Phalanx vs barbarians, phalanx wins. Champion team vs All Stars, champion team wins. Teams are greater than the sum of individual talents.

*

What makes chemistry fascinating is that the quality of the whole changes as elements combine. You can’t account for this by counting atoms.

*

Building a team can be viewed as filling holes with roles, or it can be seen as the highest form of alchemy.

*

Desperation genericizes: everything is crushed into the mold of the need. The desperate are repellent: they just want to fill a hole.

*

UX is the art of helping organizations see people as people, not as hallucinations of the organization’s needs and wishes.

A corollary to: “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

Don’t ask me to justify myself, and I won’t ask you to understand.

Soil, water, air and light, under the direction of the seed, organize themselves into life.

*

“Now we are all flowers.” That’s what leaves say just before they crinkle brown and blow to the ground.

*

I watched the orange sun stretch across the highway to the massed trees, whose leaves stood on end, ecstatic at the touch of light.

*

We set goals and as we meet them, to our surprise we sail past and surpass them. We see that they were there to propel us further. Life works on a need-to-know basis.

“Nature likes to hide itself” – Heraclitus.

*

For humans, artificiality comes naturally, and naturalness is artifice.

People become addicted to the determinacy of mathematical knowledge and empirical knowledge.

Mathematical reasoning converges to one solely possible conclusion. After reasoning arrives at its answer, all other answers can be eliminated by virtue of their nonconformity to the already-known correct answer. Deliberation on mathematical matters is unnecessary.

The empirical also converges to one possibility — one exclusive state of affairs. A well-constructed statement of empirical fact is either true or it is not true. If a statement of fact is ambiguous, it is inadequately formulated.

*

If knowledge were solely mathematical and empirical, there would be no room for disagreement.

However, some knowledge is practical. Nobody will disagree that there are multiple ways to solve a math problem, and multiple approaches to investigate and determine the fact of a matter. Likewise, in all but the most artificial situations there are multiple means to reach the same end.

So, the practical, whether in the mode of taking action or of pursuing understanding, is multiple — even when applied to a single determinate end. To argue that a means to some end is not effective simply because another means is demonstrates a lack of practical experience.

Practical experience points to the fact of practical multiplicity.

*

Beyond the empirical, the mathematical, and the practical (either in action or in pursuit of understanding), the world is also full of meanings, conspicuously or even overwhelming due to their strongly positive or negative valuations, and some so close to neutral they barely register as relevant at all.

And when we become empirically observant or rational or when we take practical action or seek understanding, it is all motivated by meaning. Something strikes us as meaningful and selectively emphasizes particular aspects of reality, without abandoning reality. Meaning drives what is seen as relevant, it directs the inquiry, it sets the objective of reasoning, it suggests methods to be employed, and it reveals where our knowledge seems insufficient.

These meanings are sometimes fleeting, but sometimes they persist for a time. And some of these meanings are purely personal and impossible to speak of, but some are felt to be universal, and are equipped with the means of expression and the expectation of being recognized. Some meanings are so persistent that we are born into them and maybe never even realize they are there, unless they falter or vanish. A person born into world of 24-hour daylight might never even have a word for “day”, because he has never experienced night.

The meanings that we share with others tend tend to endure longer than those we experience alone. The meanings we experience to be out in the concrete world, and reliably associated with particular things, almost as if the meanings were a property of these things, also tend to have more stability than those meanings that lack any particular concrete thing to attach to (or to condense upon), and which perhaps color the entire world at once as a mood.

*

Meaning in search of outwardness, concreteness and persistence — and maybe social recognition, acknowledgment, agreement or sharing — is art.

Also, things that have outlived their meanings — but which out of habit are taken for meaningful, and perhaps no longer even expect to be experienced as meaningful — often displace art, and are of interest to art.

*

It is a prejudice of our time that the best foundation for agreement is the determinate. But is it possible that the determinate is overvalued? Is it possible that it is valued out of habit (inertia of practice) or from a taste that values coercion over dialogue and deliberation? With determinate knowledge, one person can compel another with arguments. With indeterminate knowledge, both parties must come to a common understanding and then to an agreement, all within the limits of reason.

When we look at an object illuminated by light, in one sense we see the object and in another sense we see light.

If there is no light we are blind to the object. If we turn away from the object and stare directly into the light we are blinded.

From Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy:

Euripides’ basic intention now becomes as clear as day to us: it is to eliminate from tragedy the primitive and pervasive Dionysian element, and to rebuild the drama on a foundation of non-Dionysian art, custom and philosophy.

Euripides himself, towards the end of his life, propounded the question of the value and significance of this tendency to his contemporaries in a myth. Has the Dionysian spirit any right at all to exist? Should it not, rather, be brutally uprooted from the Hellenic soil? Yes, it should, the poet tells us, if only it were possible, but the god Dionysus is too powerful: even the most intelligent opponent, like Pentheus in the “Bacchae,” is unexpectedly enchanted by him, and in his enchantment runs headlong to destruction. The opinion of the two old men in the play — Cadmus and Tiresias — seems to echo the opinion of the aged poet himself: that the cleverest individual cannot by his reasoning overturn an ancient popular tradition like the worship of Dionysus, and that it is the proper part of diplomacy in the face of miraculous powers to make at least a prudent show of sympathy; that it is even possible that the god may still take exception to such tepid interest and — as happened in the case of Cadmus — turn the diplomat into a dragon. We are told this by a poet who all his life had resisted Dionysus heroically, only to end his career with a glorification of his opponent and with suicide — like a man who throws himself from a tower in order to put an end to the unbearable sensation of vertigo. The Bacchae acknowledges the failure of Euripides’ dramatic intentions when, in fact, these had already succeeded: Dionysus had already been driven from the tragic stage by a daemonic power speaking through Euripides. For in a certain sense Euripides was but a mask, while the divinity which spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo but a brand new daemon called Socrates. Thenceforward the real antagonism was to be between Dionysian spirit and the Socratic, and tragedy was to perish in the conflict.

…

What, under the most auspicious conditions, could Euripides have hoped to effect in founding his tragedy on purely un-Dionysian elements? Once it was no longer begotten by music, in the mysterious Dionysian twilight, what form could drama conceivably take? Only that of the dramatized epic, an Apollinian form which precluded tragic effect. … The poet who writes dramatized narrative can no more become one with his images than can the epic rhapsodist. He too represents serene, wide-eyed contemplation gazing upon its images. The actor in such dramatized epic remains essentially a rhapsodist; the consecration of dream lies upon all his actions and prevents him from ever becoming in the full sense an actor.

But what relationship can be said to obtain between such an ideal Apollinian drama and the plays of Euripides? The same as obtains between the early solemn rhapsodist and that more recent variety described in Plato’s “Ion”: “When I say something sad my eyes fill with tears; if, however, what I say is terrible and ghastly, then my hair stands on end and my heart beats loudly.” Here there is no longer any trace of epic self forgetfulness, of the true rhapsodist’s cool detachment, who at the highest pitch of action, and especially then, becomes wholly illusion and delight in illusion. Euripides is the actor of the beating heart, with hair standing on end. He lays his dramatic plan as Socratic thinker and carries it out as passionate actor. So it happens that the Euripidean drama is at the same time cool and fiery, able alike to freeze and consume us. It cannot possibly achieve the Apollinian effects of the epic, while on the other hand it has severed all connection with the Dionysian mode; so that in order to have any impact at all it must seek out novel stimulants which are to be found neither in the Apollinian nor in the Dionysian realm. Those stimulants are, on the one hand, cold paradoxical ideas put in the place of Apollinian contemplation, and on the other fiery emotions put in the place of Dionysian transports. These last are splendidly realistic counterfeits, but neither ideas nor affects are infused with the spirit of true art.

Having now recognized that Euripides failed in founding the drama solely on Apollinian elements and that, instead, his un-Dionysian tendency led him towards inartistic naturalism, we are ready to deal with the phenomenon of aesthetic Socratism. Its supreme law may be stated as follows: “Whatever is to be beautiful must also be sensible” — a parallel to the Socratic notion that “knowledge alone makes men virtuous.” Armed with this canon, Euripides examined every aspect of drama — diction, character, dramatic structure, choral music — and made them fit his specifications. What in Euripidean, as compared with Sophoclean tragedy, has been so frequently censured as poetic lack and retrogression is actually the straight result of the poet’s incisive critical gifts, his audacious personality. The Euripidean prologue may seen to illustrate the efficacy of that rationalistic method. Nothing could be more at odds with our dramaturgic notions than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. To have a character appear at the beginning of the play, tell us who he is, what preceded the action, what has happened so far, even what is about to happen in the course of the play — a modern writer for the theater would reject all this as a wanton and unpardonable dismissal of the element of suspense. Now that everyone knows what is going to happen, who will wait to see it happen? Especially since, in this case, the relation is by no means that of a prophetic dream to a later event. But Euripides reasoned quite otherwise. According to him, the effect of tragedy never resided in epic suspense, in a teasing uncertainty as to what was going to happen next. It resided, rather, in those great scenes of lyrical rhetoric in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonist reached heights of eloquence. Everything portended pathos, not action. Whatever did not portend pathos was seen as objectionable. The greatest obstacle to the spectator’s most intimate participation in those scenes would be any missing link in the antecedent action: so long as the spectator had to conjecture what this or that figure represented, from whence arose this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, he could not fully participate in the doings and sufferings of the protagonists, feel with them and fear with them. The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles had used the subtlest devices to furnish the spectator in the early scenes, and as if by chance, with all the necessary information. They had shown an admirable skill in disguising the necessary structural features and making them seem accidental. All the same, Euripides thought he noticed that during those early scenes the spectators were in a peculiar state of unrest — so concerned with figuring out the antecedents of the story that the beauty and pathos of the exposition were lost on them. For this reason he introduced a prologue even before the exposition, and put it into the mouth of a speaker who would command absolute trust… Between the epic prologue and epilogue stretched the dramatic-lyrical present, the actual “drama.”

As a poet, then, Euripides was principally concerned with rendering his conscious perceptions, and it is this which gives him his position of importance in the history of Greek art.

With regard to his poetic procedure, which was both critical and creative, he must often have felt that he was applying to drama the opening words of Anaxagoras’ treatise: “In the beginning all things were mixed together; then reason came and introduced order.” And even as Anaxagoras, with his concept of “Nous,” [“mind,” “reason”] seems like the first sober philosopher in a company of drunkards, so Euripides may have appeared to himself as the first rational maker of tragedy. Everything was mixed together in a chaotic stew so long as Nous, the sole principle of universal order, remained excluded from the creative act. That’s how Euripides must have thought about it; that’s how he, the first “sober” poet must have passed sentence on the “drunken” poets. Euripides would never have endorsed Sophocles’ statement about Aeschylus — that this poet was doing the right thing, but unconsciously; instead he would have claimed that  Aeschylus, because he created unconsciously, did what was wrong. Even the divine Plato speaks of the creative power of the poet for the most part ironically and as being on a level with the gifts of the soothsayer and interpreter of dreams, since according to the traditional conception the poet is unable to write until reason and conscious control have deserted him. Euripides set out, as Plato was to do, to show the world the opposite of the “irrational” poet; his aesthetic axiom, “whatever is to be beautiful must be conscious” is strictly parallel to the Socratic “whatever is to be good must be conscious.” We can hardly go wrong then in calling Euripides the poet of aesthetic Socratism. But Socrates was precisely that other spectator, incapable of understanding the older tragedy and therefore scorning it, and it was in his company that Euripides dared to usher in a new era of poetic activity. If the old tragedy was wrecked’ aesthetic Socratism is to blame, and to the extent that the target of the innovators was the Dionysian principle of the older art we may call Socrates the god’s chief opponent, the new Orpheus who, though destined to be torn to pieces by the maenads of Athenian judgment, succeeded in putting the overmastering god to flight. The latter, as before, when he fled from Lycurgus, king of the Edoni, took refuge in the depths of the sea; that is to say, in the flood of a mystery cult that was soon to encompass the world.

Wikipedia’s entry on Lycurgus of Thrace:

Lycurgus (also Lykurgos, Lykourgos) was a king of the Edoni in Thrace, and the son of Dryas, the “oak” (Iliad vi). He banned the cult of Dionysus. When Lycurgus heard that Dionysus was in his kingdom, he imprisoned Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads. Dionysus fled, taking refuge with Thetis the sea nymph. Dionysus then sent a drought to Thrace.

Going insane, Lycurgus mistook his son for a mature trunk of ivy, which is holy to Dionysus, and killed him, pruning away his nose and ears, fingers and toes. Dionysus decreed that the land would stay dry and barren as long as Lycurgus was left unpunished for his injustice, so his people had him dismembered by wild horses. With Lycurgus dead, Dionysus lifted the curse.

In some versions the story of Lycurgus and his punishment by Dionysus is placed in Arabia rather than in Thrace. The tragedian Aeschylus, in a lost play, depicted Lycurgus as a beer-drinker and hence a natural opponent of the wine god: Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 447c (Dalby 2005, pp. 65-71, 153). There is a further reference to Lycurgus in Sophocles’ Antigone in the Chorus’ ode after Antigone is taken away (960 in the Greek Text).

In Homer’s Iliad, an older source than Aeschylus, Dryas is not the son of Lycurgus, but the father, and Lycurgus’ punishment for his disrespect towards the gods, particularly Dionysus, is blindness inflicted by Zeus followed not long after by death (Iliad Book 6.130-140).

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A passage from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, “What German’s Lack”:

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown–how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation–and drink beer? … The alcoholism of young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness–without spirit one can still be a great scholar–but in every other respect it remains a problem.– Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit! Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a degeneration–the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and “new faith” … It was not for nothing that he had made his vow to the “fair brunette” — in verse–loyalty unto death …

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Some of the most striking examples of intellectual stuntedness I see among even the quickest and cleverest businessmen:

• An extreme aversion to unpredictability coupled with an equally extreme overvaluation of predictability.
• A tendency toward reductionism. Wholes are constituted of parts. Parts are the fundamental elements. Gestalt reactions are often mistrusted and picked apart into cognizable bits.
• Equating objectivity with reality. What can be observed dispassionately, analyzed and measured is automatically accorded more validity than that which is experienced as real yet defies measurement. Until a reality is made measurable and given the appearance of objectivity, they are treated as “subjective” nonrealities, powerless imaginings.
• An incapacity to conceive of brand as anything other than a sentimental complement to the objective rationality of business strategy. And brand is also confused with the attempts to describe, define or systematize the brand. The notion that a brand can exist in a manner that is only reflected in objectivity sounds really vague and suspicious, or worse, purely subjective.
• A failure to imagine the possibility things can be perceived differently than how they appear at first glance. Or, rather, at an incredulous first glance, followed by a completely credulous second glance. First glances are always refuted by subsequent analysis. We may love the gestalt something at first as a gestalt and even feel repelled by the idea of scrutinizing it, but the clever, thorough and detail-attentive businessman resists such subjective temptations. He vivisects the ideas and demands that each organ stand alone and defend itself against every conceivable attack. Sure enough, this test always reveals fatal weaknesses. Each organ is then re-crafted out of tougher materials, reassembled, oiled and cranked into stiff, unstoppable motion.

Am I being unfair?

*

Too many people confuse maturity with disillusionment. The potential our youthful selves felt, which we expected to just happen, doesn’t just happen. To conclude from this that the potential was illusory — that because it did not actualize under its own mysterious forces, that the potential never really existed — is a premature and cursory interpretation.

I have never understood why people put fate or destiny or the will of God at a distance from themselves, as if the thesis “it will happen solely through my own will” can only be met with an antithetical “it will happen entirely apart from my will.” What about “it will happen only if people participate in something greater than any single person to bring it about”? Certainly destiny is not confined to the human will, but equally certainly it involves human wills. Maybe when something is destined to happen, that means people were destined to actively work to bring it about.

All dark moods have an inside and an outside. When we are in them different things feel persuasive and different things feel empty. When we come out of them everything looks different.

It isn’t a matter of disagreement, though. The dark moods make empirically false claims.

Dark moods lie to us. If we held dark moods accountable for its claims, they’d lose all credibility.

Here’s a technique:

Whenever you manage to overcome a dark mood, recall the claims it made and carefully note each of its lies.

It might have said: “Your past happiness was a farce. I’m smarter, and I can tell you ‘Happiness is nothing.’ You were never happy and you will never be happy again.”

Or: “This minor symptom you have indicates a debilitating and fatal illness.”

Or: “You will never get through this work and produce anything good. You can try, but you will fail.”

Or any number of heavy, demoralizing things. Everyone has different dark moods and different dark claims.

When your better self emerges from darkness, it will be tempted to just enjoy the sunshine of not feeling like shit. Enjoy the better mood, but first make yourself take some notes, mentally or on paper. Observe what you believed and how it seemed to you at the time, and contrast it with what turned out to be the truth. Then figure what the best response to the situation would have been. Leave instructions to your future self: “In case of a dark mood, break glass.”

Then, next time you are gripped by a dark mood and persuaded by it you can go back and look at your notes and your instructions to yourself.

The notes will not feel true, and the instructions will feel pointless, but that does not matter. You can’t go by feel in times like those.

You have to go on faith. If you obey your better self you will retrieve yourself from the darkness.

This is very boring advice, but boringness happens to be the earmark of practical goodness.

(I made a picture of my boring instructions to myself.)

“Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”

*

If you are tempted to make a sacrifice, ask yourself if the sacrifice is greater than the sacrificed.

Much that demands sacrifices is unworthy of sacrifice, and consumes value at a net loss to the whole.

When we suffer from a situation — and by “from”, I mean the suffering literally comes from the situation by way of oneself — we lose perspective and our concern constricts around the locus of pain, the self.

We forget that the suffering self is only a topical symptom of a situation.

If we escape the situation, the pain goes away. We might leave the situation to rot. Or we escape to a comfortable perch inside the situation but outside participation in the pain and comfortably contribute to advance the degradation of the whole.

*

A hand injects morphine into a painful gangrenous point on a leg and revels in its distance and comfort. And from that same distant comfort it admires its own benevolence. Perhaps the hand would be more urgent and thoughtful — and less offensive to the leg — if it understood “self” a little less stupidly? If it recognized its own substantial involvement in the pain? If it realized itself and the afflicted leg were joined at the torso and share a heart? If it were less inclined to indulge in pity?

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A person can be comfortable, or a person can be consequential, or a person can be neither.

What most of us want is that impossible fourth option, being comfortable and consequential. The expectation of comfortable consequentiality seduces us to having neither.

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A mirror is a machine which produces artificial space. The most artificial and most highly valued space it produces is that which stands between I and me.

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An Aesop’s fable:

A dog seized some meat from the butcher shop and ran away with it until he came to a river. When the dog was crossing the river, he saw the reflection of the meat in the water, and it seemed much larger than the meat he was carrying. He dropped his own piece of meat in order to try to snatch at the reflection. When the reflection disappeared, the dog went to grab the meat he had dropped but he was not able to find it anywhere, since a passing raven had immediately snatched the meat and gobbled it up. The dog lamented his sorry condition and said, ‘Woe is me! I foolishly abandoned what I had in order to grab at a phantom, and thus I ended up losing both that phantom and what I had to begin with.’

*

At first glance, altruism seems beautiful and good.

At second glance, altruism  becomes nonsensical.

But on even closer inspection, altruism turns out to be vile.

We cannot help but operate out of pure self-interest.

The real question is the depth and breadth of “your self”.

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A Christ incapable of spending a hellish night alone in Gethsemane and knowing God-forsakenness on the cross would not be able to speak from your heart. He would have to speak from beyond, like his Father.

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Next time you notice that a new mood has overcome you while interacting with someone, or when you notice that you converse easily with one person and are shut down by another, try a different interpretive mode. Experiment with saying: “I am now experiencing participation in a different, larger self which transcends I, but which involves I, and is felt by I as if it were I.”

‘Science’ as prejudice. — It follows from the laws that govern rank-ordering that scholars, insofar as they belong to the intellectual middle class, are not even allowed to catch sight of the truly great problems and question marks; moreover, their courage and eyes simply don’t reach that far — and above all, the need that makes them scholars, their inner expectations and wish that things might be such and such, their fear and hope, too soon find rest and satisfaction. What makes, for instance, the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer rave in his own way and makes him draw a line of hope, a horizon which defines what is desirable; that definitive reconciliation of ‘egoism and altruism’ about which he spins fables — this almost nauseates the likes of us: a human race that adopts as its ultimate perspective such a Spencerian perspective would strike us as deserving of contempt, of annihilation! But that he had to view as his highest hope what to others counts and should count only as a disgusting possibility is a question mark that Spencer would have been unable to foresee. So, too, it is with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content: the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thought, in human valuations — a ‘world of truth’ that can be grasped entirely with the help of our four-cornered little human reason — What? Do we really want to demote existence in this way to an exercise in arithmetic and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one shouldn’t want to strip it of its ambiguous character: that, gentlemen, is what good taste demands — above all, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon! That the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which you have a right; one by which one can do research and go on scientifically in your sense of the term (you really mean mechanistically?) — one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else — that is a crudity and naivety, assuming it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not be quite probable, conversely, that precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence — what is most apparent; its skin and its sensualization — would be grasped first and might even be the only thing that let itself be grasped? Thus, a ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might still be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world, i.e. one of those most lacking in significance. This to the ear and conscience of Mr. Mechanic, who nowadays likes to pass as a philosopher and insists that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and final laws on which existence may be built, as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas — how absurd such a ‘scientific’ evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!

Cognition is knowledge that grasps the known. Wisdom is knowledge knows how we are grasped.

Cognition stands beside, observing the convex being that constitutes the world. Wisdom stands inside, participating in the concave being that comprises the world.

Cognition masters objects. Wisdom pursues subjects.

*

The best being stands upon a broad ground of cognition, under a high dome of wisdom.

*

Renee Guenon, from the Great Triad:

‘Heaven covers, Earth supports’; so runs the traditional formula which defines with great conciseness the roles of these two complementary principles, and which symbolically defines their positions, respectively higher and lower, in relation to the ‘ten thousand beings’, that is, to the totality of universal manifestation. Thus are indicated, on one hand, the ‘non-acting’ character of the activity of Heaven or Purusha, and on the other hand the passivity of Earth or Prakriti, which is properly a ‘ground’, or ‘support’ of manifestation, and consequently also a plane of resistance and arrest for the celestial forces or influences acting in a descending direction.

What does concrete reality mean?

Concrete: con– ‘together’ + crescere ‘grow.’

*

The seeming solidity of reality rests on the concretization of experience.

*

The noumena of experience (noumenon: Greek, literally ‘(something) conceived,’ from noien ‘conceive, apprehend.’) — the idea of entities being in themselves apart from what they are to us — is what metaphysics attempts to understand. There exist many varieties of metaphysics, ranging from the crudest — positive objectification of metaphysical entities that stand in parallel existence to the mundane physical world (“objects” lacking normal properties of objects such as materiality) — to negative skepticism (reveling in the certainty that one can always and easily free oneself from the bonds of any unpleasant determinate knowledge,), to more sophisticated relational approaches.

Metaphysics is based on the experience of exophany. Phenomena (Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view,’ based on phainein ‘to show’) are experienced as showing us something (noumena) beyond what appears. In the end, what we “have” is what appears and the feeling of exophany.

We cannot doubt exophany. As Charles Peirce said: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

And here’s something else that’s important. Love is essentially exophanic. Love always draws us beyond or beneath what is experienced, beyond experience. And love is what makes us prefer life to death. What would make us want to reject exophany in general, or deny some particular dimension or pole of it?

The distinction of noumena from phenomena points to another concept: the Transcendent. There is also that which might one day manifest to us phenomenally but has not, and there is also that which never will.

Only the tiniest bit of the Transcendent concerns us, but that doesn’t matter. There is no practical difference to us between the Transcendent and noumena and exophany. To us it is all one, and in itself it is all one.

Our job is to make things concrete with as little exclusion or reduction as possible, and this means we must occasionally get a little abstract. We have quite a few noumenal human beings around us who are still invalidated as enemies who still have something to show us around whom we must extend our community with whom we can grow together in concrete life.

Some people, when they need a concept that represents that which transcends the individual, reach for objectivity.

Unfortunately the popularization of science has done to the word “objectivity” what the popularization of Christianity did to the word “love”. Both idea have had their elusive precision rolled through the filth of language and life for so long that they have become dung-balls of emotional and conceptual associations. In Jung’s language they’ve become “concrete”. (Concrete: con– ‘together’ + crescere ‘grow.’)

Objectivity transcends the individual when, through dialogue, it binds people together in its pursuit of agreement on what is.

When objectivity becomes simply the obvious “what is” that is comprehended when one glances at stuff, it not only does not transcend the individual, it constricts and isolates the individual.

Only when science is conceived as a method for pursuing one particular kind of knowledge does it produce something transcendent. When science degrades into a reductionistic metaphysic — materialism — it produces vulgarity, or rather, it stops resisting vulgarity.

When love becomes the emotion that overtakes people when they become attracted to some other, it not only fails to transcend the other, it causes individuals to fixate not on the other’s otherness, but on what the other arouses within the individual.

Only when love is conceived as the practice of pursuing the sharing of being does it produce something transcendent. When love degrades into stimulation of one’s own roiling emotions through pursuit of interchangeable others, one’s involvements become more and more self-involved.

There is an infinite number of ways to inhabit the world. Each is true as far as it goes, and none are true enough for long.

We speak with people.

We use objects.

*

To the degree we are inclined to speak with an object, we personify it.

To the degree we are inclined to use people, we objectify them.

*

When we speak with a person we enter into and participate in relationship. We are immersed, we effect change, we are changed, and we are woven together.

When we use an object we do something to it or with it. We stand apart and effect change without being changed, and we remain independent.

*

When we command a subordinate this is less like speaking with a person than it is like using an object.

When we craft with a tool this is less like using an object than it is like speaking with a person.

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One’s taste in leadership reveals one’s relationship with people and objects.

One’s taste in work reveals one’s relationship with people and objects.

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Power means that you can insist that others speak with you as a person. You are to be reckoned with.

Power means that you can relate to people as objects. Your wish is their command.

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One reveals one’s relationship with people and objects through choice of words.

When people insist on being related to as people they have often insisted on the prohibition of their old object-status names. Out of respect of the person’s personhood, the object-status names are abandoned.

The prohibited object-status names are so objectionable I won’t even risk listing them.

(If you want to learn more about objectionable object-status names see Human Resources.)

From Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought:

The persimmon is a strange fruit. If you eat it before it is fully ripe, it tastes just awful. Its astringency makes your mouth pucker up. Actually, you can’t eat it unripe; if you tried, you would just have to spit it out and throw the whole thing away. Buddhist practice is like this too: if you don’t let it really ripen, it cannot nourish your life. That is why I hope that people will begin to practice and then continue until their practice is really ripe.

The persimmon has another characteristic that is very interesting, but to understand it, you have to know something about the Oriental persimmon. There are two types of persimmon trees, the sweet persimmon — amagaki in Japanese-and the bitter, mouth-puckering persimmon, called shibugaki. When you plant seeds from a sweet persimmon tree, all the saplings come up as astringent persimmon trees. Now, if I said that if you planted seeds from a sweet persimmon, all the saplings would become sweet persimmon trees, anyone could understand, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Without exception, all the saplings planted from sweet persimmon seeds are bitter. If you want to grow a sweet persimmon tree, what do you do? Well, first you have to cut a branch from a sweet persimmon tree, and then you graft it onto an astringent persimmon trunk. In time, the branch will bear sweet fruit.

I used to wonder how that first sweet persimmon tree came about. If the saplings from the seeds from a sweet persimmon all come up astringent, where did that first sweet persimmon come from? One day I had the opportunity to ask a botanist who specializes in fruit trees, and he told me this: First of all, the Oriental persimmon is an indigenous Japanese fruit; it goes back thousands of years. It takes many years to grow a sweet persimmon: even the fruit of a tree forty or fifty years old will be astringent. That means we’re talking about a tree that’s at least one hundred years old. Around that time, the first sweet branches on an astringent tree begin to ripen. Those branches are then cut off the tree and are grafted onto a younger astringent one. What took over one hundred years to grow on one tree is then transferred to another one to continue there.

In a way, Buddhism and our own lives are just like that. If you leave humanity as it is, it has an astringent quality no matter what country or what part of the world you look at. It just so happened, however, that several thousand years ago in India, in the culture of that day, a sweet persimmon was born; that was Buddhism. Or, more precisely, it was Shakyamuni Buddha who was born — like a branch on an astringent persimmon tree that after many, many years had finally borne sweet fruit. After a time, a branch was cut off that Indian tree and grafted onto the astringent rootstock that was the Chinese people of those days. From there, a branch bearing sweet fruit was brought to Japan and planted in that barbaric country. More recently, branches of those Asian trees have been grafted onto trees native to American soil.

Now, one thing about big old trees is that they wither easily. For the most part, there is not much Buddhism left in Asia today, except for Southeast Asia and some places in Central Asia, like Tibet. Japan is one of the few places you can find it, as withered and dried up as it may be. Now the sweet persimmon is being nurtured in America, and it needs to be tended and cultivated so it can flower and ripen here. It doesn’t happen without care and attention.

What I am saying also applies to your individual life. I would like for as many of you as possible to become sweet persimmon branches bearing the sweet fruit of a compassionate life, finding a true way to live as you settle on your astringent roots that are, after all, your own life, and your family, coworkers, and society.

I have had only one concern in my life: helping to discover and mark a true way of life for humanity. That is why I became a monk. Over the years I’ve never wished to become famous by the usual standards of fame. The only thing that matters to me is just to be an example of a true way of life that is possible for anyone anywhere in the world.