Category Archives: Philosophy

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

“What is Design?” chapbook

Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.

Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.

Here is my aphorism list so far:

  • “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
  • “Design is everything. Everything is design.” (Paul Rand)
  • “Design should be invisible.” (Beatrice Warde)
  • “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “You can’t decide the way forward. You have to design the way forward.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “Compete to be unique, not the best” (Joan Magretta, channeling Michael Porter)
  • “Usefulness, usability, and desirability: A useful design is one that people need and will use. A usable design is one they can either use immediately or learn to use readily. A desirable design is one they want.” (Liz Sanders)
  • “We think with our hands.” (Tim Brown)
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Anonymous)
  • “Behind a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” (John LeCarre)
  • “Conflict divides the world into four halves.” (Anomalogue)
  • “Craft is material dialogue.” (Anomalogue)
  • “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” (John Dewey)
  • “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” (Bertrand Russell)
  • “Start anywhere.” (John Cage)
  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.” (Anonymous)
  • “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Carl von Clausewitz)
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
  • “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Willfred Sellars)
  • “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “What has a name is real.” (Basque saying)
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” (Ernest Hemingway)
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
  • “The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.” (James Clear)
  • “It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” (Adlai Stevenson)

I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.

Ward Farnsworth on aporias

Philosophy

Ward Farnsworth‘s uncanny skill at putting the most difficult things in simple and clear words just amazes me.

I can’t even envy him. The man is in a whole different league, as thinker or writer, but obviously more than that.

I am especially loving his chapter on aporias in Socratic Method. It builds on the topic of ignorance and something he calls “double ignorance” from the chapter before:

…Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general. People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

Aporia is what happens when we apprehend our own double-ignorance.

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism. But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-EE-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind — a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question. Your feet are trying to find something solid to stand on and can’t.

Aporia can be a sign that its holder is departing a state of compound ignorance. You thought you knew something, but it turns out that you don’t understand it; you were ignorant of your ignorance, and now it’s clear. … People aren’t alarmed when they are questioned and know the answer. They aren’t alarmed when they know that they don’t know the answer. They are alarmed when they thought they knew and then realize that they don’t.

…double ignorance is, for Socrates, a kind of sleep through which everyone walks to some extent. Then you walk into a wall. The wall is aporia. The awakening is a rude one, but deeply valuable. The sensation of ignorance — of realizing that you know less than you had thought — is unpleasant, at least at first. It is experienced as loss by the ego, which has a built-in good opinion of its own wisdom. But Socratic study helps make that discovery feel more welcome. One comes to see that such a discovery isn’t really the loss of wisdom. It’s the arrival of it.

Then Farnsworth begins listing practical benefits of aporia:

…Aporia may be seen as a necessary stage before real learning can happen. You realize that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand them. Now you have a sense of something missing. Your confidence in your knowledge is gone. It needed to go to make room for something better.

…Aporia in this sense can also cleanse you of obnoxious qualities. Recall the discussion of the Theatetus … Theatetus had given birth to an idea that was pronounced stillborn. Socrates encourages him to keep trying, but says that Theatetus will be better off even if his ideas never improve. Aporia will have made him easier to put up with. Such humility may not seem a very exciting reward at first. But then think about how often people are too sure of themselves, and feel smart when they’re not, and how unendurable they are, and how dangerous, and how likely we are to be just as insufferable to others for the same reasons, and how many problems arise from nothing but this. Other people, it seems clear, would be better off if they realized how little they know, and with a suspicion that in the long run they show themselves to be fools in most of what they say. So would we all. Some shock therapy is a small price to pay for relief from those curses. — Aporia is a form of it.

…Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn. It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good-now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Then things get (at least for me) even more interesting…

We’ve just talked as though there are right answers to the questions under pursuit, and that aporia might inspire a harder search for them. But suppose you conclude, after many rounds of all this, that the answers will never be found. It still wouldn’t be time to give up. On a Socratic view it’s never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can’t possess the truth, you can get closer to it. Discourse that improves understanding becomes the valuable thing, but it works best if you forget that and act as though you’re in it to capture the truth.

And they start pressing into mystical regions. It becomes more apparent how Plotinus really was a neo-Platonist:

A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths — that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable. Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.

This way of looking at aporia might be inferred from the approach of the early dialogues. Why is the truth always sought and never discovered? Perhaps because it can’t be; that is the discovery. This idea finds some support in Plato’s Seventh Letter… “This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries — that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”

Now I will do a mic drop for Farnsworth by quoting Nietzsche:

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

This book exemplifies wisdom concealed in simplicity.

I’m halfway tempted to shelve my Farnsworth collection alongside my Marty Neumeier books.

Feeling better

Autobiography, Philosophy

The philosopher’s stone turns lead into gold.

You cannot spend a lead coin. You can’t even give it away.

So lead coins accumulate until they crush the life out of you.

Without my philosopher’s stone, my salary would be the death of me.

Job description

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

I do not aspire to be an expert, even in fields of expertise of my own invention.

If you need expertise, go find an expert.

But if no expertise exists to address what ails you, I’m here for that.

I’ll approach it as a philosophy design problem of the form “Here I don’t know my way about,” with the aim of reaching a common understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. I’ll design you a little localized philosophy that enables you and your collaborators to define and share a problem so it can be solved.

It will be messy and inefficient and unpredictable. But it will be interesting, if you can handle it.

It’s practical “beginner’s mind” without all the bullshit westernized Zen, with all its blissed out peace and escapism.

Etiquette and depth of faith

Autobiography, Philosophy

Life has taught me that some people will like me and others will not.

I don’t need to believe people who dislike or disrespect me are bad people. It just means I am probably not supposed to socialize with them, which includes working too closely with them. I’m sure that given the right setting, most of them are somewhere in the range of okay to awesome. They’re just not for me, and I’m not for them.

Others will like me right away — at first, as long as we do not exceed a certain depth — but past that point, they will like me even less than people who instantly dislike me. By “others” I mean everyone.

Of course, if my etiquette were better, fewer people would dislike me immediately. But that would require focusing on other things that I consider far more important than universal likability. In fact, it would require betraying those other things, since likability is something between real or feigned commonality of faith, and etiquette is the art of hiding difference. I’m out to differentiate, and deep disagreeability is the best means to that end.

One of my more pessimistic beliefs is that past a certain depth, we all diverge in faith. Deep down, we are all un-alike and perplexing to one another, and need to suppress this essential difference in favor of commonality. If you automatically drive to the maximum depth with every friend, you will be a friend-losing machine. I am understanding that my depths are just for me. Nobody’s going down there with me. Not only is that reasonable; it is good. I’m not going down into their depths with them either! Fair is fair.

(Oh, you’re different? You respect debate and difference of opinion? Debate and opinions are shallow. Perhaps limiting discussion to depths that debate can resolve is a weird sort of etiquette. Perhaps someday some Francis Fukuyama type of pop political theorist will write a book that casts liberalism as some sort of etiquette of the public sphere. See, this is the kind of rude shit I try to keep to myself, except here on my perverse public diary, this anomablogue. Abandon hope all ye who enter here and eavesdrop on my private thoughts.)

If you have talents in etiquette, that is, social grace, you can reveal more of yourself without irritating or offending others, but I am untalented in that area.

For now, my primary use of etiquette is keeping the few friendships I value.

Autobio DNA

Autobiography, Philosophy

In high school geometry I would never memorize proofs beyond the fundamental axioms. I found it easier just to re-prove them. It took me longer to finish tests, but my teacher let me work through the lunch break.

And this has been my life ever since, for better and for so much worse.

On youthful omniscience

Philosophy

Nietzsche: “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.”

I would add: “And he who thinks badly knows everything.”

Ideally, youthful hubris gradually matures as it is tempered  by repeated surprise.

By surprising others and being surprised by them, hubris gives way to a capacity and inclination for mutual respect.

The prerequisite for this tempering is integrity. The personality cannot be hard to the point of brittleness so that it shatters under the impact of shock, but it must be firm enough that it can hold a shape, however much its form develops. But it cannot be soft to the point of formless liquid that experiences ripple and slosh through it, leaving no enduring change. The ideal mean is probably not the halfway point between unyielding and unresisting, but more in the vicinity of 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unyielding.

An excessive appetite for domination or submission — often reflected in preference for authoritarianism tends to retard development of mutual respect. But so does an excessive aversion to all bonds of obligation, which makes mutual respect unnecessary and encourages social alienation, at a terrible cost to the human soul.

Liberalism is operationalized mutual respect. But authoritarians and alienated anarchist punks know nothing of this — while believing they are wise to it.

No, what really is metaphysics?

Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphysics is the transcendent remainder of one’s own ontology. It is the surplus oblivion around what each of us means when saying and meaning “everything”. It is the radical surprise we anticipate when we attempt to expect the unexpected or to account for unknown unknowns. Nothing could be more personal than one’s own metaphysics.

Token versus symbol

Philosophy

The word symbol comes from the Greek word symbolon. In ancient Greece, a bit of pottery or other object would be broken into two pieces and kept by different people, to be used as a primitive form of authentication. Producing the other half of the symbolon was proof of identity or authenticity.

It is a little like those popular pendants tween girls buy shortly before getting in a fight and becoming enemies.

Similarly, a symbol can be seen as half of a meaning, completed by a reality the symbol is meant to indicate.

A symbol is completed by an intuition outside of language.

A token, on the other hand, is a verbal game piece whose meaning is determined by a language game. A token refers only to other tokens or combinations of tokens inside its language game.

The more our understandings are constructed from tokens, and the less they contact reality symbolically, the more abstract and unnatural these understandings feel and the more truth and reality come apart.

A person whose language is mostly tokens is in an alienated state I call wordworld.

Pluricentrism, polycentrism

Philosophy

Pluricentrism is the principle that the universe has — or more radically, is — myriad first-person agential centers.

Polycentrism is the principle that these agential centers interacting with one another, produce systems with agency of their own.

Pluricentric Maxim

Philosophy

Two quotes from my last post deserve to be separately framed:

Sarcasm is what we do when another neglects their ironic duty, and we must do it for them.

And

The Pluricentric Maxim — Always remember: “I am not the only center of the universe.”

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Conscience warfare

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.

That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.

On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”

This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.

But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.

My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.

Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.

And all this is only for private thought.

I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.

My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.

My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.

Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.

For many “the personal is political”.

But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.

The personal should not be political.

And the political should not be personal.

Conflating them destroys both.

And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.

I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.

I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.

I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.

“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”

Ethics, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Each time I see a young people’s eyes light up at the mention of the word “ethics” — and, oh, how they do light up! — I remember this Nietzsche passage:

So, how many people know how to observe? And of these few, how many to observe themselves? ‘Everyone is farthest from himself — every person who is expert at scrutinizing the inner life of others knows this to his own chagrin; and the saying, ‘Know thyself’, addressed to human beings by a god, is near to malicious. That self-observation is in such a bad state, however, is most clearly confirmed by the way in which nearly everyone speaks of the nature of a moral act — that quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! People seem to be wanting to say to you, “But my dear fellow, that is precisely my subject! You are directing your question to the person who is competent to answer it: there is, as it happens, nothing I am wiser about.”

This is also true of aesthetics and of religious/spiritual/philosophical insight.

Cultivating moral judgment, aesthetic taste or profundity of insight is certainly personally rewarding, but it is a stupid and noxious mistake to expect recognition or acknowledgement for it. Because in each and every one of these subjective fields our appreciation for anyone else’s accomplishments is entirely constrained by what we have accomplished ourselves.

Unless we work at perceiving it, we each are always the apogee of everything that really matters.

Wouldn’t it be a comical paradox if it turned out that the closest a human can come to apotheosis is finally overcoming natural misapotheosis?

Twofold convention

Philosophy

The anti-intellectualism of conventional mystics, and the anti-mysticism of conventional intellectuals: these are a single convention. And we all know with more than our minds that we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven or earth.

Psychedelic meaning

Autobiography, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I don’t know what conventional mystics experience in ecstatic visionary states, but I assume these experiences are related to psychedelic experiences.

In my limited experience, psychedelic experiences were intensely meaningful in ways that are nearly impossible to talk about. Although I did experience vivid visions in that state, I was never terribly fascinated by the visions themselves nor in the question concerning the ontological status of the mysterious noumena. At the time, my strong unexamined inclination was to take them as imaginary, and not to attribute any kind of real existence to them.

I prefer to phenomenologically bracket visions, and approach them phenomenologically. I am most concerned with the significance of the ineffable meaning. I am interested in the genus of this meaning, the question of why this meaning is ineffable, and how we may relate ourselves to it.

Maybe my other conceptual commitments preserve themselves through this attitude and this field of relevance. But my gut tells me that this focus will bear fruit. This doesn’t exactly put me at cross-purposes with traditional mysticism, but it does put me at what could be described as a parallel purpose.