The difference between vice and virtue lies not in original instincts, but what is done with those instincts and where they are taken. 

This includes not only fundamental “Ten Commandment” type virtues, but loftier virtues that build upon them, such as the virtues of liberalism/Christianity, which treat the failure to forgive as deserving of forgiveness. 

I need to get something off my chest: You are right, and were right all along. You tried and tried to tell me, but I would not listen. But I get it now, and I am sorry.

I feel like I owe you an explanation. I am not trying to justify myself. I already told you: I admit I was completely wrong. Not just factually, but morally. And practically, too.

But if you are willing to listen I would like to explain what happened, so you can understand why I was so stubborn prior to finding the the courage to repent.

Without excusing myself, of course, I see it as rooted in the human condition. Every single person on this earth cannot help but believe that he or she has privileged access to the truth. I was no exception.

Of course, there are always open questions and knowledge gaps. And much (even most) of what is known is known tacitly, intuitively, in a way that defies language. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t known. It really did look to me like I knew. I literally could not see how I didn’t know.

But I sure could see how other people didn’t know! That’s part of this semi-tacit comprehensive knowledge we all think we have. We all think we see plainly how those around us who do not or will not know the truth — people who are dumb, misguided, self-interested, complacent, corrupt or just too arrogant to listen — evade the truth by doing everything they can to avoid confronting reality squarely. They disregard real things as imaginary and reify imaginary things and treat them as real. They argue by their own self-serving, distorted or over-complicated logic, if they even bother with logic at all. They rest their whole argument on deeply questionable premises and spurious sources. They behave as if highly subjective and partial criteria are objective and universally binding.

We’ve all had to deal with this kind of nonsense in our lives. But I always thought I was on the right side of these conflicts. On the contrary (and just as you always said!) I was the wrong side. Until I shifted my perspective on it I was utterly unaware of what I was doing. I guess it was because I trusted my own eyes and ears and mind more than the testimony of people whose eyes and ears and minds perceived more clearly, and who knew to trust what truly deserves trust, maybe?

No excuses. I refused to listen.

Anyway, I hope hearing me say it out loud helps you feel better. You were not crazy. You were right. I hope you can accept my apology.

Every single day I have feelings I don’t like having, thoughts I don’t want to have and impulses to betray my own ideals.

On good days I show them parental respect. That is, I hear them out — while refusing to obey their dictates or to accept what they say at face value. I cool them down and offer them alternative ways to look at things.

On less good days I condemn them, pretend they don’t exist, and suppress them.

On bad days they’re me until I apprehend them and restore myself. Later, I can start over again, trying to be who I want to be.

Beliefs founded in the Great Contempt can be appropriated and refounded in the Great Respect.

*

It is easiest to say “This, not that.” There is energy in concentration.

It is better to say “This and that are valid, but I choose this.”

Better yet: “I choose this because…”

Best of all: “I choose this. Why do you choose that?”

They stand at the center of a swarm of twinkling utterances and images; a swarm with a center by virtue of their standing.

They say, “Navigate this night sky of constellations and find me; I am sitting in your chair.”

They say, “From here the stars form a portrait.”

They say, “From here you are home.”

The goal of any elegant conceptualization is to render a problem retroactively obvious. 

The only remnant of nonobviousness that remains is the record of the struggle  to understand without the benefit of the now-obvious concept. Once this struggle terminates with the acquisition of a concept it is impossible to recover an immediate sense of the problem (its problematic essence) because the concept has become intrinsic to the consciousness that remembers the problem. 

When the solution is found, the problem is lost. 

But the loss is normally undetected, because concept insinutes itself into the recollection of the problem, imperceptibly rescuing the mind before it can need rescue. 

What makes this strange insinuation of concept imperceptible is this: concepts are tacit. We confuse the articulate thoughts we have under the guidance of concepts with the concepts themselves, when in fact the articulations are verbal concatenations (to use Adam Miller’s perfect term) that require the guidance of the tacit concept itself to function conceptually. (Michael Polanyi calls this the “tacit coefficient”). If you do not understand what I mean by this, stop now and note: what is missing at this exact moment is the tacit conceptual guidance required to understand the meaning of these words. Without this tacit guidance, the articulation is entirely useless, and will remain so until the proper tacit concept animates it. 

The concept does not need any articulation to function. Once a concept is conceived it lives and operates in the movements of the mind, priducing understandings, and can do this unaided by articulation indefinitely. 

Most of us are not used to thinking of thought in this way. If we cannot articulate a concept we use we are accustomed to attributing that concept to reality itself: it is just self-evidently out there in the world to see. But the concept is in us, and is us, shaping our perceptions, our actions, our thoughless reactions, our dreams — and our memories of the past, even the memories preceding the conception.

*

A concept is unforgettable because it is immemorable. A concept is not remembered, because it is who does the remembering. Just as sight sees without being seen, concepts conceive without being conceived. 

*

A resolved problem can no longer be experienced as problematic. Since the problematic character of a problem is its very essence, a problem is irrecoverable once resolved. 

Obsession is not interest in extreme form.

Obsession is a relation of a mind and its (beseiging) object. Interest is inter-esse: between-being, starting with mind and moving toward being explicity understood as beyond one’s mind. In other words, obsession is strictly immanent and interest is transcendent. I think celebrities understand best the impersonality of a fan’s obsession: next year it will be some other object, with no remnant of last year’s fixation. Genuine interest leads a person to new understandings in pursuit of understanding, and this changes a person in profound and elusive ways. Obsession leaves an obsessive pristinely unaffected by the (non)encounter. Obsession is a hermetically sealed self-protective wall of passion.

The distinction between interest and obsession is analagous to that which separates religion from fundamentalism. It appears to be obsession with God, but it is in fact a mere obsession with one’s own manmade god-object, and its effect is one of isolation from what lives beyond one’s own mind and mind-objects. It is an immanent notion of transcendence, not an active relationship with what can and will defy it (often via transcendence’s #1 favorite agent, that clueless asshole next door).

Here again, the supposed “extreme” is not something gone to far, but rather a fiery counterfeit — a self-protective wall of passion. 

This is why I keep insisting that fundamentalists are not religous extremists at all but antireligious ideology worshipers, or to say it in their own language, idolators. (The idol is a theology, an ideational image of God confused with God.)

Instead of deciding whether or not to accept this view, instead just try it out: Next time you see fundamentalists (and it doesn’t matter what denomination of fundamentalism it is) freaking out about words, definitions, codes, symbols and ideas in their heads, and treating them as more real and important than real human beings living real lives — just try thinking of them as irreligious obsessives who haven’t the slightest clue of what transcendence is, nor, consequently, what religion is, fear transcendence like eternal death, and hate every spark of living evidence that transcendence is real, most of all those who see things differently. 

I love this passage from Bruno Latour’s sole philosophical work, “Irreductions”, which is, like all the best philosophy, also poetry:

…We should not decide a-priori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else.

I am thinking about this passage today in connection with one of my favorite passages from War & Peace:

Anna Pavlovna’s alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty’s health. Anna Pavlovna in dismay detained him with the words: “Do you know the Abbe Morio? He is a most interesting man.”

“Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very interesting but hardly feasible.”

“You think so?” rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe’s plan chimerical.

“We will talk of it later,” said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper, and regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to another group whose center was the abbe.

Myriads kinds of intelligence exist, and each is the center of a different everything. Everyone is an everything. (For all we know, every thing might be an everything.)

And because I am in a sprawling mood today, I will conclude with one of my very favorite Nietzsche passages:

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!

A childhood of training for multiple choice tests, being exhorted to make the right choices, choosing between predetermined programs and paths… It is producing a world on rails, with discrete decision points that carry us to the next switchyard.

We answer as asked, and fail to grasp the freedom between the questions.

*

Design reduced to countable choices and A/B options is unable to be more than usability engineering.

 
No liberal should feel compelled to choose between Czar and Bolshevik. 

A liberal sees Leftism and Rightism as accidental flavors of illiberalism. Tyranny of a few and tyranny of all; tyranny of priests, monarchs, markets and mobs all prevent an individual from realizing individual purpose.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to establish alliances of purpose, of why. It is far easier but morally vacuous to ally over matters of who, what or how. Liberalism is a why that uses economics, political identities, policies, insititutions to serve the purpose of maximizing liberty: the greatest degree of freedom for the greatest number of people. 

A point comes in every new marriage where a person is confronted with an either-or: Who do I love more: the ideal spouse I thought I married? or the real person I married — a person who can surprise and change me?

In other words, do I want to stay stuck in that lustful possessive state youths mistake for love, or will I allow love to do its work on me and allow my marriage to be a genuine living sacrament?

The same is true for for religion.

Like marriage, religion is not your posession, but something greater than you, something in which you participate as a member. It will change you in shocking ways when you are ready to allow it. The change in you will change the world, your marriage, your religion, your beloved. And not only once.

*

Fundamentalism is religious lust which has not yet discovered the sacrament of religious love.

I wish we had a better word than “empathy” to denote intersubjective understanding.

Empathy overemphasizes the emotional dimension and underemphasizes the conceptual and logical dimension that rationalizes feelings, and equips us with the means to think critically about passions without denying their reality.

To have a passion is to obey it. Passions are, by their nature illiberal. This is why failure to distinguish empathy and sympathy is fatal to liberalism: in an attempt to “understand” the other one dives into illiberal passions and drowns in them.

It is not necessary to actually have an emotion to be able to respect it, speak to it and respond to it — and it is not helpful to do so. As the great Geertz said: “Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.” This has become one of the most important sentences I’ve ever read.

Explicit articulation of a tacit understanding in the form of thought requires the construction of a bureaucracy inside one’s soul. Even if the bureaucracy functions smoothly and fades to the background, it still constitutes layers of agency which must be coordinated to execute a thought. Some problem require explicit articulation, but whatever doesn’t require it might benefit from being spared the red tape. 

*

The philosophies we experience as liberating are the ones that disband inner bureaucracies. 

But what happens when all the offices have been dissolved? Who can we talk to when public language offices are no longer there to establish protocols for  trans-psychic communication? And even if you did open a wire, is there anything on the other side that needs to speak or hear? And where do we get our liberation fix when we’ve been deprived of the need for freedom?