually work against his own advantage. They tend to assume that it is the profit motive that moves the world. They are wrong. That is like claiming that what moves a car is the engine, but to forget that it is the burning fuel that moves the engine to move the car. No, it is the profit motive that gives structure to the forces of passion, which are the burning fuel of the engine that really gives it force to move. Or to think of it more organically, the profit motive is the bone structure that organizes into motion the spasms and extensions of destiny’s musculature. If your pursuit of opportunity harms the pursuit of destiny that directs and drives passions, the muscles will atrophy and the skeleton, however well-segmented and firmly joined it is will have tremendous trouble making its bones move. The car will sit motionless and pristine and only potentially operable on the side of the road.

Anyone who says everyone is motivated by material self-interest or profit has not stated a truth, but their own truth and identified themselves as a type. But that does not mean the statement is devoid of validity. Humankind cannot exist without the profit motive, nor can it live by the profit motive alone.

To put it in mythical language, Hades is only one god, and as necessary a god as he is, he is not Zeus.

*

Are there born doctors? Assuming there are, what effect does the profit motive have on the medical industry? What if it is so profitable that people with little interest in medicine are attracted to the medical industry? Will they practice medicine the same way as the born doctor? What if the attraction to money is so great that the medical industry is dominated by people who are not born doctors? What if the entirety of medical training distorts around training profit-motivated doctors, and what if way of training doctors is not as amenable to the born doctor? What if the dominance of the profit-motivated medical industry is such that barriers of entry are placed that discourage precisely those who would practice medicine whether it made them rich or not?

We look after our own kind. Every industry is a sort of self-selecting community..

Doctors were not always filthy rich, yet there have always been doctors.

*

Heaven is where:

The police are British,
The mechanics are German,
The cooks are French,
The lovers are Italian,
And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where:

The police are German,
The mechanics are French,
The cooks are British,
The lovers are Swiss,
And the whole thing is organized by the Italians.

*

(* SEXIST NOTE: Are men shallow for their visual attractions, or are such attractions compressed depth, like a landscape collapsed into the depth of a layer of paint on a canvas or a life concentrated within the depth of ink on a page? Where does depth reside, anyway? If it is true that “nature loves to hide”, where is she hidden and what is she hiding behind?)

The subjective will is what drives a person to objectively understand and then to change the world. The world in which a person lives influences his subjective will… which determines what changes he will make to the world… and so on, around and around.

At times a person understands the world as something in which he dwells. At other times a person understands the world as something he has experienced and interpreted, and that nothing stands outside his conceptualizations except negative concepts, unknowns, possibilities, mysteries.

At every point in this process, we’ve finally figured it all out.

“Mohammedan fatalism. — Mohammedan fatalism embodies the fundamental error of setting man and fate over against one another as two separate things: man, it says, can resist fate and seek to frustrate it, but in the end it always carries off the victory; so that the most reasonable thing to do is to resign oneself or to live just as one pleases. In reality every man is himself a piece of fate; when he thinks to resist fate in the way suggested, it is precisely fate that is here fulfilling itself; the struggle is imaginary, but so is the proposed resignation to fate; all these imaginings are enclosed within fate. — The fear most people feel in face of the theory of the unfreedom of the will is fear in face of Mohammedan fatalism: they think that man will stand before the future feeble, resigned and with hands clasped because he is incapable of effecting any change in it: or that he will give free rein to all his impulses and caprices because these too cannot make any worse what has already been determined. The follies of mankind are just as much a piece of fate as are its acts of intelligence: that fear in face of a belief in fate is also fate. You yourself, poor fearful man, are the implacable moira enthroned even above the gods that governs all that happens; you are the blessing or the curse and in any event the fetters in which the strongest lies captive; in you the whole future of the world of man is predetermined: it is of no use for you to shudder when you look upon yourself.” — Nietzsche

*

There are too many excuses for human irresponsibility — for feeling that our response to circumstance is unnecessary or even wrong.

We are always placing ourselves outside of everything, dis-involving ourselves, distancing, separating, alienating. People submit to “God’s will”, to fate, to the Invisible Hand of market forces, to some sort of cosmic cycle that autonomously and automatically makes everything return to normal, to “how things are” in the world of business, education, politics, to “the Universe”, etc.

As if we are not ourselves participants, organs, agents of these forces! As if there’s me and then there’s everything that’s going on out there. And then we praise our passivity and irresponsibility as virtuous.

Here is exactly how we were cast from Eden: We forgot that we were organs of Eden, and as such we are entirely Eden but can never be Eden in its entirety. We reduce Eden to a discrete Adam, a discrete Eve, a serpent, a tree, a fruit. We want to reduce the world to side-by-side things, because that makes us like gods, knowing good and evil by reducing good and evil to things that our minds can grasp, master, consume and possess — to mere critera, laws, code. We reduce truth to objectivity, and forget about the deepest truth: that we are a flowing confluence of the world, moved by the world to move the world. Eden is one thing, and we are another, and then we are side by side, no longer within, no longer belonging to it. It belongs to us.

*

Soil, water, air and light, under the direction of the seed, organize themselves into life. An Eden organizes itself into Adam.

*

Proof that not all Mohammedans indulge in the fatalism that Nietsche observed?: “Allah says, ‘I was a hidden treasure. I wanted to be known and so created the creation.'”

“Unaccountability and innocence. — The complete unaccountability of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest draught the man of knowledge has to swallow if he has been accustomed to seeing in accountability and duty the patent of his humanity. All his judgments, distinctions, dislikes have thereby become worthless and wrong: the deepest feeling he had offered a victim or a hero was misdirected; he may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is nonsensical to praise and blame nature and necessity. Just as he loves a good work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing about itself, just as he regards a plant, so he must regard the actions of men and his own actions. He can admire their strength, beauty, abundance, but he may not find any earned merit in them: chemical processes, and the clash of elements, the agony of the sick man who yearns for recovery, these have no more earned merit than do those inner struggles and crises in which a man is torn back and forth by various motives until he finally decides for the most powerful — as is said (in truth until the most powerful motive decides about us). But all these motives, whatever great names we give them, have grown out of the same roots which are thought to hold the evil poisons. Between good and evil actions there is no difference in type; at most, a difference in degree. Good actions are sublimated evil actions; evil actions are good actions become coarse and stupid. The individual’s only demand, for self-enjoyment (along with the fear of losing it), is satisfied in all circumstances: man may act as he can, that is, as he must, whether in deeds of vanity, revenge, pleasure, usefulness, malice, cunning, or in deeds of sacrifice, pity, knowledge. His powers of judgment determine where a man will let this demand for self-enjoyment take him. In each society, in each individual, a hierarchy of the good is always present, by which man determines his own actions and judges other people’s actions. But this standard is continually in flux; many actions are called evil, and are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence which chose them was very low. Indeed, in a certain sense all actions are stupid even now, for the highest degree of human intelligence which can now be attained will surely be surpassed. And then, in hindsight, all our behavior and judgments will appear as inadequate and rash as the behavior and judgments of backward savage tribes now seem to us inadequate and rash.

To understand all this can cause great pain, but afterwards there is consolation. These pains are birth pangs. The butterfly wants to break through his cocoon; he tears at it, he rends it: then he is blinded and confused by the unknown light, the realm of freedom. Men who are capable of that suffering (how few they will be!) will make the first attempt to see if mankind can transform itself from a moral into a knowing mankind. In those individuals, the sun of a new gospel is casting its first ray onto the highest mountaintop of the soul; the fog is condensing more thickly than ever, and the brightest light and cloudiest dusk lie next to each other. Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence. If pleasure, egoism, vanity are necessary for the generation of moral phenomena and their greatest flower, the sense for true and just knowledge; if error and confusion of imagination were the only means by which mankind could raise itself gradually to this degree of self-illumination and self-redemption — who could scorn those means? Who could be sad when he perceives the goal to which those paths lead? Everything in the sphere of morality has evolved; changeable, fluctuating, everything is fluid, it is true: but everything is also streaming onward — to one goal. Even if the inherited habit of erroneous esteeming, loving, hating continues to govern us, it will grow weaker under the influence of growing knowledge: a new habit, that of understanding, non-loving, nonhating, surveying is gradually being implanted in us on the same ground, and in thousands of years will be powerful enough perhaps to give mankind the strength to produce wise, innocent (conscious of their innocence) men as regularly as it now produces unwise, unfair men, conscious of their guilt — these men are the necessary first stage, but not the opposite of those to come.”

*

“Get on the ships! — Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking–he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him, it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it fashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end then one exclaims: Oh how I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being–all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them!–we must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it–what these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins! What is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered–and more than one! Embark, philosophers!”