Reposting a  Charles Sanders Peirce quote:

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

The difference between a merely theoretical “philosophy” (a.k.a. sophistry) and a lived philosophy lies in completely in existential honesty proved in practice. A philosopher must only consider an idea believed or doubted when he finds himself living his life according to these beliefs or doubts.

Being must be persuaded to truth. Or maybe persuasive truth is the authentic speech of being.

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“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!” – Nietzsche

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Philosophy is not a topic one can study or tell someone about. Philosophy creates topics for study, and things can be told only within the medium of philosophy. There is always a philosophy. In fact, there are always two philosophies: the philosophy that is professed and the philosophy who lives itself out and struggles to profess itself.

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Deep mutuality lives in the interplay of object and subject, bundled blindly within the beyond. At times the interplay outspirals in expansive joy. Other times it shrinks in fear.

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Tao that can be spoken of,
Is not the Everlasting Tao.
Name that can be named,
Is not the Everlasting name.

Nameless, the origin of heaven and earth;
Named, the mother of ten thousand things.

Therefore, always without desire,
In order to observe the hidden mystery;
Always with desire,
In order to observe the manifestations.

These two issue from the same origin,
Though named differently.
Both are called the dark.
Dark and even darker,
The door to all hidden mysteries.

I forget three to five exciting (to me) ideas every day. They trample each other on the way to expression. I’m not even sure the best ones win.

In popular, material terms, everything is suspended between two-spatially determined ultimacies:

1. The “universe” – approaching one in number, approaching infinite in size. The universe comprises all space, material and energy.
2. The “atomic” unit (meaning literally a– ‘not’ + temnein ‘to cut.’) – approaching infinite in number, approaching infinitesimal in size. Everything within the universe is composed of nothing but this one unit.

You can visualize this idea as an inverted cone, where the width is determined by the size of the unit, so that the universe, occupying the most space is at the top, and the “atom” (physic’s tiniest du jour) at the bottom. Or, alternatively, we can define the cone by the number of units and set the cone on its broad base and define the width by number of units, the (approximately) singular universe set on the top, and the (approximately) infinite atomic units at the base.

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How can the universe approach one in number? Because it is less than one as long as some thing that exists has not actually been subsumed in it. The universe is conceptually one, but actually perpetually falls short of one in number.

How can the universe approach infinite size? Because as long as some thing has not been subsumed by the universe, the universe is not the universe. The universe is conceptually infinitely large, but actually perpetually falls short of infinite size.

How can an atomic unit approach infinite number? Two ways: 1) Until the universe is actually one, the unit count remains actually incomplete. 2) Each atomic unit candidate multiplies the number of actual atomic units. The number of atomic units is conceptually infinite in number, but actually perpetually falls short of infinite in number.

How can an atomic unit approach infinitessimal smallness? Because as long as any thing occupies space, it remains zenoically suspicious. The atomic unit is conceptually infinitessimal, but actually perpetually occupies divisible space.

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I know physics has moved on from this conception of space, but I’m curious whether physicists have.

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Lately, I’ve been pondering the significance of my Unitarian-Universalist upbringing. I needed to sketch out a meaning of that designation.

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* REALLY CHANGING THE SUBJECT HERE *
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Speaking of designations, I’ve also been interested in design as a practice of concrete design-ation. When you think about it this way, taxonomies are almost the essence of design, not an expansion of its scope.

Design – ORIGIN late Middle English (as a verb in the sense of to designate): from Latin designare ‘to designate,’ reinforced by French désigner. The noun is via French from Italian.

Of course, designation is a complex concept. A designation can assign many different kinds of significance, from a manner of existence (what is this entity? what do we call it?), to a use (what is its use?), to its status or value.

If you start drowning your natural instincts come to the rescue: Your arms and legs automatically and independently move faster and faster as if directed by an intelligence of their own. Your body somehow knows it should consume all your energy flailing, kicking and heaving your body. Without any prompting, your heart races wildly and your lungs do their damnedest to hyperventilate. If somebody swims near you, your body starts climbing over them like a ladder to get your mouth over the surface for a lungful of air.

We do not have to remember or reason or reflect or execute on a plan. Our own nature takes over and rescues us.

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Collective being is just as real as individual being and it has its own instincts. We participate in collective being in our own ways and interpret the collectivity out of it habitually.

As long as we see things this way, as individuals we might walk upright, but collectively we’re still half-walking on our knuckles.

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The noun form of “being” ought to be considered a gerund.

A human is a human on the basis of biology.

A “human being” lives out his human being on the basis of a choice: that choice is between expansive consciousness and expansive responsibility or individual constriction within the merely apparent.

Through each individual human’s choice, humanity as a whole is faced with the choice of human being. We are collectively deliberating right now, at this moment, and you are part of it, one way or the other.

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Romanticism: Our instincts are nature and nature is good. Greed, panic, aggression, xenophobia, superstition – all natural, all good?

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“Any action is better than no action.”: The distinctive voice of panic.

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Popular conservatism, like popular liberalism, is a variety of romanticism. Some instincts are deemed natural and good and are permitted to run rampant. Other instincts are considered unnatural or otherwise morally illegitimate and are exiled.

The character of a popular political form is determind by 1) which instincts are exiled and voiceless, 2) which instincts remain to speak and dictate terms, and 3) what kind of phantom fills the chairs of the exiled instincts at the table of self.

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• Thesis: Morality is unconditional, independent of context.
• Antithesis: Morality is conditional, dependent on contect.
• Synthesis: Morality is essentially context. It is the fact that every being has a context of other beings, and is itself the context of other beings. Morality is expanding integrity of being.

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If you don’t understand something completely, it is most productive to believe that you understand none of it. The little you think you understand is likely what is obstructing your understanding of the remainder.

Linearity is refusal to let go of error. Linearity wants progress, but it sees progress negatively, in terms of how far away it is from where it started, not how close has it come to a destination. The question of “toward what?” is secondary to “how far?” There’s an element of panic in linearity. It is aimless flight from, not movement toward.

(Linearity is a pretty good instinct for rabbits and rodents, but an aspiring thinker or a leader has to overcome it.)

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I am against most forms and conceptions of moralism, because we have outgrown them. Most of us have our hands full of idle or destructive nonsense, and the rest of us have our fists clenched against nonsense. What’s needed are open hands with distinguishing fingers and our trademark opposing thumb, which always approaches from the other side to close and lock our grip.

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Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is. Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from being deprived for so long of clean air and free movement:–these chains, however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals. – We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains, and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man may be given freedom of the spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. – With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon – by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the heavens brighten above them and heard the words: “On earth peace, good will toward men.” – It is still the age of the individual. 

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One we recognize a very simple fact, many things become clear: conscious selfhood is scalar.

Each of us, however, participates in this scalarity at a fixed and finite scale, as an individual.

It is possible to develop awareness of the differences between types of relationships of selfhood.

Three radically different intelligible relationships: 1) individual self and forms of selfhood that contain and include it (that is, transcend it), 2) individual self and fellow self, 3) individual self and object.

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Our tendency is to truncate being at the first scale of self where we find stability and coherence. We identify with that self and treat it as ultimate. Whatever stands outside the horizons of that self are stripped of alterity and transposed inside the terms of that self.

This is an easy mistake to make. The peculiarity of conscious being is its ability to round off and seal its horizons, to make a complete and tidy picture of a world with unnervingly open borders. We do this through interpretation, both conscious and unconscious, constructed and inherited.

There are good reasons to fear opening out one’s horizons. You will manifestly no longer be who you were. There is a very real kind of dying in it. Your world will be supplanted by a new world that is impossible to see prior to seeing it.

This truncation of selfhood can happen to individuals, and it can happen to groups, even to entire nations. It is worse in collectives, because collectives appear to transcend individuality, and of course, collectives can easily reach agree among themselves that they possess ultimate (or objective) truth. Accordingly, the very worst idols who have ever lived were groups, many of whom have called themselves Christian, but in truth are the diametric dead-opposite.

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Hermes, the messenger god was the god of many apparently unconnected things.

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Heidegger coined the term “the They”.

For Heidegger, the They is the indistinct collective being that stands outside the boundaries of one’s own Dasein.

The Nazis were a collective Dasein, composed of individuals who identified with “something higher” than an individual. On this basis they felt morally exalted. The Nazi saw the entire non-Aryan world as the They.

It is no accident the Nazis hated the Jews, the tradition who discovered interhuman transcendence in profound vulnerability, whose religion gradually transfigured around this insight. With Christ, the more sublime Jew, the Jews as a collective self turned out toward a radically non-they Gentile world and called it Thou.

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Each of us, as an “individual” (the misnomer or misnomers), is essentially a sphere of conscious being.

This sphere, despite the folk belief of our time, is not your brain. It is much larger than your own head.  The sphere encloses your own body and every thing and every person and every fact you’ve ever known. It encloses the history of humankind, everything of the future you can conceive. It reaches to the edge of space on every side.

Each of us is crowned with a universe-sized halo.

This is how things seem to us from our own eyes, and we are not wrong. However, we are not right enough.

The longer I live, the more impressive Heraclitus becomes:

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.”

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The simplicity of Heraclitus makes him strange. There are no argumentative folds in his philosophy. He makes the simplest, barest statements. There is no space for obfuscation or concealment.

When the surprises leap out of his philosophy and change the whole world at once, they could only have come from your own mind.

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Heraclitus was called “the obscure” and the “weeping philosopher”.

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Some things we have immediately in common:

• The phenomonal world
• Language
• Social-collaborative arrangements
• Inter-subjective relationships

“Two-horse team. – Unclear thinking and sentimental emotionalism are as frequently united with a ruthless will to self-assertion, to ascendancy at all cost, as is a warm benevolence and desire to help with the drive to clean and clear thinking, to moderation and restraint of feeling.”

Most people do not attempt to unify existence. One accepts diverse phenomena as fact.

Many people attempt to unify existence by controlling phenomena and forcing them into apparent unity.

More than a few people attempt to unify existence by deeming the diversity of phenomena irrelevant. Diversity is illusory. This is common mysticism.

Some people try to unify existence by accepting phenomena as phenomena, that is as appearance to a subject. This is a more profound form of mysticism, idealism.

Idealists accept the sense of beyondness embedded in existence – by this stage, beyondness is conceived metaphysically, not in the common exoticized form (which is rooted in an incapacity to see the ordinary world in a spiritual light, and so misunderstands metaphysics to be positing supernatural otherworld populated with supernatural entities) – in a variety of ways.

Some idealists preserve a properly mysterious noumenal being, taken to be the source of phenomena.

Some idealists deny all but phenomena as such. The sense of beyondness is absorbed as an experience. The noumenon is stripped out the content of the sense.

Some try to bracket out, and make irrelevant to discussion, without negation, everything that is not phenomenon. These are the phenomenologists.

Others examine phenomena to see what (if anything) can be known about what is beyond.

Others examine phenomena to see what (if anything) can be known about what is beyond, paying close attention to the forms of knowledge proper to that which seems beyond, versus that which seems immediately intelligible, and that which seems immediately self.

This, in my opinion, is where the gate to religion stands.

[I’ll keep refining this.]

Two inabilities that have plagued me from birth: 1) I am bad at coercing myself to do things I do not care about. In other words I have weak willpower. 2) I am bad at pretending to care when I do not care. I fake unconvincingly.

To succeed in the workplace I’ve had to pretty good at figuring out how to actually care about things. This skill of finding the meaning and worth of things has become more valuable than the activities I used to have to talk myself into doing.

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If your production drains your energy away, you’ll try to compensate for the loss consuming. The consumption necessitates productivity. Lots of people desperately consuming makes the economy boom until it stops.

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An economic depression is a collective psychological depression. An economy just can’t see why it ought to keep producing.

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Too much “realism” creates a world that just can’t give a shit about itself, anymore. One day the realist’s impersonal numbers start dropping and keep dropping. They stare at the numbers and try to understand them mathematically. They are too realistic to realize the numbers are a shadow of life.

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“Realistic” people are psychological fantasists.

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Where realism is out of joint with the realities of human beings, realists make up and impose ethical principles to make human beings become more realistic. Much more ingenuity has been expended on the problem of making humans more realistic than on the problem of understanding the reality of humans. Realists pretend they simply observe the reality they actively create. They create it because they prefer it. They thrive on it.

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The Roman Empire fell because it became indifferent to its continuance.

One whose world lacks friendship will fail to make friends. His environment will be a closed space filled up with dumb, obedient objects and noisy, disobedient bodies.

Over the weekend I stumbled upon two passages that reminded me of one another.

1) From Clifford Geertz’z “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged before through the provincial government) belonging to one of the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.

 If we ventured to approach someone (something one is powerfully inhibited from doing in such an atmosphere), he moved, negligently but definitely, away. If, seated or leaning against a wall, we had him trapped, he said nothing at all, or mumbled what for the Balinese is the ultimate nonword – “yes.” The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous amount of quite accurate information about who we were and what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.

This is, as I say, general in Bali. Everywhere else I have been in Indonesia, and more latterly in Morocco, when I have gone into a new village, people have poured out from all sides to take a very close look at me, and, often an all-too-probing feel as well. In Balinese villages, at least those away from the tourist circuit, nothing happens at all. People go on pounding, chatting, making offerings, staring into space, carrying baskets about while one drifts around feeling vaguely disembodied. And the same thing is true on the individual level. When you first meet a Balinese, he seems virtually not to relate to you at all; he is, in the term Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, “away.” Then-in a day, a week, a month (with some people the magic moment never comes) – he decides, for reasons I have never quite been able to fathom, that you are real, and then he becomes a warm, gay, sensitive, sympathetic, though, being Balinese, always precisely controlled, person. You have crossed, somehow, some moral or metaphysical shadow line. Though you are not exactly taken as a Balinese (one has to be born to that), you are at least regarded as a human being rather than a cloud or a gust of wind. The whole complexion of your relationship dramatically changes to, in the majority of cases, a gentle, almost affectionate one – a low-keyed, rather playful, rather mannered, rather bemused geniality.

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school.

2) From Yirmiyahu Yovel’s “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: the Cancioneros”:

Often, when we are disposed to read them that way, the novels and poems of another era can serve as cogent historical documents. Whether realistic or ironic, equivocal or crudely direct, complexly symbolic or outright vulgar, or a mix of the above, works of fiction will reward the curious intruder with knowledge, illustration, and insights of a kind that “factual” records and the no-less-tendentious chronicles often lack.

A particularly telling genre is the fifteenth-century Spanish Cancioneros: collections of vivid, popular poems that flourished parallel to the first converso generation (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, mostly by force or harsh pressure). The Cancioneros were often coarse and satirical but also on occasion speculative and intimately personal. Using unadorned language and simple rhyme, the poems dealt, sometimes irreverently, with current events, people, social habits, and institutions, and they also served their authors to quarrel, flatter, defame, and supplicate.

To the willing reader,4 the Cancioneros offer illuminating glances into the converso situation and its early dualities. Surprisingly, many authors of these poems were conversos of the first generation, as was the first compiler of their work, Juan Alfonso de Baena; a former Jew who had been converted to Catholicism during the riots of 1391. Several poems abound in Jewish concepts and Hispanized Hebrew idioms, which readers were presumed to understand. A good many poems attack and defend conversos, voice feuds among conversos, and otherwise articulate their mental and social complexities.

In one poem, the count of Paredes attacks an aspiring converso author, Juan Poeta (Juan of Valladolid), and in so doing offers a vignette of the converso poet, his many faces and unsettled identity:

Each of the following is his name – Juan, Simuel [Shemuel] and Reduan [Arabic name]. A moor, so he won’t be dead, A Christian, so he’ll have more worth, But a Jew he is for certain, As far as I can know.

This hostile image is not altogether incredible. The ending is quite revealing. The writer does not claim that Juan is a genuine Jew who merely puts on false masks but that all of his faces constitute his identity; although his Jewish persona appears to be dominant (or at least the most “certain”), this claim is immediately qualified (“as far as I can know”), for the converso’s most distinctive characteristic is that no one can know exactly who he is – perhaps not even himself.

For a while I thought conservatism was excessively masculine. Then for a while I thought conservatism was excessively feminine. Now I think conservatism is both at once: its ideal is maximum sexual divergence. In conservatism the men try to be as traditionally masculine as possible and the women as traditionally feminine as possible.

The divergence is far more exaggerated divergent than nature produces on its own (which is really no argument against it) and perhaps more divergent than is beneficial to culture (which is a very arguable argument, but one worth having).

In liberalism the men and women both attempt to synthesize the traditional qualities of masculinity and femininity.

The androgyny might be as unnatural as the conservatives sexual roles, but really – so what? We are human beings, and that being is naturally artificial. When we try to “be natural” there’s something artificial about it. Don’t most self-consciously natural people seem a little full of shit?

Pointing at the caricatures doesn’t accomplish anything. There are embarassing fakes and hypocrites on both sides.

It comes back to the arguable argument. What is our cultural ideal? What does amplifying sexual divergence accomplish? What does cultivating androgyny accomplish? Do we need one or the other, or do the two together have some integral purpose?

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The Androgyne is a traditional symbol of primordial unity.

Have you ever been in a conversation like this?

You are trying to make yourself understood to another person. He is listening very carefully, responding point by point, and each point makes sense… but somehow you know you are not really being heard.

You attempt to express this feeling. The response is something to the tune of: “So, if I don’t agree with you, that means I don’t understand?”

At which point you try to defend yourself, stammering, groping, struggling for coherence. You know there’s something unfair about that characterization, but you can’t seem to answer it. You’re not persuaded at all that you are wrong, nor that the other is right, but you do not know how to argue your position. What you are trying to say eludes you, and it feels as if the elusiveness of your point is being exploited. You can’t prove that, either. You listen to yourself and hear how poorly you are representing yourself and you begin to despair.

Eventually you concede just to make the conversation end, just to avoid hearing yourself sound like an idiot.

“Excellent!” He says, “We have reached an agreement.”

This “agreement” is filed away like a Supreme Court decision. It will be used to settle future cases.

You were never persuaded, though. You were only somehow, mysteriously prevented from communicating. The more this happens the less you want to keep arguing. Silence is taken for agreement, but the silence is estrangement.

What is going on there?

You wanted dialogue, but what you got was debate.

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Dialogue is an attempt by two or more parties to reach mutually persuasive common ground. One party or the other might be persuaded to the other’s original position, or they might arrive together at some kind of middle ground, or a synthesis might be discovered that transcends both positions. Each party goes out to the other and tries to see the other’s position in the best possible light (that is, as a whole, from its own perspective), including, most importantly the legitimate reasons why the other party prefers their own position.

Debate is an attempt by two or more parties to represent one’s own position as superior to that of the other. In general, the arguments are intended less for the opponent and more for the audience. The debater wishes to put his opponent in a position that will demonstrate to his supporters that their position is indeed the right one, and secondarily to undermine the the resolve of his opponents and weaken their resistance. Each party fortifies itself against the other and tries to put the other’s position in the worst possible light, to delegitimize it, and sometimes to cast doubt on the other party’s true intentions.

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In dialogue:

1. The parties involved speak directly to one another.
2. The parties involved try to see the other’s position in the best light.
3. The intention is to arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome.
4. The process aims at unanimity.
5. The process is creative: it generates new possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to yield as much as they can to the other.
7. Trust is necessary and presupposed.
8. Often, the parties believe in pluralism – that multiple, legitimate ways to see the situation can exist side by side, with none being the sole or even objectively superior perspective

In debate:

1. The parties involved speak through one another to an audience, and primarily to those who share one’s perspective and  already actively or latently in agree.
2. The parties involved try to put the other’s position in the worst light.
3. The intention is to promote one’s own favored outcome, at the expense of the other
4. The process aims at convincing an overpowering majority.
5. The process is destructive: it eliminates flawed, weak or underdeveloped possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to win as much ground as possible from the other.
7. Trust is not necessary and sometimes active distrust is presupposed.
8. Often, at least one of the parties believe in objectivism – that the truth of a situation is what it is, and that conflicting opinions signal that someone is mistaken about, or is misrepresenting or distorting the objective truth.

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Debate – ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin dis– (expressing reversal) + battere ‘to fight.’

Dialogue – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French dialoge, via Latin from Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with,’ from dia ‘through’ + legein ‘speak.’

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Debate is pursuit of coersion without bloodshed. Dialogue is the pursuit of friendship.

Debate can win an argument, but it cannot win friendship.

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A debate with no audience – what does that mean? Who does he mean to persuade, if not you, the partner in this discussion? Is he persuading himself that you are unreasonable and that dialogue with you is impossible?

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A debate before a reasonable audience is won through reason. A debate before an unreasonable audience is lost through reason.

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Am I arguing for dialogue? Obviously.

Am I arguing dialogicially for dialogue? Obviously not. This post is a one-sided debate. I am speaking to those who already agree with me. Dialogue with the unreasonable must be imposed. They must be politically forced to practice dialogue. As long as an unreasonable man believes he can undermine and circumvent dialogue, he will continue to attempt it.

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I consider the defense of dialogue a chivalrous and deeply androgynous act.

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Martin Buber:

I had a friend whom I account one of the most considerable men of our age. He was a master of conversation, and he loved it: his genuineness as a speaker was evident. But once it happened that he was sitting with two friends and with the three wives, and a conversation arose in which by its nature the women were clearly not joining, although their presence in fact had a great influence. The conversation among the men soon developed into a duel between two of them (I was the third). The other ‘duelist’, also a friend of mine, was of a noble nature; he too was a man of true conversation, but given more to objective fairness than to the play of the intellect, and a stranger to any controversy. The friend whom I have called a master of conversation did not speak with his usual composure and strength, but he scintillated, he fought, he triumphed. The dialogue was destroyed.

Sometimes we fail to find what we seek because we’ve pictured what we are seeking and reject what does not conform to that image.

When seeking objects or object-form knowledge (episteme), picturing what you are seeking is a good idea.

Wisdom – sophia – is different. Sophia is not graspable like episteme. Sophia is transcendence-form. Sophia is relational. You are in it, it exceeds you while involving you.

Transcendence-form is, by definition, radically surprising. If your destination is radical surprise,  preconditions equal preclusion. You’ll never arrive at the unexpected if reject it for failing to conform to your expectations.

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Idol – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French idole, from Latin idolum ‘image, form’ (used in ecclesiastical Latin in the sense ‘idol’ ), from Greek eidolon, from eidos ‘form, shape.’

Ecstasy – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself,’ based on ek– ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place.’

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Many people work on their lives as a pre-memory. They dwell in future perfect tense (a future past-tense).

When they are happy they are literally beside themselves:”Here I am, in this happy situation.”

Everything that happens to them is a story they’ll live out later while they’re telling it. They are only real as the presenter of who they mistake themselves for.

They need witnesses to their self-sufficiency, independence and wisdom to feel themselves self-sufficient, independent and wise. If you managed to bust them on it, they’d feel ashamed, but of precisely the wrong things.

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“Borges and I”

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

– Jorge Luis Borges

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There’s a peculiar shame to many writers’ personae.

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Episteme grasps. It can grasp physical objects (the gross) and the types of knowledge that a mind can contain and comprehend (the subtle).

Sophia relates our own finite being to what contains us and transcends our comprehension. Sophia does not grasp – it feels the grasp that unifies the being and articulates the beings that constitute our world.

No self is epistemically known.

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Eden was lost when we took episteme for sophia.

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Facts about wisdom are not wisdom.

The conventional wisdom that warns us against living in the future or past and urges us instead to live in the present is unclear, confused and potentially misleading.

The present is essentially the dialogue of memory and anticipation. A present that excludes memory as past and anticipation as future is nonsensical.

To live in the present means to allow the past to be memory and to allow the future to be anticipation.

What we should avoid is a sense of past dominated by disappointed anticipations and a sense of future consumed with hope for happier memories of now.

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We memorialize a person by preserving his tangible forms: his name, his image, the historical facts of this life.

We immortalize a person by living his spirit: his meaning, his way of seeing and loving.

An immortalized person will pull along his memory in his wake, because his memory will be loved.

An unloved memory will fade into oblivion. Nobody loves names, images and facts for their own sake.