Category Archives: Philosophy

Not Jewish yet

Philosophy

Buber and Levinas make me feel very Jewish. I am tempted to say that I am already Jewish, but then I catch myself. To say that my disposition toward Judaism already qualifies me as being Jewish is to succumb to the excessive theorizing tendency of Protestant Christianity. In Judaism as I understand it, the Jewish disposition leads the Jew to encounter and engage the infinite and incomprehensible and world of radical Otherness Jewishly. (Levinas sees God as the Infinite Other.) The locus is the encounter with Otherness, and the disposition (which includes the fore-understanding) that leads the engagement and the resulting disposition that follows the engagement (which includes the new understanding) is part of the engagement. For Protestant Christianity, the disposition is the locus, and the engagment matters for the sake of perfecting the disposition. My natural (or my deeply-internalized nurtured) impulse is Christian. I am oriented toward the knowledge, not its practical application in living, but my knowledge is turning itself away from living for knowledge toward living for living.

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The thrust of Protestant Christianity is radically individualistic. Groups sub-denominate themselves by their protestations, all the way down to the individual ego, who further fragments himself into conflicting inner-factions of instincts and urges and appetites. The excessive individualism of modernity is simply Protestantism having thrust itself to its extreme. The modern individual doesn’t even have his own individual religion. Each of his moods has a religion – each of his moods is a religion – a different system of moral priorities, a different sense of who and what is relevant or irrelevant – all answerable only to itself.

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Am I an immanentist, now?

On the horizons of the yet-unknowable

Philosophy

Nietzsche:

Always at home. – One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.

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Rumi (yet again):

Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

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Buber:

The science of man that makes use of the analytical method must accordingly always keep in view the boundary of such a contemplation, which stretches like a horizon around it. This duty makes the transposition of the method into life dubious; for it is excessively difficult to see where the boundary is in life.

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Nietzsche:

Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.

“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”

Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.

And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.

For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?

And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”

When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”

Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.

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Levinas:

The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity to reflect the case of an entity encountering on the outside nothing that limits it, overflowing every limit, and thereby infinite. The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity, for it is precisely in the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced. The idea of infinity is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me. It is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its own identity. Subjectivity realizes these impossible exigencies – the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain. This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated. Hence intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently non-adequation.

Surprise

Philosophy

A surprise is a defiance of an expectation.

A superficial surprise can catch us unprepared practically, but the situation is readily understood.

A deeper surprise requires some thought. We need some time to make sense of the facts and the consequences.

A radical surprise catches us unprepared to understand: we are required to adjust how we understand in general in order to understand the surprise. We do not understand how to understand what imposes itself as needing understanding. A radical surprise hits us ontologically. Kinds of being which were once dismissed or undifferentiated from kinds of being are now vividly existent within our disrupted reality.

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The first radical surprise seems like a revelation of the truth. Its style is hot and it attracts heat-seekers.

A second radical surprise is as radically surprising as the first. The permanent fact of surprise emerges, and beyondness situates I within itself.

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One can prepare to defend one’s closed horizon against surprise (which means to be an ideologue), or be prepared for being unprepared, which is another way to say “be open”.

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The transcendent is by definition what is beyond experience and beyond explanation (since explanation draws on experience).

Active limited transcendence is what gives meaning to the transcendent. There was how you saw before, and there is how you see now– and by extension, there is how you see now and how you might come to see. It is the strangest kind of analogue.

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A person’s conception of transcendence is limited by the depth of the surprises they’ve undergone. The key is to examine the structure:

Romanticism, for instance, conceives of the transcendent in terms of nonsensical modifications of qualities of objects; the giveaway is the objective ontology to which every idea conforms. All they know and have at hand is the object-form. A romantic is prepared for bodiless bodies, silent sounds, invisible colors, all sorts of inexplicable forces acting on things.

The romantic is perfectly ignorant of spirit, and parades her ignorance ignorantly and innocently. She doesn’t even realize there’s a truth here against which lies are possible. Fundamentalists are a rustic variety of romantic – less imaginative, more practical, more irritable. They’d be less irritable if they were less practical. The god of the fundamentalists does not like being put to the test, because he tends to bomb them.

An atheist does not believe in the romantic god, but he lacks any alternative vision. Honestly forces him to deny; ontological stuntedness prevents him from finding what would force him to affirm.

Atheists and fundamentalists love to debate because they work at the same ontological depth.

Mysticism conceives of the transcendent in terms of the first surprise. A mystic turn away from the world toward the subjectivity that underlies it. In doing so, they turn away from what would surprise them yet again if they would turn back around. Mysticism is right, but not right enough.

 

The I, the We, the Other, and transcendence

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I picked through several books today without getting traction in any one of them. I started with Richard J. Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity looking for references to Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas (who is generally considered Buber’s heir). I was looking for a summary of their differences, mostly to see if there is any similarity in Levinas’s view on Other and my own. I was also interested in how Bernstein situated Levinas in his understanding of Postmodernity. I began and abandoned Levinas’s Totality and Infinity last year, and I am considering picking it up again.

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I refer to Bernstein for my sense of the postmodern landscape because I trust him as one of the “good postmodernists”, which means he has given skepticism its full, horrific due (thus “postmodernist”) but that he responds to the destruction of truth (as moderns have conceived of it) by seeking some kind of ground upon which reality can be secured, not only privately but socially (thus “good”). For me, the “bad postmodernists” are the ones who use unrestrained skepticism to insulate themselves from all appeals from their fellow subjects, whether the appeals are directly subjective (that is ethical or aesthetic or psychological) or indirectly subjective (that is, objective or empirical) by depriving conversation of any shared factual points of reference. “Bad Postmodernity” has a tendency to “slide into an attitude that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness that cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss”. “Bad postmodernity” is my term. Berstein simply places quotes around “Postmodernity” to indicate modes of thought that imitate the forms of Postmodernity without participating in the substance of the thought which actually does stand beyond the horizons of Modernity. Interestingly, Bernstein excludes both Derrida and Foucault from pseudo-Postmodernity, and presents them in a generous light that makes them seem worth reading.

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I’m in an uncomfortable, intellectually tractionless state right now. This happens to me once or twice a year. I pick around through various books, trying to pick up the scent of where I need to go next.

I think maybe these are the times I’m supposed to summarize where I am.

I’m running short on time this morning, so I will list some of my fundamental views. (I consider these views – a sort of social-existentialism – triggered by Bernstein. These kinds of thoughts began to crystallize for me in 2005, following a deep perplexity arising around the meaning of the I Ching trigrams. I semi-resolved it through reading Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Anyone who knows something about the I Ching and Bernstein’s fusion of hermeneutics and pragmatist thinking should be able to see fairly easily how I synthesized them.) The views:

  • Denial of the existence of truth is often (and I’ve been caught at times saying “always”) a defense against the impingement of the Other.
  • The impingement of the Other is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in the entire world is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and for practical purposes is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind.
  • Inter-subjectivity is experienced as change in one’s subjectivity and the whole world, attributable to the influence of the Other.
  • A radical change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change: it is transcendent. It is understandable only in retrospect.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world, which is in disarray.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against impingement of the Other is the fending off of anxiety in the face of the transcendent.
  • The Other is transcendent. The relationship with the Other, the We is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the Other in participation in We.
  • We is a greater self, a whole within which an I is a part.
  • By participating in We, an I senses its situation within greater Selfhood.
  • A We is embedded in yet greater We.
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to the personhood of God.
  • The image of God: The self composed of instincts; the friendship composed of selves; the being that arises where “two or more gathered”.

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I’m recalling a Nietzsche quote:

Where are the needy in spirit? — Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame: he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit — but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! For ever in a kind of love and for ever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the paths that rise up to the sublime are close by! — That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

How do we secure reality?

Philosophy

Trigrams - “securing reality”

“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.” – Charles S. Peirce

Empathy and holism

Philosophy

Excerpt from Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”:

But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.

The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, and as unique — even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case — is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modem. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart — not only the so-called unconscious which is accessible to relative objectification, but also the psychic stream itself, which can never, in fact, be grasped as an object. This look is a reductive one because it tries to contract the manifold person, who is nourished by the microcosmic richness of the possible, to some schematically surveyable and recurrent structures. And this look is a deriving one because it supposes it can grasp what a man has become, or even is becoming, in genetic formulae, and it thinks that even the dynamic central principle of the individual in this becoming can be represented by a general concept. An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is levelled down.

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Personality typologies are a valuable tool for understanding human souls (especially in youth), but they are something to be mastered then transcended. Otherwise, become a device for permanently arresting maturity – of satisfactory semi-involvement for the sake of safe semi-alienation – of re-creating an artificial autistic state, where one is the sole soul in a world of behaving psychological objects.

Existentialism is artificial autism.

Subject

Philosophy

The best truths are ephemeral. The best truths cannot be possessed. It would be truer to say they possess us. They take us up when we are worthy of them, and they drop us when we think they are ours to own. We enter into a relationship with the best truths, and attempts to possess destroy this relationship.

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We inhabit the best truths like a garden is inhabited. An inhabitant participates in and is a participant of the habitat. We are living things among the living things who constitute the garden. The garden encloses and involves us as parts and participants of itself.

We, however, prefer our “objective” truths. An object can be mastered and possessed. An apple can be grasped in our hands, held up against the sky and seen whole, turned and examined on all sides. We can eat that apple and subsume it and force it to be “me”. It is true: some truths are like this, like objects, objective. The best truths, however, are not. The best truths are subjective – and whatever is genuinely subjective is holistic and transcendent.

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Modernity acknowledges subjectivity, but excludes it from the sphere of truth. Modernity acknowledges only objective truth.

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Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.

Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

I scanned Buber’s essay “Elements of the Interhuman” and put it in my wiki. It is hard to convey the feeling of satisfaction I’m enjoying right now at the fact that this essay exists. It is essentially a summary of my own ethic. When I say that I “feel Jewish”, this essay is an example of what I mean by Jewishness.

I say this essay summarizes my ethic, but that doesn’t mean it summarizes what my ethic was prior to reading the essay (which I read for the first time early this year). I’m not sure exactly how much I was persuaded by this particular essay the first time I read it, but I can say that the process of reading most of Buber’s writings this year did change me ethically. It wasn’t a persuasion away from my earlier ethic, but it was a persuasion beyond it. Also, it was my first experience of sharing this species of ethic-ethos with another soul – and considering that the species of ethic-ethos is an ethic of sharing ethic-ethos, that was a major life event. Sharing this ethic-ethos was an actualization of something that had before existed as mere faith. The fact that Buber existed to me only as an author makes little difference. (If you understand why I would say this, you’ll understand my hostility to all pomo “death of the author” talk. If an author is dead to you, you are dead to humanity. A person who rejoices at the announcement of the author’s death fears and hates authentic love. Love is fearsome especially if you know what it is, but this is what courage is for: love is the root of courage’s undeniable value. All people admire courage, whether they want to or not, even if they cannot love. Courage points to love, even if it seems to point into nothing.)

The standout idea of this essay the first time I read it was the distinction Buber made between the interhuman and the social. It made such an impression on me that it’s possible I noticed no other idea in the essay. A brilliant insight can blot out all surrounding ideas with its glare. In the last several days I’ve re-read several of the sections multiple times. Even on adjacent days the same passage can read entirely differently. Key personal insight: I am sensitive and effective in the interhuman sphere, but half- or three-quarters-blind and paralyzed in the social sphere. I need the social.

“Supposing truth is a woman–what then?”

Philosophy

Can a person’s relationship with truth evolve beyond the face-to-face fascination characteristic of youthful love and arrive at a mature turning together with the loved one toward the world?

The deepest figure-ground reversal: the philosophy which formerly had been a foreground feature seen against the background of reality now passes into the background. Reality, now in the foreground, is seen against the undergirding philosophy.

How could someone in that state teach philosophy?

The story of Right Hand, Left Hand…

Philosophy

Let me tell you the story of Right Hand, Left Hand. It’s a tale of Good and Evil.

HATE… it was with this hand that CAIN iced his brother.

LOVE… these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand, the hand of love.

The story of life is this: STATIC.

One hand is always fighting the other hand. And the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the Right Hand, LOVE, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the Right Hand’s coming back. Yeah, he’s got the Left Hand on the ROPES, now. That’s right. Yeah. BOOM. That’s a DEVASTATING right and HATE is hurt. DOWN! OH! OH! Left Hand, HATE, KO’ed by LOVE.

If I love you, I love you.

But, If I hate you…

Reflection on “Distance and Relation”

Philosophy

I just finished rereading Buber’s “Distance and Relation”, and it made me want to list the ways other people can exist to one another.

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Another person can be nonexistent, latent in the environment: unnoticed, in blind irrelevance.

Another person can exist as an object that emerges from the environment: noticed, but relevant functionally, not a subject. (Never forget: symbols are functional…)

Another person can exist as a person in principle: a subject-within-an-object, but the subject is one in whom we are not involved. We leave the subject sealed inside the object until the subjectivity makes itself relevant to us. (Note regarding William Ayers: Fear makes what is feared instantly relevant. Terrorism is the method of using fear to make one’s systematically disregarded subjectivity relevant to those who wish to ignore it out of existence.)

Another person can exist merely psychologically: a subject which is experienced by means of its behavior. The behavior can be studied as behavior or it can be comprehended empathetically, but in the end the other person is grasped as a subject-within-an-object and reduced to objective terms, a perceptual/behavioral system. The person is rendered functionally predictable, and, wherever necessary, subjectively irrelevant.

Another person can be a person, present to us: a subject with whom we engage as a subject, whose subjectivity we know directly through the changes we experience in our own subjectivity. What exactly does a change in one’s subjectivity look like? When one’s objective world changes all at once, as a whole. When one would write different poetry or compose different songs for his involvement in the other. In this other person, nothing can be dismissed as irrelevant: whatever is relevant to this other is by definition relevant to us, and not out of duty but spontaneously, for no reason at all.

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I am going to post the entire final section of this essay in the comments of this post. I already posted a large chunk of it yesterday, but when I looked at it again I realized the part I posted, while rich in insight, lacked the practical force of the whole.

Reading this blog

Philosophy

A single heavily cross-referenced entry on this blog could take hours or days to read if one were to follow the links into the companion wiki, and then to follow the chains and lattices and constellations of thought within the wiki to grasp the entry within its philosophical context – which really is the only way to achieve authentic understanding. Obviously, nobody can put that much time and effort into reading a blog. I think the best approach is the one most people will take anyway: to read the passage straight through, and to click links placed at those points where meaning is felt to be especially concentrated. The best policy is to follow one’s urgency, through bliss and dread alike.

Martin Buber on self-becoming

Philosophy

From “Distance and Relation”:

The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one – the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way. That this capacity lies so immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness and questionableness of the human race: actual humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds. On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for confirmation, without devotion for being and becoming, again and again mars the truth of the life between man and man.

. . .

Within the setting of the world at a distance and the making it independent, yet also essentially reaching beyond this and in the proper sense not able to be included in it, is the fact of man’s himself being set at a distance and made independent as ‘the others’. Our fellow men, it is true, live round about us as components of the independent world over against us, but in so far as we grasp each one as a human being he ceases to be a component and is there in his self-being as I am; his being at a distance does not exist merely for me, but it cannot be separated from the fact of my being at a distance for him. The first movement of human life puts men into mutual existence which is fundamental and even. But the second movement puts them into mutual relation with me which happens from time to time and by no means in an even way, but depends on our carrying it out. Relation is fulfilled in a full making present when I think of the other not merely as this very one, but experience, in the particular approximation of the given moment, the experience belonging to him as this very one. Here and now for the first time does the other become a self for me, and the making independent of his being which was carried out in the first movement of distancing is shown in a new highly pregnant sense as a presupposition – a presupposition of this ‘becoming a self for me’, which is, however, to be understood not in a psychological but in a strictly ontological sense, and should therefore rather be called ‘becoming a self with me’. But it is ontologically complete only when the other knows that he is made present by me in his self and when this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently in the mutuality of the making present – in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other – together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation.

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. The human person needs confirmation because man as man needs it. An animal does not need to be confirmed, for it is what it is unquestionably. It is different with man: Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.

 

Day and night

Philosophy

Some ideas I find myself reconsidering regularly, from oldest to newest:

With the first three, reconsideration usually means renewed hostility – I come back at the ideas with new attacks.

Today, however, I returned to the Rilke passage and found myself affirming it slightly more than I have been able to recently, though with a style of reservation that only seems diplomatic: the statement is true relatively, but in a way where it must seem absolutely true until it runs its full course and finds its own limits. It is a truth that can be transcended to greater truth, but which must be passed through in order that the greater truth can be known at all.

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I’ve been deeply disturbed to discover that Martin Buber somehow has become more foundational to my thought than Nietzsche. Yet, I love Nietzsche more. And I have to remember that reading Nietzsche I came to Buber’s beliefs on my own – Buber said the beliefs and gave me companionship where I’d arrived. Nietzsche advocated apartness. Buber advocated togetherness, but from the ground Nietzsche led us to in our apartness. Nietzsche taught yin heaven. He gave his reader a starry midnight sky, but a sky set in a finite duration: an open darkness into which the new sun could rise and close the infinity with bright, human blue. Buber is the still-knowing day, and I share that day. The day will end, but at this moment night is only a memory and a certainty of the future.

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Increasingly, I refute things like this: “This is true, but not true enough.”

Increasingly, I suspect all truths will someday come to be seen as not true enough.

If this is true, what is the sense of refuting what we already know to be refutable? When do we stop?

(Doesn’t skepticism have an unexamined and absurd faith in one particular vision of truth? Is skepticism skeptical enough about skepticism?)

At some point does it make sense to stop courageously at the surface? When do we stop asking and start affirming? And when we affirm, in what role are we affirming? Who are we as affirmers if we affirm what we could just as easily break?

Ethics

Philosophy

The purpose of ethics: cultivation of ethos. An ethic, through practice, creates or preserves a particular world-view.

The ethic of ethics is morality: namaste/shalom/gassho/I-thou.

Morality can sometimes demand the self-sacrifice of an ethic.

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I was thinking about those little praying hand sculptures, fingers touching, chopped off at the wrist. It is the front half of a gassho, touching at the extremities, but missing the unity of the body to whom the hands belong.

Dread and fear

Philosophy

All moods would prefer to find their source outside one’s own being. An example: dread would rather be fear.

People who never fail to find a particular object for each holistic state of the soul are prisoners in a poem. This can happen at the level of the individual, or it can happen collectively. A whole reality can degenerate into condensations of holistic irritability. Look around.