Category Archives: Philosophy

Buber on marriage and responsibility

Philosophy

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.

Fundamentalists as lukewarm modernists

Philosophy

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.

Blind to darkness

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Taoism

A question can be seen as a kind of intellectual darkness waiting to be illuminated by an answer.

Philosophy is not about illuminating darkness. It is about turning one’s head and making visible new regions where darkness and light can exist to one who asks and answers. It is about discovering new questions one has never thought to ask. And when the answers change the character of one’s spontaneous (pre-interpreted) lived existence — when the changes are authentically subjective, meaning the change is experienced as a transfiguration of the world (as opposed to a modification of one’s psychological attributes or one’s opinions about this or that fact, however fundamental that fact is) — philosophy crosses over its line into religion.

Where the sciences answer darkness with light, religion answers with vision questions philosophy raises from blindness.

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As long as a science or philosophy does all its own asking and answering it remains sterile. Fertility requires otherness.

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The best seem to speak only to their own kind. Nobody else understands them.

What is the cause of this, and what is the effect? Nobody understands because nobody wishes to understand. But, maybe the wish to understand has never been awakened simply because they haven’t been asked to understand. For sure, the wish to understand doesn’t want to wake up — but who ever thanks someone for waking them when they’re trying to sleep?

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Calling someone a scientist’s scientist or an artist’s artist or a musician’s musician — this is usually considered a complement. I hope someday soon it will be considered a devastating criticism.

Are there any poets left who are not poet’s poets?

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Collective solipsism is not much better than individual solipsism.

There are even forms of collective solipsism that encourage individual solipsism.

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Years ago I knew someone who insisted that there is no essential difference between the understanding of a technical manual and understanding a poem.  This failure to distinguish between different orders of understanding makes knowing what a self is impossible. It reduces subjectivity to psychological terms — that is, it forces subjectivity into objective thought-forms. This failure always has a peculiarly moral character — it seems to originate in need rather than incapacity. Perhaps it originates in the fear of a need.

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Sight knows only what is visible. Experience knows only what has been experienced.

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Negation does not produce the negative. If negation is possible, the negative is already gone. Philosophy has already occured and cannot be undone. Innocence is irretrievably lost.

Samsara

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Phenomenology

The modern confusion of objective knowledge with knowledge in general causes us to reject knowledge we cannot account for in objective terms. Or worse, it leads us to reject knowledge in general in order to legitimize our non-objective sense of life, which we cannot recognize as knowledge.

What is needed is not a choice of one or the other, but a way to relate objective knowledge to its non-objective counterpart, and this means relating to it and through it until one finally apprehends its ground by way of comprehension of its forms.

This does not happen on the terms of objectivity. There is a rejection of a kind in regard to objective knowledge, but what is rejected is not objectivity, but its apparent fundamental nature.

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(The question must be answered empirically, but the answer won’t be empirical.)

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The world is not a deception. The deception lies in what the world is taken to be. If the world is taken at face value, acceptance or rejection of what has been taken is equally meaningless: one has been taken.

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Scientism — science as metaphysic — is a species of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the locked foyer of genuine religion. The solution is not to annihilate the foyer door, but to unlock it. To unlock it we have to look in our hands and recognize the key as a key.

Protection

Ethics

In any genuine relationship, here’s no net gain in protectedness against the world. Certainly something positive is gained, but nothing negative is lost. Heraclitus said, “Nature likes to hide.” The retention of the negative (the desired shedding of the undesirable) in what seems to promise the shedding of the negative conceals an inconceivable gain. A sacrament is sacred for this seduction to the inconceivable, that is, to practical transcendence. (See note.)

A newlywed can become disillusioned in the discovery of suffering of the spouses pain. Pain is now shared. Overcoming the pain if it is to be overcome is a shared effort. One’s responsibility has expanded to that which cannot be directly controlled, only influenced, while consequences of the influenced are felt directly. It is as if the feeling nerves extend while the controlling nerves stay where they were.

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NOTE: Capital-T Transcendence is a magically pregnant “everything else” (a positive reflection of negativity) which gradually develops positive concrete meaning in lowercase-t practical transcendence. In this development, capital-T transcendence loses none of its magic, its pregnancy, nor its negativity. It is reality who changes. Knowledge about objects resolves into knowing relationships, and knowledge is liberated from the tyranny of the requirement to posess and master. This negative freedom-from, however, is secondary to — and exists for the sake of — a positive freedom-to: the freedom to relate.

One’s former beliefs about capital-T Transcendence were never wrong, but they can always be more right, and this increase in rightness is pragmatic.

It is hard to know if the purpose of the Transcendent is to call us to transcend, or whether all transcending is done for the sake of the Transcendent. It isn’t even clear if this is a question that needs asking. Really: Can we love God with all our heart, soul and mind without loving our neighbors as ourselves, or love our neighbors as ourselves without loving God with all our heart, soul and mind? Such things are not discrete, not object-form facts, not possessable, masterable knowledge. They’re expressible as dogma — they indicate truth — but dogma is not essential truth. Dogma is still object: true but not true enough.

Rebuberizing

Ethics

My situation requires some Judaic fortification. Until things change I’m dropping Hegel and taking up Buber.

A crucial passage from Buber’s “Dialogue” (in Between Man and Man):

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray.

There is a tale that a man inspired by God once went out from the creaturely realms into the vast waste. There he wandered till he came to the gates of the mystery. He knocked. From within came the cry: “What do you want here?” He said, “I have proclaimed your praise in the ears of mortals, but they were deaf to me. So I come to you that you yourself may hear me and reply.” “Turn back, ” came the cry from within. “Here is no ear for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

True address from God directs man into the place of lived speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another, and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the eternal partner.

 

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When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 22:34

Perfection

Ethics, Etymology, Philosophy

Yesterday I wrote this:

Love is the active desire to share a world, to see with. Love pursues the accomplishment of perfect sharing despite futility.

Some will point out the futility and on that basis to give up the pursuit, but this happens when love is lacking.

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Would someone who loves chocolate refuse to eat a portion of chocolate she knows she cannot finish? The chocolate is intrinsically good. Eating it is not a means to having eaten it.

Where something is a means and not an end in itself it is not intrinsically valued. Love is intrinsic valuing.

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In its imperfection, love is not absent, only its outer edges. Its imperfection is incompleteness, something remains to be done. But this is only a way of saying that it is inexhaustible.

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Today I read this passage by Martin Buber:

Religion as risk, which is ready to give itself up, is the nourishing stream of the arteries; as system, possessing, assured and assuring, religion which believes in religion is the veins’ blood, which ceases to circulate. And if there is nothing that can so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can, religion can hide from us as nothing else can the face of God. Principle there, dogma here, I appreciate the “objective” compactness of dogma, but behind both there lies in wait the — profane or holy — war against the situation’s power of dialogue, there lies in wait the “once-for-all” which resists the unforeseeable moment. Dogma, even when its claim of origin remains uncontested, has become the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation. Revelation will tolerate no perfect tense, but man with the arts of his craze for security props it up to perfectedness.

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Perfect –  ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French perfet, from Latin perfectus ‘completed,’ from the verb perficere, from per– ‘through, completely’ + facere ‘do.’

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Scatological meditation

Philosophy

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.

Negativity

Philosophy

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.

Mystery novels

Philosophy

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.

Chain of thoughts

Chord, Philosophy

Reading Hegel, a passage from Nietzsche popped into my head:

Transfiguration. — Those that suffer helplessly, those that dream confusedly, those that are entranced by things supernatural — these are the three divisions into which Raphael divided mankind. This is no longer how we see the world — and Raphael too would no longer be able to see it as he did: he would behold a new transfiguration.

Raphael is an important personality in Nietzsche, one of the few (along with Goethe and Chopin) he represented in a consistently affirmative light. It is always interesting to look at these references together, so I indexed all of Nietzsche’s Raphael references to see if an intelligible shape would emerge. In the process I came upon this passage from Daybreak, which always struck me as pivotal.

Learning. — Michelangelo saw in Raphael study, in himself nature: there learning, here talent. This, with all deference to the great pedant, is pedantic. For what is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation, whether at the stage of our fathers or an even earlier stage! And again: he who learns bestows talent upon himself — only it is not so easy to learn, and not only a matter of having the will to do so; one has to be able to learn. In the case of an artist learning is often prevented by envy, or by that pride which puts forth its sting as soon as it senses the presence of something strange and involuntarily assumes a defensive instead of a receptive posture. Raphael, like Goethe, was without pride or envy, and that is why both were great learners and not merely exploiters of those veins of ore washed clean from the siftings of the history of their forefathers. Raphael vanishes as a learner in the midst of appropriating that which his great competitor designated as his ‘nature’: he took away a piece of it every day, this noblest of thieves; but before he had taken over the whole of Michelangelo into himself, he died — and his last series of works is, as the beginning of a new plan of study, less perfect and absolutely good precisely because the great learner was interrupted in his hardest curriculum and took away with him the justificatory ultimate goal towards which he looked.

The phrase “noblest of thieves” is an obvious reference to Hermes, and what Nietzsche is discussing here is hermeneutics, specifically hermeneutical appropriation. When you fully understand the reality of hermeneutics (which means you have participated in it and have experience of its peculiarly holistic befores and afters) the apparently random attributes of Hermes resolve into coherence. According to wikipedia, Hermes is “the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.”

Some more insights on Hermes from Guenon’s The Great Triad:

To explain the formation of the caduceus it is said that Mercury saw two serpents fighting each other (a figure of chaos) and that he separated them (distinction of contraries) with a rod (determination of an axis along which chaos will be ordered in order to become the Cosmos) around which they coiled themselves (equilibrium of the two contrary forces acting symmetrically with respect to the ‘World Axis’). It should also be noted that the caduceus (kerukeion, insignia of the heralds) is considered the characteristic attribute of the two complementary functions of Mercury or Hermes: on the one hand the Gods’ interpreter and messenger, and on the other the ‘psychopomp,’ conducting beings through their changes of state or their passage from one cycle of existence to another; these two functions correspond respectively to the descending and ascending currents represented by the two serpents.

Hegel on practical transcendence

Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Hegel’s introduction to Phenomenology of Mind contains a description of what I have been calling practical transcendence:

This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself — on its knowledge as well as on its object — in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely, what is termed Experience. In this connection, there is a moment in the process just mentioned which should be brought into more decided prominence, and by which a new light is cast on the scientific aspect of the following exposition. Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

In this treatment of the course of experience, there is an element in virtue of which it does not seem to be in agreement with what is ordinarily understood by experience. The transition from the first object and the knowledge of it to the other object, in regard to which we say we have had experience, was so stated that the knowledge of the first object, the existence for consciousness of the first ens per se, is itself to be the second object. But it usually seems that we learn by experience the untruth of our first notion by appealing to some other object which we may happen to find casually and externally; so that, in general, what we have is merely the bare and simple apprehension of what is in and for itself. On the view above given, however, the new object is seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is our doing, what we contribute; by its means the series of experiences through which consciousness passes is lifted into a scientifically constituted sequence, but this does not exist for the consciousness we contemplate and consider. We have here, however, the same sort of circumstance, again, of which we spoke a short time ago when dealing with the relation of this exposition to scepticism, viz. that the result which at any time comes about in the case of an untrue mode of knowledge cannot possibly collapse into an empty nothing, but must necessarily be taken as the negation of that of which it is a result — a result which contains what truth the preceding mode of knowledge has in it. In the present instance the position takes this form: since what at first appeared as object is reduced, when it passes into consciousness, to what knowledge takes it to be, and the implicit nature, the real in itself, becomes what this entity per se, is for consciousness; this latter is the new object, whereupon there appears also a new mode or embodiment of consciousness, of which the essence is something other than that of the preceding mode. It is this circumstance which carries forward the whole succession of the modes or attitudes of consciousness in their own necessity. It is only this necessity, this origination of the new object — which offers itself to consciousness without consciousness knowing how it comes by it — that to us, who watch the process, is to be seen going on, so to say, behind its back. Thereby there enters into its process a moment of being per se, or of being for us, which is not expressly presented to that consciousness which is in the grip of experience itself. The content, however, of what we see arising, exists for it, and we lay hold of and comprehend merely its formal character, i.e. its bare origination; for it, what has thus arisen has merely the character of object, while, for us, it appears at the same time as a process and coming into being.

 

Hegel haters

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

The objections to Hegel I’ve heard so far fall into three categories.

  1. Hegel is an obscurantist. The empty nonsensicality of his thought is concealed by his misuse of language and his needlessly convoluted arguments.
  2. Hegel lacked cohesive vision (synesis), and attempted to compensate for this deficiency through theoretical systematization. This is a view Nietzsche seems to have held.
  3. Hegel lacked awareness that his apparent final actualization of the potential of thought was only apparent. He lacked knowledge of the properties of what postmodernist thinkers call “horizon”.

It is hard for me to take the first two objections seriously. It seems to be a cynical choice to blame the author for one’s own failure to understand a work as it was meant to be understood. Instead of pursuing an understanding of the work as it was meant to be understood, Hegel himself is reduced to the status of an object of inquiry, something to observe and diagnose from an exterior vantage point. This sort of self-excusing from true hermeneutical reading (a dialogical reading that recovers the emic spirit in which the work was produced) justified by the belief that the author is a charlatan or an ideologue puts the reader in danger of listening like an ideologue, imposing his own limited fore-understanding on material that exceeds his philosophical reach, making transcendent understanding entirely impossible.

The third objection seems possibly valid. If the objection is valid, though, the question must be asked: is Hegel now refuted? or is he simply sublated, and paradoxically affirmed?

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Early Nietzsche seems strongly influenced by Hegel, and it has been his more Hegelian passages I’ve liked best.

Hegel (sounding very Chinese)

Philosophy

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.

Etymologies of English words associated with Hegel

Etymology, Philosophy

Subject – ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense of person owing obedience): from Old French suget, from Latin subjectus ‘brought under,’ past participle of subicere, from sub– ‘under’ + jacere ‘throw.’

Object – ORIGIN late Middle English : from medieval Latin objectum ‘thing presented to the mind,’ neuter past participle (used as a noun) of Latin obicere, from ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’

Substance – ORIGIN Middle English (denoting the essential nature of something): from Old French, from Latin substantia ‘being, essence,’ from substant– ‘standing firm,’ from the verb substare, sub– ‘under, close to’ + stare ‘to stand.’

Existence – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from late Latin existentia, from Latin exsistere ‘come into being,’ from ex– ‘out’ + sistere ‘take a stand.’

Essence – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin essentia, from esse ‘be.’

Immanence – ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin immanent– ‘remaining within,’ from in– ‘in’ + manere ‘remain.’

Transcendence – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin transcendent– ‘climbing over,’ from the verb transcendere, from trans– ‘across’ + scandere ‘climb.’.

Appearance – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French aparance, aparence, from late Latin apparentia, from Latin apparere, from ad– ‘toward’ + parere ‘come into view.’

Revelation – ORIGIN Middle English (in the theological sense): from Old French, or from late Latin revelatio(n-), from revelare ‘lay bare’, from re– ‘again’ (expressing reversal) + velum ‘veil.’

Manifestation – ORIGIN late Middle English : from late Latin manifestatio(n-), from the verb manifestare ‘make public.’

Phenomenon – ORIGIN late 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view,’ based on phainein ‘to show.’

Intention – ORIGIN Middle English entend (in the sense of direct the attention to), from Old French entendre, from Latin intendere ‘intend, extend, direct,’ from in– ‘toward’ + tendere ‘stretch, tend.’

Articulate – ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin articulatus, past participle of articulare ‘divide into joints, utter distinctly,’ from articulus ‘small connecting part’, diminutive of artus ‘joint.’

Concept – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French concevoir, from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take.’

Notion – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin notio(n-) ‘idea,’ from notus ‘known,’ past participle of noscere.

Idea – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Latin from Greek idea ‘form, pattern,’ from the base of idein ‘to see.’

Ideologue – ORIGIN late 18th cent. : from French idéologie, from Greek idea ‘form, pattern’ + –logos (denoting discourse or compilation).

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

Thesis – ORIGIN late Middle English : via late Latin from Greek, literally ‘placing, a proposition,’ from the root of tithenai ‘to place.’

Antithesis – ORIGIN late Middle English (originally denoting the substitution of one grammatical case for another): from late Latin, from Greek antitithenai ‘set against,’ from anti ‘against’ + tithenai ‘to place.’ The earliest current sense, denoting a rhetorical or literary device, dates from the early 16th cent.

Synthesis – ORIGIN early 17th cent.: via Latin from Greek sunthesis, from suntithenai ‘place together.’

Proposition – ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin pro– ‘forward’ + posit– ‘placed,’ from the verb ponere.

Assertion – ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin asserere ‘claim, affirm,’ from ad– ‘to’ + serere ‘to join.’

Negation – ORIGIN early 17th cent. : from Latin negat– ‘denied,’ from the verb negare.

Sublation – ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Latin sublat– ‘taken away,’ from sub– ‘from below’ + lat– (from the stem of tollere ‘take away’ ).

Cancellation – ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense of obliterate or delete writing by drawing or stamping lines across it): from Old French canceller, from Latin cancellare, from cancelli ‘crossbars.’

Erasure – ORIGIN late 16th cent. (originally as a heraldic term meaning represent the head or limb of an animal with a jagged edge): from Latin eras– ‘scraped away,’ from the verb eradere, from e– (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + radere ‘scrape.’

Eradication – ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense of pull up by the roots): from Latin eradicat– ‘torn up by the roots,’ from the verb eradicare, from e– (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + radix, radic– ‘root.’

Annihilation – ORIGIN late Middle English (originally as an adjective meaning destroyed, annulled): from late Latin annihilatus ‘reduced to nothing,’ from the verb annihilare, from ad– ‘to’ + nihil ‘nothing.’ The verb sense of destroy utterly dates from the mid 16th cent.

Overcoming – ORIGIN Old English ofercuman. Old English ofer (of Germanic origin; related to Dutch over and German über, from an Indo-European word – originally a comparative of the element represented by –ove in above – which is also the base of Latin super and Greek huper/hyper) + cuman, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch komen and German kommen.

Sublimation – ORIGIN late Middle English in the sense of raise to a higher status) : from Latin sublimat– ‘raised up,’ from the verb sublimare, from sub– ‘up to’ + a second element perhaps related to limen ‘threshold,’ limus ‘oblique.’

Speculative –  ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Latin speculat– ‘observed from a vantage point,’ from the verb speculari, from specula ‘watchtower,’ from specere ‘to look.’

Perspective – ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘optics’ ): from medieval Latin perspectiva (ars) ‘science of optics,’ from perspect– ‘looked at closely,’ from the verb perspicere, from per– ‘through’ + specere ‘to look.’

Answers are easy

Hermeneutics

Before you answer, worry a little: Are you so smart that you see the answer? or are you so stupid that you can’t see the question?

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By the time you have recognized the existence of the problem, identified its nature, and formulated the problem as a question the actual answering of the question is trivial.

The worst problems remain troublesome because the problem’s question has been poorly asked.

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One of my favorite quotes, from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.”

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Knowing one’s way about is being oriented by a clear question.

Yin, Yang, Tao

Philosophy

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.

 

Notes on emic versus etic

Design, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

In “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” Clifford Geertz outlines a fundamental concept of anthropology:

The formulations have been various: “inside” versus “outside,” or “first person” versus “third person” descriptions; “phenomenological” versus “objectivist,” or “cognitive” versus “behavioral” theories; or, perhaps most commonly, “emic” versus “etic” analyses, this last deriving from the distinction in linguistics between phonemics and phonetics — phonemics classifying sounds according to their internal function in language, phonetics classifying them according to their acoustic properties as such.

Some thoughts:

  1. The precise meaning of the suffix “-icity” (at least when applied to existential terms) has been unclear to me. The problem has been in that no-man’s-land between registering the presence of light anxiety and actually doing something to relieve it. I know what each -icity word means (facticity, historicity, scientificity, etc.), I just wouldn’t have been able to explain to someone else what it means. The resolution turns out to be fairly simple. The suffix -icity indicates the root is to be considered from an emic perspective. X-icity mean X considered as an interiorized existential condition (which conditions exteriorized facts), rather than as a simple exteriorized fact. (Example: History is the record of past events. Historicity is being inside history as a participant, where each historic moment is understood to have its distinctive way of seeing history, and based on this historic vision, making new history. This condition affects an entire sense of reality, holistically.)
  2. Holism is a quality of the emic, and atomism is a quality of the etic. According to the hermeneutical circle, there is never an etic fact (a part) that is not articulated from an emic whole (a fore-understanding).
  3. Only the etic is quantifiable. The emic as such is discussable strictly in qualitative terms. The emic, however, since it generates an etic vision of reality (in phenomenological terms, its intentionality) will produce quantifiable entities. Attempting to grasp the emic in etic terms (such as statistics) is the factual and moral mistake of behaviorism.
  4. Epistemology knows only the etic. Mysticism and poetry tends to treat the etic primarily as a vehicle for indicating an emic vision. Phenomenology understands the etic in terms of the emic. Hermeneutics understands the interplay between etic and emic and attempts to navigate by etic triangulation other emic visions. Pragmatism might be applied hermeneutics to cultural ends. (Despite the name, pragmatism is much stranger than many showier forms of philosophy. Ever notice how the serious druggies try to look as normal as possible?)
  5. Buber’s I-Thou relationships regards the other as essentially emic. In I-it the other is regarded as essentially etic.
  6. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the practice of listening. It’s not primarily a matter of being considerate and letting the other talk (though that’s certainly a part of it). Real listening requires the entire battery of philosophies I listed above. Listening is inviting the other’s emic vision. One must allow the other to say what he is trying to say and to hear it without trying to force it into one’s own emic schema by stripping out its emic structure (that is, pattern of significance), retaining only its etic content. Then the listener must attempt to apply that structure concretely to his own experience in an attempt to show the other his understanding of what he has heard, and he must be open to the possibility that he has misunderstood. This restatement stage of listening, though, can be non-receptive and aggressive and be used to channel the speaker away from his emic vision toward the vision of the listener. (This is the hardest part of interviews: not asking leading questions or offering leading restatements that derail and rechannel, distort or otherwise damage the emic vision of the interviewee.)
  7. Subjectivity properly understood is emic, but it is so commonly misunderstood to be some kind of interior dimension of a more solid/concrete/real etic world that “subjectivity” has become ruined for all practical communicate purposes. On the contrary, it is the etic that is interior to the emic. The emic “interiority” of each other in our environment is in fact partially shares but largely transcends our own emic and etic vision.

Tree cross (alt palette)

Lamp moths

Ethics

We’re always stealing choices. We make choices that are not ours to make. Someone makes a decision that someone else ought to be making and is called “presumptuous” or “aggressive”. Or someones decide to do something or to become something contrary to her own nature and consequently despairs.

When we refuse to steal a choice we say, “I have no choice.”

At the same time we’re always giving away choices that do belong to us – that belong to us alone and can only belong to us. What do we say then? “I have no choice.”

In the former case the statement is true; in the latter it is false.

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A true statement always has a complementary false abuse. Aping truth is essential to falsehood.

A person who rejects as categorically false any concept that has been shown to be used falsely is naive or/and a charlatan – or/and ironic.

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The fact that falsehood apes truth explains why the worst immorality is done under the guise of morality. This does not refute morality, but 1) makes morality deeply questionable, and 2) affirms morality.

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Where there is truth there is power, and where there is power there are charlatans. Even a tiny bit of truth and power attracts charlatans.

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Moths settle on a lamp and encrust it until the lamp is dark and its light is sealed inside.

(Maybe a helpful soul with a lamp could cast some light on the moth-eclipsed lamp so people could see what happened. If the moths were still alive, maybe they would abandon the old lamp for the new one in brightening flurry?)