Category Archives: Philosophy
Protected: Middle
Generative thoughts
My favorite books are nearly impossible to read, because they cause me to have so many of my own thoughts.
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An insight is a generative thought: an idea that produces ideas.
An insight is impossible to speak about directly. It can only be observed, but not empirically in the usual sense. What is observed is intellectual behavior. This kind of observation takes the form of following a thought. It is an intellectual participatory observation.
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A very strange reading experience:
- At the beginning of the book the author sets a painful and apparently irresolvable problem.
- Then the author shifts his attention to a second, different problem. He approaches it from several angles, and resolves it several ways. Each angle sets off an explosion of original thoughts. It is hard for the reader to get through the book. (And some of the explosions reverberate into the reader’s own past and future, and change the meanings of things in unexpectable ways.)
- Then toward the end of the book the author shifts back to the original problem. The reader is shocked to find himself reading the very thoughts he’d conceived earlier, sometimes worded almost identically. It is as if the author made the reader think his thoughts (and in profound cases, even feel his feelings).
What is going on here? My explanation:
The author has presented a problem the reader does not know how to think out. His mind lacks the movements necessary to resolve it, and it leaves him with a sort of knot in the mind.
Through the explorations of the second problem, his mind learns to produce the necessary movements. (“The dance.”) Once the reader has acquired the means to resolve the first problem himself, the resolvability somehow causes the mind to recall and solve the problems almost effortlessly. This causes the eruption of thoughts.
Then the author “winks” and indicates what has happened by showing his own resolutions by the same method. This phenomenon is itself theoretically, practically and ethically problematic, and it has been the obsession of many fine minds.
Worldviews
A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.
What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.
“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”
The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)
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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)
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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.
The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.
In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.
Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.
- Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
- Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
- Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.
Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.
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- Note to nerds:
What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.
Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.
Inconceivable dimension
Last week I had an unusual number of conversations with artists about the nature of art. I want to try to summarize what I understand about the being of a (romantic) artist, based on what I took from these conversations.
For a variety of reason, artists today are necessarily romantic artists. Romantic artists attempt to create outside of what already is, as opposed to affirming or revitalizing the culture to which they belong as members. There is no vital high culture left to preserve in our time. Even so-called conservatives invent by reanimating formal corpses with newish notions through the black magic of revisionism.There is just flat, sea-level philistinism: discrete, mutually exclusive working hard and playing hard. Nobody’s going to exert for anything that won’t earn him a dollar.
Romantic artists are cultural mutants. They have mutated individuality; they developed differently as individuals and have a different conception of what individuality is. They do individualism differently. Certainly this mutated individuality/individualism can give them a conspicuously different appearance (which is all most people perceive) but the more essential difference is imperceptible: Artists inhabit mutated worlds. And they inhabit these worlds partially or entirely alone.
So far, what I’ve described includes romantic artists, but it also includes visionaries of all kinds. A romantic artist is a visionary who responds to his vision by creating cultural artifacts that affirm and reinforce his vision. This occurs both through the practice of creative activity (by which he lives differently), and through the artifact (by which he establishes a more meaningfully-orienting environment). What is lacking at the start, — with genuine romantic artists, invariably — which philistines are incapable of imagining, is what it is like to be the solitary member of a culture. Cultures are shared. An unshared culture is a psychic vacuum, and that vacuum is the profoundest loneliness, which crushes proportionally to its difference, and threatens the survival of the mutant. Very, very few cultural mutants survive, much less reproduce their vision, much less change the nature of human-being.
Regarding mere survival: everything that threatens the continuous activity of the artist (that is imposes displacing, depressing and exhausting alien tasks) or imposes environmental disorientation on the artist threatens his particular cultural existence, if not his biological existence. And since an artist identifies more with his particular cultural existence than even with his biological being, this threat reaches beyond individual death to the extinction of one’s own species.
I am assuming what I mean by “inhabiting a world” (as opposed to perceiving the world) is pretty obvious to anyone for whom this line of thought is relevant. In case it isn’t, here is a mythical evolutionary analogy. Imagine the first appearance of eyes in an eyeless species. That first eyed mutant probably looked pretty strange, not that anything else was around to see it. But what was much stranger was what happened to its existence as a result of the acquisition of the faculty of sight. This organism lived a visual existence in a visible world unlike that of anything that preceded it. Its world deepened in an extra inconceivable dimension.
* Adolescent rant…
Crisis of conscience
A person can waste his whole life attempting to win the right (aka get permission) not to waste his whole life.
Business philosophy
Philosophy asks: What purely intellectual factors constricting our options?
What assumptions possess our minds and make matters that could be otherwise and better seem absolute and eternal?
Where is our customary perspective hiding relevant clues from us that would be revealed as relevant if we looked at our situation from a different vantage point?
Where are we justifying our actions with explanations that do not actually do justice to those forces that really impel us?
How are we imposing habitual modes of thought on problems that call for different modes, which we would use if we “knew the moves”?
Where are our life practices depriving us of the inner resources or outer conditions necessary to concretely experience alternatives to how-things-are?
Where are our hasty answers concealing questions that need asking?
Where are our hasty formulations of questions concealing more fruitful question to ask?
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At this point in history it is embarrassing (quaint, pompous, ludicrous, and many other unpleasant things) to call yourself a philosopher in a business setting. Nonetheless, I still aspire one day to have a business card with the title “philosopher” printed on it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. Think about it: If philosophy helps ask and answer the questions I listed above, wouldn’t a business with at least one philosopher on staff have a pretty serious competitive advantage? The answer I’d anticipate is: “by having philosophical people on staff.” But what about that popular management principle that “if you don’t assign it to a person it doesn’t get done”? In my experience, that is exactly the case. Businesses tend to run around like chickens in chalk-line circles, for no reason other than failure to ask if the lines can be redrawn… or erased.. or even just stepped over. Why? They take the chalk-lines as the moral or practical limits of valid activity, and see the problem in terms of how the business is running.
To be seen and not heard
“You are to be seen and not heard.” This means: you are to be an object, not a subject.
Whatever needs knowing about an object can be known through observation. An object belongs to a world, but a world does not belong to it.
A subject, however, while belonging to the world also has a world that belongs to him. A subject looks back.
Consider the etymology of the word “respect”.
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There is no way to understand a particular subjectivity as such objectively.
One only understands subjectivity by engaging subjectively. One attempts to share the other’s world as the other views it, which means one involves oneself. One learns from the other. In the process, one’s own view of the world changes, and that means one’s own subjectivity changes. The other’s view of the world changes, too.
In an interview two separated views converge and merge into an inter-view.
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Behavior is an objective consequence of subjectivity. The odd thing about behavior: in the end it is phenomenal, and it can be taken as a mode of speech and heard along with the other’s voice, or it can be stripped away from the other and subsumed entirely by one’s own world and simply observed. Even speech can be viewed as behavior, or as mere sound. One can explain an other away or one can illuminate an other’s own self-explanation and understand.
Hermeneutics is hearing. The-hermeneutic-of-such-and-such is resistance to hearing: aggressive mishearing.
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The most immediate and convincing evidence of otherness is dialectic.
Iridescent irritants
Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…
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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.
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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.
Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.
Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.
It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.
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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.
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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.
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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.
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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.
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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.
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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.
Diagram du jour
This is pretty much a paraphrasing of what I’m always saying, one way or another, but I think it’s a relatively clear one. What I’m trying to do is to classify the different modes of understanding available to us to help us relate and unify our experience. In this diagram the darker, outer circles of why, how and what are the space in which we can feel the relevance of a problem and pursue understanding; the brighter inner circles of the venn diagram are the successful resolution of a problem through the exercise of various modes of understanding. At the center is totality as (as I believe) Levinas uses it, though without the moral overtones.
My view is that most us overemphasize episteme (the type of knowledge by which we comprehend objects), if we recognize the other forms of understanding at all. Even when we do, we tend to reduce them to the terms of episteme. In my view, sophia and phronesis are felt and responded, to aptly or not, according to the degree of one’s understanding. One’s ability to articulate the understanding has much less to do than with one’s ability to relate and respond (verbally or not) by the terms of and to the ends set by the understanding. Sophia and phronesis are essentially tacit forms of knowledge, which can find articulations, but precedes and exceeds the articulation of language.
These diagrams are the attempts of my own episteme to relate to the other faculties within my soul. And when I find myself caring about the form and content of these diagrams and then later catch myself working naturally according to the principles I’m attempting to show, I experience wholeness of purpose and coherence in the world. And if others experience my diagrams this way — or show me how I can improve them, or convince me that I ought to destroy them — I feel the potential of the world to be a home.
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I’m always looking for structures, but not because I think the structure is already there to be discovered. It’s because I think sanity requires these kinds of structures. I am perfectly willing to project a structure onto reality as if it is already in it, and see it there afterward. These structures are not tools I employ to help me see; they’re understanding itself, by which I see.
I’m enough of a skeptic that I do not care if a model is a discovery or an invention. What matters is that it is experienced as a discovery, and that the structure clings to my vision as if it is part of what I see, not a feature of my sight.
Subject-object
Our minds grasp only that which is objective in form. What concerns us most, though, is subjective in form. This fundamental agony of being is the root of the best and worst religion.
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An object is that which exists side-by-side among other entities.
A subject is one who participates in a whole that wholly includes and exceeds himself.
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A person: a subject and object, who relates as an object or subject to objects and subjects.
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Both the objective and the subjective are violently reducible to the the terms of the other. One can inhabit a radically subjective world of extensionless phenomena. One can also inhabit a radically objective world as a being with emergent consciousness. Why, though?
Chains
“Dancing in chains. — With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that which we call ‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter. ‘Dancing in chains’, making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance: and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.” – Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow
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Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.
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Most of us expect to build up to something compelling (usually some negatively conceived happiness — the absence of what we think is preventing happiness) through faithful observance of constraints. Or we think that if happiness hasn’t occurred, it’s because of some oversight. We start from the ground and aggregate upward. Standing at the top of the heap we think we’ll grab happiness out of the sky.
Philosophy starts from what is compelling and works downward, one reality at a time until it touches earth and closes the circuit.
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The chains of science, like all theoretical chains, are light and fine. They just draw limits around your movements.
The chains of practice, however, actually weigh your limbs down and threaten to immobilize you. Business, socializing, parenting, governing — pursuits traditionally avoided by philosophers — are not outside the domain of philosophy, they’re just such heavy fetters that few thinkers will wear them. It’s not that they are hard to think about. It is that they are hard to think within. They encumber the entirety of one’s being, thought and all.
Chord: Nietzsche’s practical metaphysics
The circle must be closed. — He who has followed a philosophy or a species of thought to the end of its course and then around the end will grasp from his inner experience why the masters and teachers who came afterwards turned away from it, often with an expression of deprecation. For, though the circle has to be circumscribed, the individual, even the greatest, sits firmly on his point of the periphery with an inexorable expression of obstinacy, as though the circle ought never to be closed.
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Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned!
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A few rungs down. — One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul’s salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind’s greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind’s finest accomplishments to date.
With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I now see a number of people who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but only a few who climb back down a few rungs. For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it. Those who are most enlightened can go only as far as to free themselves of metaphysics and look back on it with superiority, while here, as in the hippodrome, it is necessary to take a turn at the end of the track.
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One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics… Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength … Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them — it knows itself sovereign…
Compás
The many forces that now have to come together in the thinker. — To abstract oneself from sensory perception, to exalt oneself to contemplation of abstractions — that was at one time actually felt as exaltation: we can no longer quite enter into this feeling. To revel in pallid images of words and things, to sport with such invisible, inaudible, impalpable beings, was, out of contempt for the sensorily tangible, seductive and evil world, felt as a life in another higher world. ‘These abstracta are certainly not seductive, but they can offer us guidance!’ — with that one lifted oneself upwards. It is not the content of these sportings of spirituality, it is they themselves which constituted ‘the higher life’ in the prehistoric ages of science. Hence Plato’s admiration for dialectics and his enthusiastic belief that dialectics necessarily pertained to the good, unsensory man. It is not only knowledge which has been discovered gradually and piece by piece, the means of knowing as such, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been discovered gradually and piece by piece too. And each time the newly discovered operation or the novel condition seemed to be, not a means to knowledge, but in itself the content, goal and sum total of all that was worth knowing. The thinker needs imagination, self-uplifting, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, the critical faculty, the assemblage of material, the impersonal mode of thinking, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least justice and love for all that exists — but all these means to knowledge once counted individually in the history of the vita contemplativa as goals, and final goals, and bestowed on their inventors that feeling of happiness which appears in the human soul when it catches sight of a final goal.
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If you’ve caught sight of and studied the limitations of the intellectual moves you’ve been trained to perform since toddlerhood, and gained some freedom from unconscious habit of thought, and perhaps even learned some new counts and steps and trained yourself to dance kinetically so the dance dances itself… you’ll see exactly why “objective” thinkers tend to be so sterile and stiff. Objective thinkers know only how to stand apart and think about things. They tune out music as mere noise, and consequently never go beyond the counts.
If we want the world to be a place we love to inhabit, we’re going to have to teach ourselves some new modes of knowing.
Sanity and vision
The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.
What is lacking is:
- vision which respects sanity, and
- sanity which recognizes vision.
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Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.
Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.
But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.
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We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.
We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.
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Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.
We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.
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Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”
Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”
Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”
Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”
Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”
Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”
Is experience essentially individual?
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Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive. The world is seen as together.
Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.
Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.
Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.
Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.
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On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.
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Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.
Empathy and sympathy
A friend of mine confessed that while he has sympathy for others he lacks empathy.
What does this mean? Here is how I took it: He is able to sympathize with isolated and momentary feelings that another person has. Something in him resonates and participates in the experience of feeling with the other. But empathy involves constellations of feeling that endure over time. To empathize would be to really get that other person’s persistent experience of the world as a whole.
When we sympathize we feelingly relate spirit-to-spirit, part-to-part, atomistically.
When we empathize we feelingly relate soul-to-soul, whole-to-whole, holistically.
Admittedly, I might have him wrong, so I won’t assume yet that I have understood what he meant. This is only my first understanding, and while this understanding seems to me to be true and plausible and coherent, that only distinguishes it from confusion. Misunderstanding is tricky because it is nearly indistinguishable from understanding. The most reliable indication of whether you understand or misunderstand the other is whether the other agrees with your understanding. The question is not whether your understanding of what was said was true, it is whether it is true as the other meant it. (The author is far from dead — but he is in no position to dictate to you what is or is not true. He is, however, qualified to tell you if you understood what we was trying to say as he meant it.)
It is too easy to superimpose one’s own way of seeing on the experience of the other. It is too easy to grasp isolated facts from a person’s world-view and mistake that for understanding the person’s philosophy or literary world. Understanding is not grasped. Understanding grasps.
(Hermeneutics is the discipline of recognizing and avoiding the deep habit of misunderstanding.)
The understanding of a person is a non-objective co-participation, which encompasses feeling (empathy), perception, thinking and modes of action. It manifests as a never-perfect but ever-perfecting sharing this mysterious world we share and don’t share.
Incidentally, this understanding is what I refer to as synesis, and it is the most important thing in the whole world.
Selections from BG&E
Preface. Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. The dogmatists’ philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia…
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6. Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he –) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds –), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time — and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering {herrschsuchtig}: and as such it attempts to philosophize. — To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different — “better,” if you like –, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist: — it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is — that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.
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205. The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a rough game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game …..
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230. Perhaps what I have said here of a “fundamental will of the spirit” may not be immediately comprehensible: allow me to explain. —
That commanding something which the people calls “spirit” wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of “external world.” Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the arrangement of new things within old divisions — growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.
This same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its “digestive power,” to speak in a metaphor — and indeed “the spirit” is more like a stomach than anything else.
It is here that there also belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a mischievous notion that such and such is not the case, that it is only being allowed to pass for the case, a joy in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exultant enjoyment of the capricious narrowness and secrecy of a nook-and-corner, of the all too close, of the foreground, of the exaggerated, diminished, displaced, beautified, an enjoyment of the capriciousness of all these expressions of power.
Finally there also belongs here that not altogether innocent readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that continual pressing and pushing of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and cunning of its masks, it enjoys too the sense of being safe that this brings — for it is precisely through its protean arts that it is best concealed and protected.
This will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the superficial — for every surface is a cloak — is counteracted by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound, many-sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for long enough his own view of himself, as he should have, and is accustomed to stern discipline and stern language. He will say “there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit” — let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of that.
In fact, it would be nicer if, instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with an “extravagant honesty” — we free, very free spirits — and perhaps that will actually one day be our posthumous fame? In the meantime — for it will be a long time before that happens — we ourselves are likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and valences of this sort: all our labor hitherto has spoiled us for this taste and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful — there is something about them that makes one’s pride swell. But we hermits and marmots long ago became convinced that this worthy verbal pomp too belongs among the ancient false finery, lumber and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and varnish too the terrible basic text homo natura must again be discerned.
For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura {natural man}. To confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him “you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!” — that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task — who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently: “why knowledge at all?” — Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer ….
231. Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve” — as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning — only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later — we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are — rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.” — Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty compliments I may perhaps be more readily permitted to utter a few truths about “woman as such”: assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent these are only — my truths. —
Earth and heaven
This is yet another attempt at a comprehensible, practical and understandable account of the trigram (of the I Ching).
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Earth
Observations are unified in comprehension (com- “together” -prehendere “grasp”). Comprehension is objective.
Yin earth is that which is observed without comprehension. (Chaos.)
Changing yin earth is the first glimmer of comprehension of that which is observed. (Birth of a paradigm.)
Yang earth is the comprehension of that which is observed. (Normal science.)
Changing yang earth is skepticism toward comprehension of that which is observed. (Scientific crisis.)
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Heaven
Understanding unifies experience. Understanding is subjective. (Under all “objects” stands that by which the objects exist to us. See the first line of the Dhammapada, or verse 29 of the Gospel of Thomas or anything by any famous philosopher whose name begins with the letter H.)
Yang heaven experiences the world in a unified and sustained understanding. (Nobility.)
Changing yang heaven begins to doubt, and experiences the world in increasingly incoherent and wavering understanding. (Loss of faith. Danger of reactionary hubris.)
Yin heaven doubts, and experiences the world in fragmentary and fleeting understandings. (Akrasia.)
Changing yin heaven begins to understand, experiences the world in increasingly unified and sustained understandings. (Insight.)
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Man
Action is animated by understanding and directed by comprehension:
Yang man acts upon the world instinctive sureness.
Changing yang man acts upon the world with wavering instincts and diminishing confidence.
Yin man withdraws from the world and abstains from action.
Changing yin man learns how to act upon the world.
Step 5 of 8
When you live your life wrongly, you lose the capacity to value.
When you lose the capacity to value, you cannot imagine something worth working toward.
When you have nothing to work toward, you live your life wrongly.
Melioristic meditation
To attack all forms of collective self-determination — any kind of visioning an ideal, intentionally pursuing that ideal, and evaluating means in terms of whether they advance or harm the pursuit of the ideal…
… to brand every kind of collective intentional coordination of efforts as soulless “social engineering”…
… to hope that compromise solutions on innumerable questions of means, each considered in isolation from the others, will somehow result in something acceptable to all relevant citizens (that is, those with the awareness, the will and the means to take action)…
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This is America’s state religion, held most fervently of all by our Christian element: An aggregate of self-interested parts, operating under simple rules, will somehow miraculously, effortlessly, inevitably and automatically serve the best interests of the whole.
Ours is an atomistic-mechanistic faith assembled by the blueprint image of the Deistic god of the Enlightenment.
Our self-interests are parts of an enormous intricate moral machine that drives the engine of public welfare. This system was designed for unconcern. Our impulses can — and should — push with unconstrained force against the unconstrained forces of our citizen-opponents. Each takes care of himself, and the system looks after the whole.
The system was designed to replace moral responsibility. Moral responsibility was never humankind’s strong suit. It’s too squishy, too evadable. Following laws to the letter, with no concern for their purpose or consequences — we’re much, much better at that. Push by the rules, and whoever is crushed in your pushing is either a holy sacrifice to competition or an economic infidel (insufficiently motivated to participate in our economy).
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Here is a question: Do we hold the American moral atomistic-mechanical faith because we’ve seen it work out? Have we judged this tree by its fruit?
Is it possible that our adherence to this faith is just inertia? A fear of the Otherwise? Do we suspect that an improvement for the whole, might not be an improvement for me?
Or do we hold this faith because we are crushed by the sheer size and complexity of the world, and we’re dogged by pessimism that we can improve anything?
I have to wonder if the Founding Fathers imagined the psychological consequences of their lowered expectations. Did they ever imagine that a populace propped up by an artificial public morality might eventually lose all moral muscle-tone?
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Not only do we pious Americans see no conflict between serving the good and serving wealth — we know for a fact that we serve the good most perfectly by refusing to get caught up in ideals and instead concentrating on serving wealth. Who says there’s a conflict? With the exception of a few isolated wingnuts, nobody.
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We fixate on isolated issues because we instinctively know that discussing ends will be catastrophic.
Why? Because we disagree so deeply? Because if we sketched out our ideals to one another that they would be so mutually unacceptable that violence would be inevitable? But, if we can just manage to coerce the other into trying things our own way, they’d see how right we are?
Or, have we neglected altogether the question of how we would like our lives to be?
Or, have we merely defined our ideal negatively? I’d like my life as it is, but without the loneliness, the soul-crushing boredom, the insane stress, the ugliness?
Or, do we just have no idea what a public discussion of ends could be? What forum? What themes? How is it moderated? It cannot be imagined in any detail at all.
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How many of us believe we have any right to form our lives?
How many of us believe we can play by the rules and end up with lives we really love?
What’s a little strange is that many of us are pretty sure that this system doesn’t actually serve the whole, and when we play, it theoretically serves us — we can pay for our homes, our food and our entertainments — but our lives are not lives we would have chosen. Ah, here’s a moral responsibility every American is required to accept: We are responsible for feeling grateful. We are at least required to tack some gratitude to the end of whatever complaints we express. “Oh, well, it could be worse.” “At least I’ve got a job.” “At least I don’t live in Africa or Iraq.”
Sometimes we console ourselves with our little virtues. We may not love life, and we may not really concern ourselves with the whole — but at least we are good. We adopt little causes and practices here and there that we believe will somehow benefit the whole — the Earth, if you lean left, or America if you lean right.
At least we’re good. That we have.
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When you live your life wrongly, you lose the capacity to value.
When you lose the capacity to value, you cannot imagine something worth working toward.
When you have nothing to work toward, you live your life wrongly.