Doubt is the tool of Faith.
Faith is primary. Doubt is adjustment of Faith.
It is all just Talk, all this psychology and philosophy. It does not prove itself as applied physical science does.
And yet this Talk is no less necessary, for applied physical science is also applied Talk.
Scientific jargon, in the mouths of those who do not understand it, is not unlike Theology, in the mouths of those who do not know God.
Faith in babble remains faith, and therefore a source of power.
Faith is more important than its object.
Potent action is demanded sometimes of humans and other animals. Faith is the name of the subjective experience of potent action.
Religion and psychology are inseparable. Both concern themselves with the same subject matter and both depend on metaphor.
Sometimes we calculate. We run simulations in our head.
Metaphors change our conceptual picture of the world. (Rorty can piss on epistemology all he wants, with good reason, but picture is not a bad metaphor here.)
To say we picture reality is to show humility. We acknowledge that others see it differently. We assume that know one sees it except thru particular eye pairs. But we can imagine the totality.
Most epistemology is academic, insincere, boring. How much of it is pants-pissing cowardice in the face of the big bad world?
Ayn Rand, for all her faults, didn't waste much time on epistemology. A person like Derrida is boring in that antecedent scepticism is old news and ultimately useless. It's as significant as a chess problem.
I liked Hume when I was ditching God. The more extreme the skepticism, the better. But this is a beginner's trick. Eventually one wants to learn, not just unlearn.
Extreme doubt is always insincere. Readers of Derrida who think they can undermine the establishment with skepticism are under the impression perhaps that humans are a logical species.
Logic is in its technical aspect is no more significant than a chess problem. It's a game that certain mother's boys deify.
On the other hand, materialists philosophies (reality talk) is macho. Marx is macho, with all his bluster about changing the world, not just thinking it. The implication is that only action is real, that Talk is cheap. Marx is Talk against Talk.
And yet Marx did not approve of the Action in his present-tense life. So talk is important after all, as the mobile representation of desire. He made his fantasy real by means of Talk. Talk in books. Of course his fantasy was distorted in its manifestation.
My game is to get my mind in a better order, to increase my sense of freedom and power. Criticism can be viewed this way, as the flailing of the mind in its changes, trying to shake them loose.
Realizing and announcing that men live and die in the chains of TALK.
I call it TALK to emphasize that all books are written in this one medium, the medium of word, the medium of TALK.
How often we forget that Psychology is no less metaphorical than Religion, and yet in our Science-worshipping age we take Psychology for truth, as dogma, all the while sneering at religion.
Psychology is TALK and Religion is TALK, and some of it is good. In fact I myself am TALK.
Don't call me a philosopher or a prophet, though. Call me a TALKER.
Derrida can yammer on about the priority of writing over speech or the reverse. I call it boring in any case. What a trivial issue, I think.
Some confusions are too boring to make one's enemies.
Heidegger was a poet. But so was Kant. So was Newton with his Inertia.
It's one of my goals not to get caught up in words. I study land mines in order to avoid them.
I study confusions to rid myself of them.
Man is such an incorrigible believer. One of the popular forms of faith today is cliché skepticism, an insincere skepticism.
If a person does the job they are paid for and obeys the law, he is allowed to be as stupid as he likes. Therefore an ocean of stupid opinion surrounds us.
Because most folks don't take it seriously.
And I'm not saying they should.
My own obsession with the nature of value of TALK is perhaps no more laudable than a predilection for watching dog shows.
Sometimes I am tempted to pride myself on some kind of secret that I would like to believe I have. I want to see myself as the possessor of the inside dope, the magic, the truth.
I like to play the hero like the next guy. And I think about this, this desire to play the hero that seems ubiquitous.
I theorize that TALK is often the conceptual aspect of our personal hero mask.
I suggest that folks wear words as more often than they wear cotton.
Be it "good Christian" or "intellectual" or "attractive" or "evil."
I say that the talkers wear especially ornate verbal masks -- subtle fusions of the virtues they identify with.
Those who see themselves as poetic or intellectual heroes are likely to be self-conscious about their originality.
Whereas those who see themselves as pure or righteous need not concern themselves with originality.
Van Gogh, for instance, triumphs as a singular heroic being. He is famous for and as his idiosyncrasy.
Whereas the martyrs are distinguished only by the details but not the essence of their martyrdom.
The philosophers in their dialectical series are secure in their idiosyncrasy. Kant will keep his categories.
And yet the categories seem so obvious, so destined to be "discovered."
Philosophers are generally less original, in my experience, than they first appear.
I experience what seems like an obvious structure in the history of philosophy.
It's not unlike the history of painting. To be exciting, one must be new. To be important, one must be significant.
To play the hero one needs a virtue to incarnate.
Obviously TRUTH has served as an idol in the realm of philosophy.
"The truth is, there isn't one."
Nietzsche denounced TRUTH for the lie it always was. Nietzsche called the bluff of TRUTH.
But it was only one sort of TRUTH he called the bluff on, really. Moral-metaphorical truth was his target.
Technology, whether one hates it or not, is solid in a way that so much TALK is not.
But man is steered by his creative talk, by his moral-aesthetical vision. He is steered by his religion / philosophy. Call it what you must.
The attack on metaphysics was good for those did not already see that metaphysics is poetry.
Positivism helps to separate goal-talk from truth-talk.
Hegel's vision of the Absolute peeping on itself (that being us wearing Hegel-goggles) is fascinating talk. For those who didn't get that notion already from the East. (That Art Thou.)
Diogenes and his scorn of dialectics is laudable in its way. He himself lived according to certain ideas, which are of course made out of talk. But he was more of a holist than Plato. He was not simply thinking but LIVING his philosophy. He was the INCARNATION of his idea.
Plato ran his mouth to folks and died.
Perhaps Plato was wiser, and saved himself needless trouble. Perhaps Diogenes was an attention-whore.
But the attack on DIALECTIC is significant. It's good that we get cold water thrown in our faces.
For man is such a narcissist, such a believer. So quick to be hypnotized by slogans.
The crowd marched in protest, all with signs that read NO MORE SLOGANS.
Some folks are happy to be left alone. Others feel the need to evangelize. Beware what Spengler calls a Socialist. Those who impose their virtues on you.
It's an old theme. Stones thrown by Pharisees. Jesus accuses the accuser. Soon enough accusers accuser in his name.
Same old tool-using killers. Words are long-range weapons. Words don't break like the handle of an ax might.
We use our TALK in many many ways. Some insist that they have it all figured out. Their TALK is the end of philosophy, the beginning of omniscience.
What a fun belief, I would think. Not to be mocked in itself, but only when it gets ugly.
Schopenhauer was a poet. Who could take his metaphysics literally? A few perhaps, but never me.
And yet poetically it was something I already vaguely experienced. He painted a clear picture of a tragic world-view.
His LIFE FORCE is not unlike spirit or soul. It was mystical and scientific simultaneously.
Just as Spinoza was.
Like I said, it's all talk. It's just done in different styles is all.
Some like scientific jargon (new myth). Others like religious jargon (old myth).
By scientific myth I do not mean the equations but rather the prose that applies the equations, the conceptions that anchor the equations.
If equations are the muscles of science, mental-models are its tendons, connection the muscle to bone, applied the math to reality.
For the atom is a useful dream. If atoms "exist" apart from us, they are different from our image of them.
By science-talk I especially refer to psychology, which absolute is mythological. Freud with his Pronoun Pantheon. Which is fascinatingly reductive and modernist. I found it quite seductive.
Of course in English Translation they used Latin pronouns instead of German. A significant choice.
In a way I'm another protestant, another Martin Luther. I nail my theses on the door of the library. BEWARE OF TALK.
Be the master of talk, not its slave. Thus Spoke Professor Shit Stain.
But it's like I said. Folks get by just fine with their ignorance. One refines one's talk as one might refine one's hair, and for similar reasons.
Hyperbole, right? For our religion and science is made of talk. Talk is the rudder of the ship of state.
Talk is the essence of romance. Talk is raw material of history and other fictions as well.
We live and die in talk, and were doing so before I mentioned it of course.
Can I add anything at all to this discussion of discussion?
I don’t know. I comfort myself with the notion that most famous writers simply tastefully arranged building blocks that others had created (discovered? observed?).
I have to settle with offering not society as a whole but only a few individuals whatever it is I have to offer.
For the average person, I am one more useless scribbler. For talk is cheap, or so they chatter.
I read the greats people. I put my nose in respectable books. On your knees then, before the fount of my wisdom.
Many of the famed are ridiculous, or at least over-rated.
All these epistemologists with telescopes up one another's rectums.
These boring pseudo-skeptics, the prophets of a pseudo-irreligious faith.
You won't catch me denying my faith. Not that I can easily define it. I believe in not being easily define, how's that?
But I am thereby defined?
Not really, not by a sentence.
I'm an ass. I'm a transcendental buffoon. I'm another gripe-ass critic.
It's boring to listen to me chatter like that. You will gauge what I am by other means, no doubt.
If I throw it this theory of a built-in hero program, you aren't going to see an epistemologist about it. You will weigh it in your hands, smell it, decide whether you want to adjust your notion of the world that way or not. Does it serve you, this notion of mine? This notion of Jung's. This notion of Shakespeare's (All the worlds a stage..)
Ah yes, I want to be original and significant even more than I want to be paid (because I am not yet starving). But I must content myself with emphasis. These days, the best you can do is emphasize the better old thoughts.
That is perhaps an overstatement. But the anxiety of influence is such an important notion.
It drove the evolution of music and painting as well as fiction and philosophy.
Good old-fashioned egotism. The lust for fame.
In my talk about talk, I am arguably playing the sophist, the relativist.
So be it. The impossibility of closure is something I can assent to.
I don't deconstruct anything. I just point and say "don’t forget that all that is just metaphor, symbol, etc. and also that this statement too is just metaphor, symbol, etc. "
If I define "metaphor," I will do so by means of example and …metaphor.
Sigh-dwarf talks about talk.
The linguistic turn is a Kantian sort of turn. Let us look at what it is we do are looking with, as much as possible. No, make that as much as profitable.
We don't do it for the truth, no sir. The truth is one more means.
To what?
But man's goal is flexible.
If the goal is a woman, she is never without her mask, and yet she has so many mask..
She covers her face with poems.
So man must indeed seek her, must indeed play the hero, and yet new styles of heroism are invented with every new word for ultimately ineffable virtue.
I can point at a hole, yes, but not with the hole I'm pointing at.
I am inferring a black hole, you might say. Black holes are inferred by the way they bend light. Archetypes are inferred by the way they bend talk.
I'm an atheistic naturalist who yet revels in religious myth as perhaps the fittest subject of music and the plastic arts. So in that sense I am a Christian or a Satanist. In these ignorant times, a sophisticate mind is easily misunderstood.
Shrink is a good word, for it confesses the reductionism inherent in our mental models of the human soul/psyche.
The shrink compares a living being to his dead shriveled painting of a head, one painted by various books.
The better shrink self-consciously and with humility sculpts his mental model in the face of experience.
Just as we all sculpt our notion / dream / idea of reality in the face of our experience.
Ordinary language well-used is more potent that some folks realize.
Jargon reeks of vanity, the petty kind.
So much of modern art is just shit. Just the visual babble of those who cannot draw.
Idiosyncrasy in itself is worthless. It's only the successful union of the idiosyncratic and the universal that deserves praise.
I think originality less important that skill in regards to painting. Some assert that photography made realistic painting useless. I reject this notion. The skillful simulation of a desirable (or just exciting) reality by means of paint is good stuff. Paint me a beautiful woman. Paint me a saint. Paint me a daydream. Knowing that it is paint, that all the details were chosen, and carefully executed… this means something.
Rothko and Reinhardt are fun to contemplate, maybe even to look at. But there is a more obvious charm in delightful simulation.
Stare at a black square. Stare at some red fog. Or stare into a simulated crowd of humans at some significant moment. Or stare into the lavishly details 2 dimensional rendition of a master's erotic ideal.
Let a man perfect his whole life the painting of beautiful humans. Let him make their faces radiate wisdom, grief, pride, something altogether ineffable. Something like music.
Compare this to a black square whose effect if ideological rather than of its own professed medium, paint on canvas.
Conceptual art is just poetry that prefers the museum to the library.
It is significant that Nietzsche lived on a pension, that he was a sickly fucker who didn't do much, who no one depended on.
He was a bitter dreamer, a self-glorifying bum. I understand his type completely.
He was eaten up by the dream, the myth, the vision.
He was an ass in hot pursuit of the carrot, the one that is tied to stick before his mouth, that stick being tied to his body.
That carrot is the hero-program.
But the carrot can look like an asparagus or an orange.
The hero program is a magnetic nothingness.
Nietzsche's program changed it appearance quite often. It's phenomenological variation was rapid?
And noumena would be that unknown face, that inferred face.
Superbia, invidia, the will to power.
Nietzsche was the will to power become self-conscious.
No more excuses, but the naked beast itself before its looking class.
Not with a robe or a sword, though Nietzsche liked swords. The deepest Nietzsche knew perhaps that the sword too was just phenomenal.
Nietzsche was one more vortext. Bring in the myth of the bottomless pit. Object Petit A. The name of the father?
The name of authority, or virtue. For it is ultimately nameless (you might guess). So "authority" and "virtue" fail to close it up.
The WAY that can be told is not the true way, they say.
Good old ineffability.
It's ultimately neither that important nor mystic, what I keep harping on. Some will understand the concept of archetype immediately, and infer the what-you-may-call-it behind the phenomena.
Let's review.
A man of talk is a man of religion is a man of science, for all of it is talk and all of it is to be understood in relation to the rest.
A certain holism is implied here. I want to erase false distinctions, call certain bluffs. Attack the lazy superstitions of my age.
I want to point out that metaphor is the basic substance of talk, as soon as one moves beyond the literal.
First the kid learns the name of real objects (which simultaneously cuts reality into pieces, these same objects). Soon the kid can create imaginary objects, by recombining the qualities of perceived objects.
At some point the kid can talk about one object by referring to another, to point out similarities.
We adults live a realm populated by imaginary objects. Things like laws, theories, opinions, stories from the news. These object exists as memories, as words.
Philosophy and religion are two such realms of imaginary objects. In such a realm, metaphors are monarchs.
Whoever said talk was cheap forgot that this statement too is talk.
The macho will always contrast talk with action, and perhaps they have a point. But then the meaning of actions exists largely as talk. The reasons for action are made of talk.
Contrast a Diogenes and a Marx. One is personal, visceral, suspicious of dialectic that is not manifest as behavior. The other is prophetic, nose always in books, moralistic, technical, social.
Both are called philosophers.
"Philosophy" is a stupid like most general words.
Generality is what the folks that don't know know.
To judge a man by one statement is as stupid as whatever the stupid statement was.
Air and ink are cheap. Not every sentence works out.
I like to consider a man's talk in relation to his life, though one can be valuable without the other being so.
Nietzsche on his pittance, in his hotel rooms, womanless nomad. Ah, what a paradoxical role he had to play. How can a sickly poor man not play the priest somehow? Nietzsche evolved this role, re-invented it, stretched it. He was prophet, comedian, poet, sage, woman, buffoon… all at once.
Kant is a stable image. Nietzsche is not. Fred got his feet in the quicksand, danced on it, screamed in it, described it, vanished.
No foolosopher denies the appearance of change. But Nietzsche, like Hegel, admitted change into the lens itself. Truth was allowed to change.
ARTIST UNVEILS PERFECTLY TRANSPARENT PAINTING.
The hermeneutics boys are late, as some of them know. Interpretation is an old old game. That we tossed it for logical analysis is funny, ridiculous, embarrassing.
But we wanted simplification. We wanted mechanical and not organically, for mechanical is cleaner, easier, something that can be mastered. You might say we wanted the text closed, the game over. We wanted to pretend we answered the Sphinx. So we lied to ourselves (early Wittgenstein and Russell) and pretended that talk was simpler than it was. We pretended there was only literal talk. Slowly we realized that to say there was only literal talk was not to talk literally, that the word "literal" was already a metaphor.
The math boys need to be watched closely. They resent the stains on their mother's panties. Therefore to number. Therefore to equation. Therefore to…tautology. Analytic propositions are cleaner, they say.
But synthetic propositions, so often metaphorical, are what drives life, my numerical friends.
They know that of course, so they want synthetic propositions made mathematical somehow. But it just doesn't work. This brain is magic gore, not abacus. Examine the trees and the fractals thereof. Messy networks, we.
With metaphors we change the nature of the very matrix that data are arranged on. You might divide world-picture into literal layer and interpretative layer. A metaphor can inspire us to re-interpret the data of decades of life experience.
Rorty knew that epistemological angst was "rather fussy." He read enough books outside Foolosophy genre to get a clue on this. I think of him reading Ada. What did Van Veen need of epistemology?
But Rorty can't simply laugh epistemology out of court. Because the gang he's in is in love with it. Their self-image is tangled up with epistemology. He's got to argue them out of it. He must, like he says, offer them something better in exchange. Rorty says pretty boldly that refutation manifests a lack of creativity. Good point.
Did Rorty read Jung and Spengler and learn from them and yet not mention it? It seems as if Jung is taboo. Freud is always mentioned. Jung almost never.
Spengler too, with his organic interpretation, is never mentioned.
Fools (short for Foolosophers) are afraid to let go of epistemology, for this would be the loss of a special implicit claim, that philosophers are referees of truth.
But the "truth" is that all men are "philosophers" to the degree that they think at all. I say this from a holist angle. Life is complex problem but if it is thought about as "life" then it is thereby unified, generalized.
The unity archetype is not to be ignored. From Parmenides to Spinoza to Hegel to Rorty's holism, it re-appears. Yes, holism is the modern manifestation of the grand ol' ONE.
Jehova is singular. Christ is singular. Buddha is singular. If they can be incarnated, the Spirit is singular and unifying. Physics in its search for a Unified Theory is singular. We aren't talking proof here. We are talking persuasion.
Life is lived in different intensities of doubt. When doubt is weak enough to be unconscious, we call it belief. Take this sentence not as a dogma, but as a candle-flicker.
What we call (ever-so-holy) Certainty is manifest in action. Faith is manifest in Works. One man charges into the highway to snatch up a baby. Another springs from a trench with an eager bayonet. These extreme cases are used to show that we just sincerity (certainty) by action, for all we know how often humans lie, exaggerate, misjudge.
Are we talking about metaphorical interpretations? Or perhaps interpretative metaphors.
I think of books written by certain Greek Cynics, utopian and communist of course. How amusing it is, when the most unworldly instruct the world on how to behave itself.
Diogenes and gang are beautiful in their way, but perhaps they are not the sort who should draw up constitutions.
Diogenes at least tried to live his theory, whereas Plato wanted his theory imposed on us.
Philosopher-king -- it's not an absurd idea necessarily, if "philosophy" has positive associations in the reader's mind.
Why not just as well Priest-king? Because Plato was indeed a geometrical mystic, with his form of the Good.
But Priest-kings are old news. Did Plato not visit Egypt? Where is the news here?
Plato innovation was perhaps the dialectical method. Plato coated his mysticism with a pseudo-logic. Plato strained Christ thru Euclid. Or Pythagoras thru Socrates.
Footnotes to Plato? But Plato is a footnote.
Socrates as destroyer is the distinctively Western root. Skepticism and criticism is what I associate with the West.
Positivism, which is ugly as religion but beautiful as a method for effecting "real" change.
As Nietzsche said, Bacon was something special. Bacon who cast knowledge as power rather than virtue.
Plato is an uncomfortable synthesis of science and ethics. Bacon finally sifted out the science and left this science value neutral. Knowledge is power, which can be used for good or evil purposes.
Aristotle set the example of examining particulars. Plato set the example and goal of universal hidden ideas.
Modern science has Aristotles' exteriority and Plato's obsession with universal form.
Bacon, Hobbes, Hume. Consider the English.
Bacon does not destroy all metaphysics. Nor do the positivists. Instead they are minimalist in regards to metaphysics. They are suspicious of metaphysics and therefore use only what they must. They have what you might call a social or objectivist epistemology. A practical epistemology. If it isn't power, it isn't knowledge.
This power-knowledge equation can also be applied to the subjective realm. One could think of religion as an applied science of morale. If it doesn't inspire, it isn't religion. And this inspiration can be measured in the same objectivist social way. How is behavior transformed by myth.
Bacon's objective power is steered by Umo's subjective power. Man steers the machine he builds according to organic and not mechanical reasoning.
The organic is often conceived as mechanical, which is sometimes useful, but the organic is not created by man. Man has created no machine as impressive as himself. The machine metaphor is useful, of course. Modern medicine is based on a machine paradigm. But the soul, for lack of a better word, is not to be so dismissed.
And yet I use a metaphor like program. Jung and his archetypes are indeed perhaps a machine interpretation of man's spirituality.
Ayn Rand, fool that she is in so many ways, is yet to be respected for what she did right. She was essentially on the right track.
She is an unhip source of valuable ideas. She makes explicit the idea and ideal of capitalism, or if you prefer individual property rights, etc.
She makes explicit the heroic notion of individuality.
It's not her fault that most Americans are fat sacks of uselessness.
Here I am living on unemployment checks, for various reasons, one of which is the export of labor, from which by the way I profit via the availability of cheap goods. On the flip side I am not so needed, hardly needed at all. The food is produced without me. Lodgings constructed without me. Roads paved without me. Trucks driven. Movies made. In the big bad world, our protagonist is useless. My existence is meaningless so far in relation to anyone outside my personal life.
This doesn't bother me much. I do wish there were more folks out there eager to pay me for honest work.
I explain all this because here I am a fiscal conservative in many ways living on government handout. Ah man.
Knowing also that the political opinion of one poor guy in Kentucky is utterly meaningless in itself.
Movements and mass-media. That's where the power is at. Which Obama and the rest understand. Ride the big waves. The little drops mean nothing. Of course.
So whether or not I like it, I am in the boat with Diogenes, especially as I am poor and un-degreed. Ah, what a tragicomedy, that I did not attend a real college.
How silly all that! How silly that no one I know reads philosophy or even much good literature. For whatever reason, they don't think it thru. It does not interest them.
Yet I can offer the reason myself. It's not their hero-game. It's not their program-variable.
Then I realize how it always attracted me, gripped me. Then I think I shaped my program around my fascinations. No less likely than the reverse.
Word was always my medium, or since sometime in childhood. I loved ideas. I loved abstractions, generalizations. Of course I was a convert to passionate religion once. Yet the theology was a big part of the attraction. The philosophical baggage of religion. The science of god. Which is also the science of his creation. This is not to deny the usual superstitious element. I believed in the old bastard, a mysterious creator.
I could not make sense of free will. I was such an instinctual naturalist that free will was inconceivable, literally. I could not square it. Could not justify God. Why would anyone choose Hell? I knew there were atheists out there. I abandoned God over the problem of evil and free will, not for the trendy atheists. In fact I always liked being heterodox. I was a convert. For me religion was the adoption of a heresy. I was joining an elitist out-group. Which seems funny now, of course.
I couldn't stomach an evil god, though. For that I demanded proof, and proof was not forthcoming. Also I read the bible, which is such a grand mess, of course.
I abandoned the afterlife at 19, having picked up Freud and a naturalistic view of the psyche.
To lose Heaven sucks, but I also feared Hell. I was either paranoid or more virtuous (read guilty) than the average Christian.
Had I really believed in getting into Heaven, I probably wound not have dropped God. Perhaps the problem of Evil was just the problem that I was afraid to end up in Hell. It was probably just a selfish fear that motivated my abandonment of God.
For which I soon found other reasons, besides this simple fear.
Considering the way I took for philosophy (and at one time logic), it does seem that a love of clarity was indeed another sincere reason.
I wanted to anchor my ship in calm waters. Mine was a difficult childhood. Not as difficult as some, of course, but rough enough to make me long for something stable.
I wanted insurance. I wanted security. I was old young. Having a mixture of pride and the fear of being ugly, unlovable.
Mother's love as a baby and father's indifference as a young man. Blah blah. Social failure at school. Not complete failure though. Moments of triumph. A mixed bag.
Sometimes I stood out as clearly the sharpest boy in class, in a public way, in an undeniable way. All thru schooling at various moments. Of course it was a small town school, a small pond.
But test results put me in the top few percent, again and again. Also was good at quick recall. I remembered shit. I understood concepts. I was equipped for both literature and math, history and science. I applied myself to literature and science especially.
I was lazy in sophmore geometry class. I picked my zits and wrote love notes, sketched whatever, ignored the teacher. Got an F.
Took it again and got an A. It was easy, of course.
Straight A's my final semester and on all my final exams. Big deal, right? Many of the classes were easy, but it wouldn't have mattered.
I should have been taking Calculus, French, Honors English. But I had gotten myself too far behind for all that.
I was a rebellious little shit, anti-social and brooding. I thought I was a genius of some sort in any case. And yet I hated and doubted myself, which was fire and brimstone for someone so instinctually arrogant.
I felt ugly, which is also hell for someone who must have spoiled as a baby to be so articulate, romantic, secretly confident.
Seems the recipe for just such a guy as I turned out as. An ironist prophet, an unorthodox comedian. A musician, of course. An art-critic. A self-proclaimed psychologist.
I know how ridiculous it appears to so and so. To myself even, being an ironist. A term which I am ironic about.
All these static terms. This old game and the impossibility of its closure.
My obsession is nothing for most folks. All this clarification of issues that most folks just ignore.
And because I am not a socialist in the Spenglerian sense, it's even more ineffectual and subjective. It's as if I were constructing chess problems.
Indeed, I am just a poet. Like Kerouac I cannot escape the gravity of my real life. Unlike Kerouac, I cannot take the details seriously. I present my life as the conflict of ideas. I experience a good chunk of it as such. I simply care about such things. I live to some degree in ideas. As Bobby Fisher lived on the chess board.
I live between books. I live on the book shelf. In the babble of the wise who are not so wise.
The philosopher as anti-wisdom. The philosopher as doubt, as the negation of a warm and effective prejudice.
The philosopher as sand in the oyster.
Wisdom as something of the folk. Wisdom as an implicit pragmatism, implicit holism.
But explicit holism is good perhaps for my type, the unwise. We self-mutilators can profit perhaps from holism. We can get our choir-boy asses away from the phallus of the Absolute.
Or can we?
Is the hero-myth well symbolized by the phallus?
The non-contingent core, the program with its variable undefined. The hole in ethics.
The hole in ethics that wears a mask. It is never seen without its mask, though it can trade one for another, this being the history of an individuals intellectual development. An exchange of masks. A modification of the Ideal.
The IDEAL undefined, that is what I mean by program, phallus, name of the father, etc..
Not mystical but psychological, metaphorical. Not certain like logic, just useful like the word "soul."
A useful theory, a mental model.
If particular hero-myths (ego-ideals) are cartridges, then this hole in ethics is the slot. We are programmed to find and execute a heroic mission.
Probably evolved it because it helps with socialization.
And to be the scientist (the knower of) this same hole in ethics, is also to find and execute a hero-myth, a program. I am the heroic scientist, the explorer of that which is. I am the engineer of mental models, a cartographer of the subjective factor.
