The traditional Eastern triad of earth, man, heaven can be translated to what, how, and why, or object, verb, and subject (taken primarily as as the source of valuation).

The trigrams describe varying states (yang, changing yang, yin, changing yin) each stratum (or yao, in the language of trigrams) can take which determines the quality of a given situation. A situation comprises a subject situated amidst objects of varying relationship to the subject. The state of each stratum can be unitary or fragmentary (unitary corresponding to yang, disintegrating/diverging corresponding to changing yang, fragmentary corresponding to yin, integrating/converging corresponding to changing yin).

The value of the trigrams lies in the fact that the situations are intrinsically gestalts that are not easy to analyze, because each part of the situation modifies the whole in non-obvious ways. The modification seems to be caused by what is modified, where what is modified generally reflects a change originating elsewhere. For instance, if the meaning of a situation (heaven/why/subject) is disintegrating, this change may be felt most distinctly as doubts around the practical response (man/how/verb) and the objects concerned (earth/what/object) in the form of change in relevance and relation among the entities involved in the situation. Conversely, if heaven is integrating the change may manifest as emerging practical resolve and as clarity in regard to the relevant entities and how they connect. (I may write more on this later.)

Another thing I want to record before I forget: the permutations of yin and yang in each yao create situational gestalts, each with distinct character. The “Securing Reality” post I made last month was a first attempt to summarize those situational gestalts.

 The experiencing self is the nexus of the world – not necessarily the world itself, nor the world’s origin, nor the world’s destiny. It is, however, necessarily the world’s nexus, whatever else it may be. That “whatever else” in connection with the experiencing self is the genetic kernel of the self’s metaphysics and morality.

For sure, no totality is as total as it self-evidently appears; every totality is suspended in an exceeding infinity. But does it automatically follow from this fact that morality demands constant and infinitely sensitive awareness of infinity, particularly in our interactions with others? Despite the fact that refusal to sympathize with others is a universal component of evil, does that mean that refusal to sympathize is essentially evil?

Perhaps sometimes we totalize our world for good reason. (Just as sometimes the infinite must break through to us.)

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Next time you see one of those cars plastered with dozens of bumper stickers, look for the one that says “Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.”

If you get a chance to talk to the driver ask her what parachute packs and ripcords are for. Or see if she’s open to performing an experimental jump with an unpacked parachute.

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Every complex living thing has a membrane which selectively admits and rejects what is foreign.

So far in Dewey I’ve seen no recognition of the need to harmonize and focus the disparate elements of subjectivity. Without this harmony and focus, no individual or collectivity can care enough to take responsibility for itself, much less the conditions that influence it. This harmony and focus very well might involve simplification and even a certain degree of (poetic) falsification. This would be a slippery slope if it weren’t for the fact that the surface slips in both directions: toward unreality on one side and apathy on the other. In this time we are threatened by both at once.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– W. B. Yeats

I don’t expect anyone to read much of this:

If monism is founded on (in) a monad, what is pluralism founded on? A “plurad”? A plurad is the background of monads; and each monad is self-evidently self-grounded. A monad’s derivation from its plurad is existentially known only through the experience of change across monistic foundings. For a minute, I thought the plurad would be synonymous with the Tao, but the plurad might be just another monad.

A thinker tends to transpose the Transcendent into the terms of his current ontology. The meaning of the Transcendent for me currently is based on a sort of calculus of perspective. I look at the trajectory of the kinds of change I apperceptively observe in my observations as I iteratively blow up and reconstitute my understanding of being, and that trajctory suggests a negatively-defined point of approach. I’m on the lookout for ontological transpositions, and I don’t trust myself one bit to avoid them. There’s no way to positively expect the unexpected, so I try to acknowledge the utter futility of attempting to settle it, and I try to allow my spiritual processes to run their course by their own principles and not impose standards on where they take me. I’m not sure if that’s a sustainable way to live, though. The moral value of this way of living is not clear. The point of it is also not clear. I’ll probably have to stop at some point to avoid implosion or terrible social consequences, or maybe I’ll stop on my own from exhaustion.

(I googled “plurad” to see whether it has been used as a word, and I found this.)

According to Nyanaponika Thera in his book Abhidamma Studies, The Abhidhamma, the fundamental Buddhist metaphysical treatise, is primarily phenomenological. One exception to the phenomenological approach is the existence of the negatively defined Nibbana (the Pali/Theravada word for Nirvana). When presented this way Nibanna appears to be another name for the Tao. Nibanna is “not included” within conditioned existence, the subject of the work.

An ontology can be arrested or preserved by a number of attitudes. A provisional list:

• Reductionism: treating one kind of being as strictly derived from another unlike kind of being.
• Mysticism: classifying what is outside of known being as unknowable in principle.
• Romanticism: assigning qualities of being to what is outside of known being.
• Ideology: reflexively invalidating what is unknowable within one’s current ontology.
• Decadence: refusing to clarify one’s thoughts enough to distinguish and relate various kinds of being.
• Ignorance: accepting the self-evident sufficiency of one’s ontology in the absence of evident insufficiency

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I’ve thought of philosophy as a quest for authentically innocent blissful ignorance. Innocent means one has sincerely attempted to overcome reductionism, mysticism, romanticism, ideology, decadence and ignorance… and failed so completely he cannot avoid feeling he has succeeded.

(Can a person feel he has succeeded if people he respects remain unpersuaded?)

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A question I have not asked seriously enough: What is the moral value of arresting or preserving an ontology? When is it right or wrong to arrest or preserve an ontology, and what is the standard and ground of this rightness or wrongness?

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Note: According to my definition of reductionism, strong holism (as I understand it) is as much a form of reductionism as atomism, because strong holism reduces parts to mere articulations from wholes and denies the reality of a part’s individual being.

The decision to live according to one’s own experience and reason is more radical and problematic than it seems, but there is no more reasonable alternative.

Self as individual seer.

Self as a seen individual.

Self as participatory seer, which means that the shared seeing subjectivity is as much a concern as the seen object.

Self as seen as belonging to a particular whole: a member of a particular type.

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An account can be taken sequentially: each part evaluated in turn, admitted or rejected.

An account can be taken whole: all parts admitted, and evaluated in relation to one another.

Before an account is fully understood, in what state is the understanding?

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I watched two girls learn to speak. They learned to imitate tone, the vocabulary was secondary – at first the words were vehicles for tone, then the meanings of words developed out of the babble.

I’m told I didn’t speak at all until I could form sentences out of defined words.

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I like to watch women talking in restaurants, leaning toward one another, looking at each other, gesturing and mirroring gestures.

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Years ago when I was learning to meditate I thought I heard a dim phonemical flux playing in the back of my mind. A phoneme resembling a word reminded me of a word and caused an idea to crystalise and pop into my head. It’s hard to know if that happened or if it was like a dream making retroactive sense in semifalsified recollection.

… looked sort of like this:

I’m not sure when I’ll get around to reading it, but I just ordered The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom.

The premise of the book sounds very similar to Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors”.

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The people I know who are most preoccupied with fending off influence and protecting their originality are the ones who haven’t even begun to liberate themselves from the influence of culture. These people tend to rethink what’s been well-thought and in fact, thought all the way through and out again by men who have accepted the humiliation of being taught.

The irony of intellectual pride is that it tends to make a thinker complacent and less likely to work and win less obvious knowledge. The disinclination to acknowledge one’s intellectual debt to one’s culture is the arrogance of youth. The extreme and uncritical valuation of originality of thought which makes the youth prefer to overlook his debt to the past is one of the more conspicuous symptoms of this debt.

Arrogance: ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare.

Apology: away+ speech. Speech toward what is away… toward what has become away?… in response to becoming away?

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.(denoting a formal defense against an accusation): from French apologie, or via late Latin from Greek apologia ‘a speech in one’s own defense,’ from apo ‘away’ + -logia.

Honor and narcissism are two forms of androgyny, meaning that self knows itself both as essence (seer) and appearance (seen), but their orientations are different. Honor is extraverted androgyny and narcissism is introverted androgyny. Honor cultivates essence and appearance together in order to interface more fully with an enclosing (that is, transcendent) world populated with seeing entities who are seen (what Levinas calls “the face”). Narcissism cultivates essence and appearance together in order to create a a self-enjoying short circuit. The narcissist maintains conditions for the self enjoyment, both through behavioral aesthetics (self-pleasing actions) and ethics (doing what is necessary for the practical upkeep of the self-pleasing life). Honor also engages in behavioral aesthetics and ethics, but in addition is moral, meaning that it recognizes the mystery of others – a binding mystery.

(As I’ve said before, the borderline personality experiences self solely as seen, pure yin; and the autistic personality experiences self solely as seeing, pure yang. Existentialism is artificial autism.)

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Honor cultivates appearance for the seeing of others beyond self, in order to approach them as fellow-seers who see differently and who can potentially bring one another to different seeing together: an opening to agreement. Honor recognizes the relevance of the radically other, which is not at all the same as automatically accepting its legitimacy.

Narcissism cultivates essence and appearance together in order to enjoy the seeing and being seen of self, and the seeing of others is welcomed only as a reflection of this seeing and being-seen of self: a closing off of disagreement. Narcissism rejects what is radically other, sometimes aggressively, but often serenely, and often in an act of extravagant tolerance, as acceptance of the fact of otherness as permanently and unapproachably beyond its participation. Much mysticism is narcissism: otherness is a sparkling backdrop to one’s own serene soliptic self-orbit, something to gape at or to pray to, but nothing that could break or burn or blow someone to pieces – nor renew him. Those who want to be left the hell alone are attracted to this kind of vision of heaven.

“Thin Cities 5, Octavia”
From Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.

This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

Pride -> honor -> vanity -> contempt -> pride …

Slowly the lamp is covered by moths until it is eclipsed and no longer attracts moths.

A mothy crust: a testimonial.

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Our world has one sun and one moon, roughly the same size in our sky, a German sky.

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We say “sun and moon” as if they were antitheses, like something and nothing, or subject and object, or good and evil.

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If the unknown were as resistant to esteem as it is to knowledge, this world would be very different. For one thing, there would be no religion. After all, there would be no poetry – but the loss of poetry goes unnoticed.

Out in the ocean with no land in sight a navigator looks up and takes readings of stars he knows by name, each set in its precise position within the constellations. The stars tell him where he is, where others have been, and where others are now.

In the town the people look up at the same stars but they see less than the the navigator. They are at home together under their roofs under the starry expanse.

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Free conversation is standing together on common ground, in common understanding, looking out upon the world.

Understanding of words can be the enjoyment of common ground. Or words can be a means to coming to common ground.

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Converse: ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [live among, be familiar with] ): from Old French converser, from Latin conversari ‘keep company (with),’ from con- ‘with’ + versare, frequentative of vertere ‘to turn.’

Conversing – Turning with another, toward the topic.

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“I will hear you out.”

“I will try to understand what you are saying.”

“I will try to understand the ground of what you are saying, because what is said is comprehensible only in reference to the ground from which it is said.”

“I will try to stand on your ground with you, with you in order to understand what you are saying, because an understanding must be arrived at, not comprehended from afar.”

“We should find common ground. That ground, once we find it, will lead back to where we stand now, what we cannot help but take for the destination.”

In college I spent hours drawing. I did not know how a drawing would turn out. As I drew I drew in response to the drawing-in-progress, which perpetually surprised me in a twofold way: 1) in how the drawing unfolded before me, and 2) in the responses the drawing drew from me. Part of what kept me absorbed in the drawing was suspense of the unfolding.

As long as I stayed absorbed in the drawing of the drawing I was absolutely surefooted. The times I lapsed into reflection on myself and my abilities and drew as “myself who is drawing” everything fell apart. Nothing interesting would happen, my fingers had to be told what to do, the drawing and the drawing were ruined together.

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The artifact of the drawing feeds into the craft of the drawing, which produces the artifact.

Craft -> artifact -> craft -> artifact …

In conversation, what is heard feeds into what is said which produces what is heard.

Saying -> said -> saying -> said …

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Art creates itself through the artist. Conversation has itself through the interlocutors.

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Absorption is bliss. Craft is bliss.

Reading on in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity:

We must now indicate the terms which will state the deformalization or the concretization of the idea of infinity, this apparently wholly empty notion. The infinite in the finite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire – not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A Desire perfectly disinterested – goodness. But Desire and goodness concretely presuppose a relationship in which the Desirable arrests the “negativity” of the I that holds sway in the Same – puts an end to power and emprise. This is positively produced as the possession of a world I can bestow as a gift on the Other – that is, as a presence before a face. For the presence before a face, my orientation toward the Other, can lose the avidity proper to the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands. This relationship established over the things henceforth possibly common, that is, susceptible of being said, is the relationship of conversation. The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kathauto. It expresses itself. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its “form” the totality of its “content,” finally abolishing the distinction between form and content. This is not achieved by some sort of modification of the knowledge that thematizes, but precisely by “thematization” turning into conversation. The condition for theoretical truth and error is the word of the other, his expression, which every lie already presupposes. But the first content of expression is the expression itself. To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. The Aristotelian analysis of the intellect, which discovers the agent intellect coming in by the gates, absolutely exterior, and yet constituting, nowise compromising, the sovereign activity of reason, already substitutes for maieutics a transitive action of the master, since reason, without abdicating, is found to be in a position to receive.

Finally, infinity, overflowing the idea of infinity, puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question. It commands and judges it and brings it to its truth. The analysis of the idea of Infinity, to which we gain access only starting from an I, will be terminated with the surpassing of the subjective.