Some people need things they know how to ask for.

Some people are meant to give the things for which they are asked.

Those are the lucky people.

Others need things and they do not know how to ask for. It is not that they do not know how to ask for things in general; it is that they cannot locate, objectify and speak about their need. A common response is to ask for things that can be asked for and to hope satisfaction happens.

Others need to give things nobody would ask for, that nobody recognizes they need, and sometimes even reject. These people are not generally considered useless; it is that they have a purpose no other person could ever assign them. The function they are asked to provide, as valued as it might be, is felt by the one providing it to be incidental. The common response to this condition is either a refusal to associate with those in the habit of assigning purposes, or to submit to the demands of the world and to coat meaning with insulating doubts. In other words a person withdraws from meaninglessness, or he internalizes meaninglessness and becomes a cynic or nihilist.

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Responsibility is only responsible when it acts with judgment and judges in order to act.

Responsibility must respond. It cannot refuse to respond.

However, responsibility cannot simply obey.

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When a need speaks, it often speaks the truth of its general existence with false specifics.

(Why? A determined need is uncomfortable. An indeterminate need is horrifying. Need finds relief even in false determinations.)

The need does its best to express its substance, but often it can only manage to indicate the fact of its existence.

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A patient who feels ill misdiagnose his ailment, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong that he feels ill. A doctor who treats his patients according to their self-diagnoses is a bad doctor. So is the doctor who refuses to treat his patients on the basis that they have misdiagnosed themselves.

A parent who dismisses a child’s distress because the child is wrong about its source is as bad as a parent who indulges the child’s demands. Spoiling a child comes not from giving the child what she needs, but from failure to exercise parental judgment before acting on the child’s need.

The same is true, but more ambiguously, between employer and employee, between husband and wife, between citizen and nation, between parishioner and parish.

The dialectic form — thesis, antithesis and the resolution of the opposition — is a fundamental form of philosophical truth, but it is functionally useless. The dialectic form is severely constrained and as powerless as Cassandra. The dialectic is entirely retrospective: it is both radically non-predictive and radically postdictive.

Those who have lived out dialectical truth know the strange transfiguration of anxious, opaque nonsense into crystalline vision.

The dialectic as such is not an answer: it promises an answer if you grapple faithfully with the anxiety of the present question. It reassures: the anxiety in the face of opaque chaos is not the symptoms of a disease but the necessary birth-pangs of insight. It teases: if you already knew the answer, it wouldn’t be a question.

The dialectic is a kind of faith. It is the form and the assurance that spurs the pursuit of the presently unseen.

Sometimes a human being finds himself able to dominate an other — to bind another to himself in dependency, and coerce him to participate in a purpose that he would not freely choose.

Sometimes a group of human beings find in one another sufficient like-mindedness to form a covenant. Each accepts shared principles, acknowledges reciprocal duties and enters into voluntary interdependence. The principles, the duties and the interdependence apply only to one’s neighbor within the covenant. The other — the one standing outside the covenant — is neither bound by its duties nor protected by its principles. The morality of the covenant is reciprocal.

Those bound in covenant can behave like a single human being, and can decide to dominate or annihilate an other if that other is called “enemy”.

A time can come when the morality of the covenant — its duties and principles — become so internalized, so deeply inscribed in each neighbor’s heart, that he is no longer himself apart from them. The covenant loses its reciprocal functionalism and becomes useless, absolute and universal.

The man of the universal covenant can be counted on to behave according to his morality regardless of advantage or disadvantage. There is no legitimate ground for distrust. The “preemptive” violence at the root of all violence — “do unto the other before he has a chance to do unto you” — the eternal justification of a nation’s defense taking offensive action — becomes a ludicrous and shameful ruse.

The man of the universal covenant treats the enemy who persecutes him as his own neighbor and exposes the coercive violence as chosen by preference, not by necessity.

Mediocre – ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French médiocre, from Latin mediocris ‘of middle height or degree,’ literally ‘somewhat rugged or mountainous,’ from medius ‘middle’ + ocris ‘rugged mountain.’

Excellent – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin excellentia, from the verb excellere ‘surpass’, from ex– ‘out, beyond’ + celsus ‘lofty.’

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Are the excellent necessarily rugged?

What if excellence, being the venturing into the beyond is intrinsically vulnerable?

Is it possible that in conditions where only the rugged survive, excellence is precluded?

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Mediocrity finds its advantage in emergencies and tough times. Look closely at the declarers of emergency, the united-standers, the principle-suspending, expedient-employing realists: their fear is cut with a strange exultation. They are in their element.

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Nietzsche asks: What, after all, is ignobleness?

…Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common. On this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there originates therefrom an entity that “understands itself–namely, a people. In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely: about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly–the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer. The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger–that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them–and not some Schopenhauerian “genius of the species”!) Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command–these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. A man’s estimates of value betray something of the structure of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and common experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficult to comprehend, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile (continuation of the same thing), the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious–to the common!

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Buber answers:

The great character can be conceived neither as a system of maxims nor as a system of habits. It is peculiar to him to act from the whole of his substance. That is, it is peculiar to him to react in accordance with the uniqueness of every situation which challenges him as an active person. Of course there are all sorts of similarities in different situations; one can construct types of situations, one can always find to what section the particular situation belongs, and draw what is appropriate from the hoard of established maxims and habits, apply the appropriate maxim, bring into operation the appropriate habit. But what is untypical in the particular situation remains unnoticed and unanswered. To me that seems the same as if, having ascertained the sex of a new-born child, one were immediately to establish its type as well, and put all the children of one type into a common cradle on which not the individual name but the name of the type was inscribed. In spite of all similarities every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction which cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you. I call a great character one who by his actions and attitudes satisfies the claim of situations out of deep readiness to respond with his whole life, and in such a way that the sum of his actions and attitudes expresses at the same time the unity of his being in its willingness to accept responsibility. As his being is unity, the unity of accepted responsibility, his active life, too, coheres into unity. And one might perhaps say that for him there rises a unity out of the situations he has responded to in responsibility, the indefinable unity of a moral destiny.

All this does not mean that the great character is beyond the acceptance of norms. No responsible person remains a stranger to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never becomes a maxim and the fulfilment of it never a habit. Any command that a great character takes to himself in the course of his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a concrete way. What it has to tell him is revealed whenever a situation arises which demands of him a solution of which till then he had perhaps no idea. Even the most universal norm will at times be recognized only in a very special situation. I know of a man whose heart was struck by the lightning flash of “Thou shalt not steal” in the very moment when he was moved by a very different desire from that of stealing, and whose heart was so struck by it that he not only abandoned doing what he wanted to do, but with the whole force of his passion did the very opposite. Good and evil are not each other’s opposites like right and left. The evil approaches us as a whirlwind, the good as a direction. There is a direction, a “yes”, a command, hidden even in a prohibition, which is revealed to us in moments like these. In moments like these the command addresses us really in the second person, and the Thou in it is no one else but one’s own self. Maxims command only the third person, the each and the none.

One can say that it is the unconditioned nature of the address which distinguishes the command from the maxim. In an age which has become deaf to unconditioned address we cannot overcome the dilemma of the education of character from that angle. But insight into the structure of great character can help us to overcome it.

Of course, it may be asked whether the educator should really start “from above”, whether, in fixing his goal, the hope of finding a great character, who is bound to be the exception, should be his starting-point; for in his methods of educating character he will always have to take into consideration the others, the many. To this I reply that the educator would not have the right to do so if a method inapplicable to these others were to result. In fact, however, his very insight into the structure of a great character helps him to find the way by which alone (as I have indicated) he can begin to influence also the victims of the collective Moloch, pointing out to them the sphere in which they themselves suffer–namely, their relation to their own selves. From this sphere he must elicit the values which he can make credible and desirable to his pupils. That is what insight into the structure of a great character helps him to do.

A section of the young is beginning to feel today that, because of their absorption by the collective, something important and irreplaceable is lost to them–personal responsibility for life and the world. These young people, it is true, do not yet realize that their blind devotion to the collective, e.g. to a party, was not a genuine act of their personal life; they do not realize that it sprang, rather, from the fear of being left, in this age of confusion, to rely on themselves, on a self which no longer receives its direction from eternal values. Thus they do not yet realize that their devotion was fed on the unconscious desire to have responsibility removed from them by an authority in which they believe or want to believe. They do not yet realize that this devotion was an escape. I repeat, the young people I am speaking of do not yet realize this. But they are beginning to notice that he who no longer, with his whole being, decides what he does or does not, and assumes responsibility for it, becomes sterile in soul. And a sterile soul soon ceases to be a soul.

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Sometimes people are fated to fall in line and do their duty with the collective.

Sometimes an individual is destined to step out of line and to take sole responsibility.

From “Dialogue”, the first essay in the collection Between Man and Man:

Be clear what it means when a worker can experience even his relation to the machine as one of dialogue, when, for instance, a compositor tells that he has understood the machine’s humming as “a merry and grateful smile at me for helping it to set aside the difficulties and obstructions which disturbed and bruised and pained it, so that now it could run free”. Must even you not think then of the story of Androclus and the Lion?

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a worldwide dialogue, a dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partly of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

You ask with a laugh, can the leader of a great technical undertaking practise the responsibility of dialogue? He can. For he practises it when he makes present to himself in its concreteness, so far as he can, quantum satis, the business which he leads. He practises it when he experiences it, instead of as a structure of mechanical centres of force and their organic servants (among which latter there is for him no differentiation but the functional one), as an association of persons with faces and names and biographies, bound together by a work that is represented by, but does not consist of, the achievements of a complicated mechanism. He practises it when he is inwardly aware, with a latent and disciplined fantasy, of the multitude of these persons, whom naturally he cannot separately know and remember as such; so that now, when one of them for some reason or other steps really as an individual into the circle of his vision and the realm of his decision, he is aware of him without strain not as a number with a human mask but as a person. He practises it when he comprehends and handles these persons as persons — for the greatest part necessarily indirectly, by means of a system of mediation which varies according to the extent, nature and structure of the undertaking, but also directly, in the parts which concern him by way of organization. Naturally at first both camps, that of capital and that of the proletariat, will decry his masterly attitude of fantasy as fantastic nonsense and his practical attitude to persons as dilettantist. But just as naturally only until his increased figures of production accredit him in their eyes. (By this of course is not to be implied that those increases necessarily come to pass: between truth and success there is no pre-stabilized harmony.) Then, to be sure, something worse will follow. He will be pragmatically imitated, that is, people will try to use his “procedure” without his way of thinking and imagining. But this demoniac element inherent in spiritual history (think only of all the magicizing of religion) will, I think, shipwreck here on the power of discrimination in men’s souls. And meanwhile it is to be hoped that a new generation will arise, learning from what is alive, and will take all this in real seriousness as he does.

Unmistakably men are more and more determined by “circumstances”. Not only the absolute mass but also the relative might of social objectives is growing. As one determined partially by them the individual stands in each moment before concrete reality which wishes to reach out to him and receive an answer from him; laden with the situation he meets new situations. And yet in all the multiplicity and complexity he has remained Adam. Even now a real decision is made in him, whether he faces the speech of God articulated to him in things and events — or escapes. And a creative glance towards his fellow-creature can at times suffice for response.

Man is in a growing measure sociologically determined. But this growing is the maturing of a task not in the “ought” but in the “may” and in “need”, in longing and in grace. It is a matter of renouncing the pantechnical mania or habit with its easy “mastery” of every situation; of taking everything up into the might of dialogue of the genuine life, from the trivial mysteries of everyday to the majesty of destructive destiny.

The task becomes more and more difficult, and more and more essential, the fulfilment more and more impeded and more and more rich in decision. All the regulated chaos of the age waits for the break-through, and wherever a man perceives and responds, he is working to that end.

From “The Question to the Single One”, the second essay in the collection Between Man and Man:

Kierkegaard does not marry “in defiance of the whole nineteenth century”. What he describes as the nineteenth century is the “age of dissolution”, the age of which he says that a single man “cannot help it or save it”, he can “only express that it is going under” — going under, if it cannot reach God through the “narrow pass”. And Kierkegaard does not marry, in a symbolic action of negation, in defiance of this age, because it is the age of the “crowd” and the age of “politics”. Luther married in symbolic action, because he wanted to lead the believing man of his age out of a rigid religious separation, which finally separated him from grace itself, to a life with God in the world. Kierkegaard does not marry (this of course is not part of the manifold subjective motivation but is the objective meaning of the symbol) because he wants to lead the unbelieving man of his age, who is entangled in the crowd, to becoming single, to the solitary life of faith, to being alone before God. Certainly, “to marry or not to marry” is the representative question when the monastery is in view. If the Single One really must be, as Kierkegaard thinks, a man who does not have to do essentially with others, then marriage hinders him if he takes it seriously — and if he does not take it seriously then, in spite of Kierkegaard’s remark about Luther, it cannot be understood how he as an existing person can be “the truth”. For man, with whom alone Kierkegaard is fundamentally concerned, there is the additional factor that in his view woman stands “quite differently from man in a dangerous rapport to finitude”.

. . . .

Marriage, essentially understood, brings one into an essential relation to the “world”; more precisely, to the body politic, to its malformation and its genuine form, to its sickness and its health. Marriage, as the decisive union of one with another, confronts one with the body politic and its destiny — man can no longer shirk that confrontation in marriage, he can only prove himself in it or fail. The isolated person, who is unmarried or whose marriage is only a fiction, can maintain himself in isolation; the “community” of marriage is part of the great community, joining with its own problems the general problems, bound up with its hope of salvation to the hope of the great life that in its most miserable state is called the crowd. He who “has entered on marriage”, who has entered into marriage, has been in earnest, in the intention of the sacrament, with the fact that the other is; with the fact that I cannot legitimately share in the Present Being without sharing in the being of the other; with the fact that I cannot answer the lifelong address of God to me without answering at the same time for the other; with the fact that I cannot be answerable without being at the same time answerable for the other as one who is entrusted to me. But thereby a man has decisively entered into relation with otherness; and the basic structure of otherness, in many ways uncanny but never quite unholy or incapable of being hallowed, in which I and the others who meet me in my life are inwoven, is the body politic. It is to this, into this, that marriage intends to lead us.

. . . .

A man in the crowd is a stick stuck in a bundle moving through the water, abandoned to the current or being pushed by a pole from the bank in this or that direction. Even if it seems to the stick at times that it is moving by its own motion it has in fact none of its own; and the bundle, too, in which it drifts has only an illusion of self-propulsion. I do not know if Kierkegaard is right when he says that the crowd is untruth — I should rather describe it as non-truth since (in distinction from some of its masters) it is not on the same plane as the truth, it is not in the least opposed to it. But it is certainly “un-freedom”. In what unfreedom consists cannot be adequately learned under the pressure of fate, whether it is the compulsion of need or of men; for there still remains the rebellion of the inmost heart, the tacit appeal to the secrecy of eternity. It can be adequately learned only when you are tied up in the bundle of the crowd, sharing its opinions and desires, and only dully perceiving that you are in this condition.

The man who is living with the body politic is quite different. He is not bundled, but bound. He is bound up in relation to it, betrothed to it, married to it, therefore suffering his destiny along with it; rather, simply suffering it, always willing and ready to suffer it, but not abandoning himself blindly to any of its movements, rather confronting each movement watchfully and carefully that it does not miss truth and loyalty. He sees powers press on and sees God’s hands in their supreme power held up on high, that the mortal immortals there below may be able to decide for themselves. He knows that in all his weakness he is put into the service of decision. If it is the crowd, remote from, opposed to, decision which swarms round him, he does not put up with it. At the place where he stands, whether lifted up or unnoticed, he does what he can, with the powers he possesses, whether compressed predominance or the word which fades, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. Otherness enshrouds him, the otherness to which he is betrothed. But he takes it up into his life only in the form of the other, time and again the other, the other who meets him, who is sought, lifted out of the crowd, the “companion”. Even if he has to speak to the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find and find again its truth only through persons, through persons standing their test. That is the Single One who “changes the crowd into Single Ones” — how could it be one who remains far from the crowd? It cannot be one who is reserved, only one who is given; given, not given over. It is a paradoxical work to which he sets his soul, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. It is to bring out from the crowd and set on the way of creation which leads to the Kingdom. And if he does not achieve much he has time, he has God’s own time. For the man who loves God and his companion in one — though he remains in all the frailty of humanity — receives God for his companion.

Higher sense and nonsense are, in regard to understanding, the same. That is, they are unassimilated and unassimilable to knowledge. To intention, however, they can be different, but not necessarily. Regarding an unknown as potentially having a higher sense opens the possibility of actualizing that possibility in active understanding. Regarding an unknown as mere nonsense closes the possibility.

There is, however, a second and third way of regarding an unknown as as having a higher sense while leaving the possibility of understanding closed: Agnosticism categorizes the non-understood assertion to be unfalsifiable with no intention to attempt to affirm, refute or otherwise grapple with it. Fundamentalism categorizes the non-understood assertion as true with no intention of ever actualizing the truth in understanding. They evade grappling with truth by exteriorizing and worshiping. Its overheated emotionalism regarding its professed facts conceals a lukewarm indifference to lived participation in truth.

Some people think that their unpleasant vision of life proves they’re realists. The world looks like shit: to them this is proof they do not have their heads up their asses.

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No pain, no gain. Therefore: pain, gain.

This is bad logic.

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Many live in a waking nightmare.

Its ugly vision is a communicable spiritual disease.

The disease is cured by the lucid will to wake up.

Philosophy is essentially the learning of particular intellectual movements. It is finding points of flexibility in how we understand things, on the whole and in each specific constituent fact. The positive content of philosophy, the facts the philosopher asserts as true, are not essential. They are, however, necessary for the actualization of philosophy. One cannot dispense with the facts, but also one cannot reduce philosophy to facts. Philosophy cannot be summarized.

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The reader’s primary question is “how did the author understand?” The means to finding the answer is to ask “what did the author understand?” These seem to be two different questions, but they are inseparable and are answered together. When the reader understands the material – what the author understood – he necessarily understands how the author understood it. There is no other way to the How than the What.

Going through this process of acquiring new reveals the Why of philosophy in general. Nobody knows why prior to this revelation; they are only inclined toward or against undergoing its revelation.

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When reality lacks a dimension, it manifests as the dimension not being missed. Reality is always self-complete. This is what is meant by horizon.

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We don’t see the blind spots that exist in our immediate field of vision. We discover them through reflection, through mediation.

Is not-seeing a phenomenon? What kind of being does not-seeing have? Does not-seeing exist prior to the discovery of the fact of its existence?

According to vision, what isn’t seen is dark, and blindness doesn’t exist. Vision is half-aware when it sees, but vision is self-aware when it learns what blindness is. Knowledge is half-aware when it knows only facts.

(I’m digesting Hegel’s idea of negativity.)

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If you have experienced and lived out the gap between what can be said and meant and heard and understood you’re in a better position to appreciate the history of religion. Full knowledge includes knowledge of ignorance.

Reading a mystery novel you know as a general fact that you are being misled by appearances, but you are not certain specifically how it is happening. Ideally, everything must be hidden in plain sight, and there should be one and only one possible resolution. No essential fact may be withheld. No more than one resolution should be possible. All theories attempted by the reader should be overwhelmed by the truth revealed at the end. The truth should not become clear until the author reveals it in a conceptual vase-face. The whole book shifts its meaning at the end. Every significance must be reconsidered all at once, on the whole and in particular.

Borges loved the mystery novel genre.

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Mystery novels are to philosophy what a roller coaster is to reckless driving on a mountain road. It’s a safer, cleaner and more linear simulation of something unsafe, dirty and nonlinear.

From Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind:

Precisely for the reason that existence is designated a species or kind, it is naked simple thought: nous, simplicity, is substance. It is on account of its simplicity, its self-identity, that it appears steady, fixed, and permanent. But this self-identity is likewise negativity; hence that fixed and stable existence carries the process of its own dissolution within itself. The determinateness appears at first to be so solely through its relation to something else; and its process seems imposed and forced upon it externally. But its having its own otherness within itself, and the fact of its being a self-initiated process — these are implied in the very simplicity of thought itself. For this is self-moving thought, thought that distinguishes, is inherent inwardness, the pure notion. Thus, then, it is the very nature of understanding to be a process; and being a process it is Rationality.

In the nature of existence as thus described — to be its own notion and being in one — consists logical necessity in general. This alone is what is rational, the rhythm of the organic whole: it is as much knowledge of content as that content is notion and essential nature. In other words, this alone is the sphere and element of speculative thought. The concrete shape of the content is resolved by its’ own inherent process into a simple determinate quality. Thereby it is raised to logical form, and its being and essence coincide; its concrete existence is merely this process that takes place, and is eo ipso logical existence. It is therefore needless to apply a formal scheme to the concrete content in an external fashion; the content is in its very nature a transition into a formal shape, which, however, ceases to be formalism of an external kind, because the form is the indwelling process of the concrete content itself.

This nature of scientific method, which consists partly in being inseparable from the content, and partly in determining the rhythm of its movement by its own agency, finds, as we mentioned before, its peculiar systematic expression in speculative philosophy.