Category Archives: Philosophy

Individual

Philosophy

The most defiantly, radically individual thing an individual can do today is to reject individualism and to live alone with the absurd consequences.

It is much harder to be individual than you might think, and it is also a lot shittier. And it’s really not intrinsically valuable. Sometimes radical individualism can be useful when a new vision of life is needed, but that’s an exceptional case.

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(Said cheerfully): Philosophers are spiritual mutants. 99% of philosophers are pure waste, and the ones who aren’t waste are useful due to accidents of history. But philosophers are like salmon or sperm, doing their thing for no reason at all, for the sake of something they cannot see until it has been accomplished. When I use the word transcendence as a verb, what I am referring to is this kind of nonrational obedience to one’s own urgency that reveals its purpose only in hindsight.

The tragic vision: embracing the fact and its consequences that countless are wasted for the sake of the rare success, and experiencing pride in being wasted as an individual for the sake of one’s kind, which is the true seat of one’s own identity. It is affirming: “Lord, let me die… but not die… out.”

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The paradox of good listening

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

In our content-glutted world, listening is exalted above speaking. There’s many people talking and few people listening.

Human beings are creatures of the foreground. We like to take the direct path. If few people are listening the solution is: Start listening. Right? Isn’t that a satisfying answer? Don’t you feel virtuous when you take the attitude of the good listener and let the other do all the talking? Don’t you feel charitable?

But let me ask you this: If you perceive it this way – that all honor is due the listener… are you really listening? Or, taking it from a different angle: when someone needs to be heard, is the need essentially one of needing some silent space and a friendly face? Or something else?

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The paradox: We listen to the degree that we value what is said. Unless the listener experiences the value of what he hears – unless he is genuinely grateful for what is being said – he’s not actually listening at all. Valuing doesn’t have to mean agreeing, it means valuing the shared being of conversation. A conversation of this kind has itself (as a shared whole) through its part-icipants.

The resolution: Start by refusing to listen to what you can’t value; but even more importantly, don’t speak what you do not spontaneously experience as valuable yourself. If it doesn’t move you saying it, it won’t move the other hearing it. Don’t say it, write it, sing it, paint it, build it, dance it. Wait attentively and openly for your vision to come to you from within or from without.

There is no shame in waiting. There is tremendous honor in waiting.

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Have you ever experienced the liberation of art?: a deeply persuasive presentation of a new way to be in the world?

Art that does not radiate a new existential possibility around itself is not art, but mere entertainment.

It does not matter if the art “moves” you emotionally, as long as you are moved within the same old world as before. That is mere sentimental jostling, and it seems like a big enough deal until you’ve experienced a true shift at the depths.

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Your universe is a planetarium. You look out into the starry, plaster dome and you see infinite space. You look at the projector at the center, and it is an object, furniture.

Oh, inverted world…!

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We no longer expect enough. But do not worry: desperation is on its way and it will liberate us from our drab satisfaction. Nothing but genuine intense pain can liberate. Until then vanity and fear conspire to imprison us in cozy complacence. I have nothing to say to someone who has never suffered and known the disorientation of despair.

I’ve always loved people in deep crisis, and also people on psychedelic drugs; both listen urgently enough to hear the radically unexpected.

“Lord we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven…”

Nietzsche quotes that have mattered to me

Philosophy

“The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: ‘to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.’ If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.”

(Human All Too Human)

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Redeemed from scepticism. — A: Others emerge out of a general moral scepticism ill-humoured and feeble, gnawed-at and worm-eaten, indeed half-consumed — but I do so braver and healthier than ever, again in possession of my instincts. Where a sharp wind blows, the sea rises high and there is no little danger to be faced, that is where I feel best. I have not become a worm, even though I have often had to work and tunnel like a worm. — B: You have just ceased to be a sceptic! For you deny! — A: And in doing so I have again learned to affirm.

(Daybreak)

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What makes one heroic? — Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.

In what do you believe? — In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.”

Where are your greatest dangers? — In pity.

What do you love in others? — My hopes.

Whom do you call bad? — Those who always want to put to shame.

What do you consider most humane? — To spare someone shame.

What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

 (The Gay Science)

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For the new year.– I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I , too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year–what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

(The Gay Science)

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Get on the ships! — Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking–he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him, it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it fashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end then one exclaims: Oh how I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being–all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them!–we must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it–what these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins! What is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered–and more than one! Embark, philosophers!

(The Gay Science)

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To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive–and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it:–women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction–for the sake of truth.

(Human All Too Human)

Practice precedes theory

Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Practice precedes theory. Practice is wordlessly active. Theory is the verbal ensurfacing of practice.

Hermeneutics is the practice of performing the ensurfacing practice in reverse  (most obvious when performed in the intellectual realm). It is the reconsititution of wordless intellectual practice guided by the theoretical content, treated as artifact, but not as the essential content of the writing.

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I read Nietzsche hermeneutically, but it took me nearly four years to explain how reading Nietzsche was unlike other kinds of reading. It took me all this time to find the descriptive language for a practice I’d already mastered, but mastered mutely.

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Genuine philosophy is not factual: philosophy presents its factual content like a starry sky, by which the reader/listener can navigate his understanding. The navigating is the essential philosophical act. But most people look at the star-charts and confuse navigation with astronomy.

You cannot summarize philosophy. You cannot factually transfer it. Philosophy is not reflections, it is reflecting. Philosophy must be coperformed, or it degrades into mere fact.

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What has made Nietzsche such a controversial and perpetually fascinating writer is this: much of his content is strictly artifact, often the opposite of his own private opinions. He leaves it to the reader to apply the intellectual practices he teaches; it is up to the reader to apply this practice to his own content and to reach his own conclusions. And he assumes his reader will need to reach his own conclusions because precisely the readers Nietzsche wants (of whom and to whom he wrote frequently) will find the content of Nietzsche’s apparent philosophy, his factual philosophy, completely unacceptable, offensive. But you have to stay with him, anyway, all the way to the ugly end. If you try to cut to the conclusions, you will miss everything.

Nietzsche’s ideal reader – out of the deep, intense urgency – will apply Nietzsche’s practical philosophy to the goal of escaping Nietzsche’s factual philosophy – to the refuge of his own conclusions. And just when you think you disagree with him, Nietzsche winks mischeviously and compassionately.

Remember: Nietzsche called himself the first Dionysian philosopher. Dionysus/Siva: the dancing god.

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The consciousness of appearance. — How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-a-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer, — I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a sleepwalker must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is “appearance” for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence,–what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown X or remove from it! Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more, — that among all these dreamers, I, too, the “knower,” am dancing my dance, that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve — the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

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I would only believe in a God who could dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we kill. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need to be pushed to move from a spot.

Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. —

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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Spoiler: Dionysus is wordless practice, dance doing its dance. Apollo is theory and everything else that belongs to surface. Dionysian philosophy is doing, faithfully, what philosophical urgency (not curiosity or ambition) impels one to do. Only afterward – as  consummation – the accomplishment, which is known only in hindsight, is articulated. This is Nietzsche’s “overcoming“.

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This might be a pretty good scholarly paper.

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation

Hermeneutics

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a poetic demonstration of Gadamerian historicity. It is a self-interpretive narrative experienced from the inside, degrading retroactively as it unfolds into the future, always faithful to the truth of the utter faithlessness of memory. The content of memory might be the past, but its sole allegiance is to the future.

Kaufman is the best philosophical filmmaker I know of. He seems gimmicky because his urgency is rare, and his ingenuity is distracting.

Intelligence and urgency

Philosophy

I like this Aldous Huxley quote: “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Does that mean that a Huxley-qualified intellectual who thinks sex is infinitely interesting is in some sense superior to one who never saw why sex was such a big deal?

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Intelligence is one important element of intellectuality, but urgency is also important. Intelligence and urgency increase one another’s effect exponentially, and sometimes catastrophically. The poor souls who are both urgent and intelligent to an extreme drive way the hell too far out into the frontiers of knowledge and create great caches of insight where nobody has ever been, then they die in solitude. They literally sacrifice themselves to knowledge.

The sacrifice is redeemed by the merely intelligent and the merely urgent. The merely intelligent build infrastructure around the new knowledge – sanitation (solid scholarship), communications (standard language, histories, textbook knowledge), logistics (publishing, championing). The merely urgent digest all these insights, simplify them, smooth them and carry them back to civilization. The merely urgent are the agents of popular change.

I can tell you: there is a lot out of astonishing insight out there, freely available, that civilization has not even begun to digest. The question is whether we’ll eat, or whether we’ll keep pointing at our empty distended bellies as proof that we’re already too full. We’re starving to death on a mountain of nourishment.

The most fascinating knowledge in the world

Philosophy

I’ve put considerable effort into learning the most fascinating things in the whole world. Therefore, by my own standards I know the most fascinating things in the world, and being someone who prizes knowledge, I have made myself into my own ideal of the most fascinating person in the world. It’s too bad these standards are strictly my own. Dang. (But there’s an upside: because knowledge isn’t treasured it’s inexpensive. I can buy miraculously good books for ludicrously low prices. This book I’m reading right now ought to cost more than a house, but I got it for $20, brand-new.) Still, I’d love to meet someone who recognizes the value of the insights I’ve worked for and fought for. I feel like I’ve accumulated zillions of dollars in a currency nobody exchanges.

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Maybe it would be fruitful to ask some questions about what makes my fascinating knowledge so fascinating. Is the knowledge itself fascinating? Are the applications of the knowledge fascinating, as case studies? Does the knowledge itself only become fascinating as it is being applied, so that the conjoining of theory and practice is what is fascinating? Or is the activity of applying the knowledge the locus of the fascination – and if it is fascinating as an activity, is it a participatory or spectatorly fascination? Or is the fascination bound up with the entity acted upon in the application of the knowledge? Or is it being, oneself, the object of the application, being acted upon, affected? Maybe it’s a matter of presentation or packaging.

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I asked myself a question five years ago: If I discovered there were no practical purpose at all in my learning and thinking, would I do it anyway? My answer was “yes”. I need to keep it that way. And I need to protect my life as a means to do this learning and thinking. Because when I ask that same question about just about everything else my answer is “no”. That “yes” and that “no” is one’s ethical kernel.

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Love is what we do for no reason.

Once you are clear on what in your life is ends and what is means you can be a real son-of-a-bitch.

Maybe my existence in regard to all other people is absolutely purposeless. Then what? What do we owe one another?

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

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Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

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We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

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I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

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There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

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How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

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Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

What is truth?

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Some ways truth is established, practically:

  • In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
  • In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
  • In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
  • In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.

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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.

Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.

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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”

Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.

Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.

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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.

A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.

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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.

– Rumi

Trees

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

When we walk on the forest floor, the part of the tree we are given at eye-level is the narrowest point, the trunk, slightly above the tree’s midpoint.

To see how the trunk spreads itself upward into the open light, we can simply turn our faces to the sky. However, to see how the trunk spreads downward, we have to dig with our hands, and come to terms with dirt and sweat. Tender leaves and delicate blossoms will not be found down there. This is where the tree braces itself against the weather and procures its nourishment. Below the ground, a tree is not fucking around: it is all business.

That’s one way to see it.

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

It is also true that a seed “grows” into a tree. We know what this means. But let’s not get carried away with the usefulness of our habitual intellectual devices. Objectivity is instrumentally useful (techne), but this usefulness is true in a certain limited sense; it does not make it “the truth”. To get closer to something like “the truth” we must acclimate ourselves to a different and larger mode of knowing, a mode where we consciously articulate meaningful order out of the whole: the profoundly chaotic world we have arisen and awakened within. What is this chaos, essentially? It is akin to being an infant, or waking up from a deep afternoon nap.

Maternalization

Philosophy

For many years I was fond of pointing out something sort of awful: New mothers are the most selfish, egotistical beings in the entire world.

They see themselves as the pinnacle of altruism, selflessly sacrificing themselves to another person who is not themselves.

Obviously, that is a diaperload of crap. New mothers merely transfer their selfishness to their baby: their outrageous personal ambitions, fantasies, preoccupations. Every megalomaniacal, hyper-romantic conceit the woman wisely kept tucked within the concealment of her subjectivity explodes out of her in a massive fireball of unrestrained self-indulgence, onto this allegedly external, separate being in her arms… For all practical purposes, that baby is her. This is why new mothers are in so many cases universally reviled, even though nobody will admit it.

I always liked very much how horrible and obviously true this observation was. (I do pretty seeing; but I do ugly seeing, too. I just like truth; and when the truth is ugly I know I love truth for her mind, not for her pleasing features.)

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Here is an example of a perspectival shift I have had on this topic.

I now see unrestrained maternal self-indulgence as the ideal transegoic experience, of entry into authentic intersubjective relationship, what I call Logos.

Postpartum depression is the destruction of a girl’s ego under pressure of maternal responsibility, which any mother will tell you is absolutely crushing. The mother undergoes biological bootcamp. She is disoriented, sleep deprived, stripped of all familiar comforts and freedoms, ordered around by the insistent cries of an imperious officer. She is broken down and built back up into a mother. The mother is no longer the girl she was. That girl could not accomplish the things the mother has to. But the mother is not a stand-alone woman. She is a participant (probably a broken one) in a new transegoic being, the mother-baby, which comprises the mother and the baby, but is not reducible to the two individuals. I’ll call this “maternalization”.

But, in exchange for this period of depression, which is nothing less than a nonintellectual analogue of philosophical perplexity, the mother gets to experience the joy of the transegoic, which is the analogue of philosophical breakthrough. She gets to feel the nestedness of being, that we are in each in We as much as each of us are I.

Mothers worship their babies like little gods because the mother-baby relationship is the first religion many mothers have experienced. Worship is the natural response.

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That women put their children in daycare because they think they ought to want to pursue a career… it overwhelms me with misogynistic contempt. Women (on the whole) still lack independence of thought. Here is immediate, primordially intense reality revealing itself, and what does your average “liberated” woman do? She remains enslaved to general opinion, to all-too-common sense, to vanity. She’d rather appear free than to exercise authentic freedom and risk being seen as Not Independent. So, she tears her guts out, comes to work in despair, weeping… and accepts this as normal and necessary. Phuh.

(Note: Obviously, none of this vitriol applies to women who have no choice but to work, nor does it apply to women who sincerely love their careers more than their babies. I’m only talking about women who ignore what is closest in favor of what is furthest.)

Not vision

Philosophy

Imagining something vividly is not “having a vision”; nor is imagining something vaguely but intensely. 

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Very few people have a vision of anything. They’re sitting in the same seats as the rest of the audience, seeing what everyone else, seeing as everyone else sees.

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Having a vision is having a vital line of sight on something, a place where others – if they are willing – can walk and see from, too. Vision isn’t about the object. It is about the subject, and about cosubjects.

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Do you know why we all love to relax with popular fiction? Because the author is writing to an already seated audience. We can remain seated, too, where we already are. The interpretation is effortless and there is no possibility of angst.

Seeing follows looking

Philosophy

I reread the David Foster Wallace piece I posted yesterday. I thought I agreed with him, but now that I’ve reread the whole thing I realize that while I agree with his goal I disagree with him on how the goal is reached.

We do not get to choose our beliefs. We are only able to move about and see from different angles. What we see at these angles determines our beliefs for us.

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Starting with the belief you’d like to have and shifting angles in order to make the belief believable 1) is intellectual dishonest, and 2) will leave you with bad-faith “faith” that puts the heart and mind in conflict.

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If you hate what you see, your only recourse is to look differently. You cannot change your seeing directly. The seeing is determined by the looking. You have to work with your angle of sight. Take the metaphor of “perspective”, of “seeing differently”, of “insight” seriously. Stop squinting. Keep your eyes open. Get your intellect off its ass, out of its comfy chair and make it walk around its objects until the objects show themselves to you in a way that reveals new and better meaning.

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Intellectual honesty without ideals is cheap. Ideals without intellectual honesty is cheap. The marriage of intellectual honesty with ideals is more difficult and much more valuable.