Random Miscellany
It doesn’t matter what you do—you can’t know.
The world of practice is not what you think.
There really is a “they,” but they aren’t whom you imagine, or even whom “they” imagine.
A political system based on two or three factions distinguished, in ultimate fact, by nothing but a parenthetical acronym after the names of their respective members—and in which people are divided by nothing less than hatred, or united by nothing less than brotherly love, entirely (yes, entirely) on the basis of those acronyms. A mental illness, to put it politely. (There is no such thing as mental illness, but the true name is far less comforting.)
Americans are stupid, just as everyone thinks. And everyone else is stupid, just as Americans think. This is the one point of agreement—albeit only geometrical—between Americans and the rest of the world, and consequently the only thing about which it is actually true to say, “Everybody knows that.”
Modernity is hell-bent on proving what would be without need of proof if we still experienced life as humans. Case in point: it wants to demonstrate through experimentation that mortality gives life its purpose, its interest, and its reason to carry on. People before the age of science used to intuit this simply by recognizing that they were going to die, feeling afraid, and then thinking and acting accordingly; but we are much too scientific for that, aren’t we? Deference to science in matters of human nature is modernity’s self-revelatory substitute for natural self-awareness, which is to say our compensation or consolation for the loss of our ability to feel alive.
Socrates was so right; writing is futile. I am as certain that you do not know what I mean as you are certain that you do. From this it follows that I am most likely to trust your interpretation of my words precisely when you are least likely to do so. Our amity is based on refusing to presume about one another.
If not writing, then what? No one has proven more enigmatic than Socrates, who did not write, but who changed the world more fundamentally than anyone else has done, entirely by means of other men’s writing.
The only way to avoid misunderstanding is to say nothing to anyone. Of course, that too can be misinterpreted, as anyone knows who has ever taken a moment to collect his thoughts during a lovers’ quarrel.
Have we all been duped all this time? Have we even been duped about “all this time” itself? I am not disposed to conspiracy theory, but….
I do not know anyone who believes, when push comes to shove, that he does anything he does not want to do. And yet, if I said, “Desire (or the lack of it) is the cause of everything—growth, death, the heavens, the weather, and the flow of your blood,” you would probably call me insane. You would likely insist that the nexus of desire and reality ends at the outer limits of practical action; I would be inclined to say the opposite.
I am writing this to prevent myself from writing something else; I am trying not to say the thing I feel compelled to say, but which I know is more likely to harm than help me. I am trying to do what I want, rather than what I feel I need. It is difficult. The failure to overcome this difficulty is death. This is not a metaphor; it is a literal, practical problem.
The death of metaphysics occurred in 322 B.C. Even Aristotle could not resist. That is why so much of what is called metaphysics after Aristotle is based on an unmetaphysical principle, hope for transcendence. Post-Aristotelian metaphysics is mostly nostalgia for Aristotle, a dream of returning home. Kant was the angry son who refused to return. This is why his own progeny can barely remember their grandfather. And that is why this grandfather’s portrait, which evokes awe and pride among the noblest branches of the family tree, reveals, for these post-Kantians, only a wrinkled old man in his quaint little workshop.
Plato-Aristotle, Augustine-Aquinas, Kant-Hegel. Considering this, can anyone continue to deny that progressive history is a myth?
The history of philosophy is the incremental supplanting of thoughts by words. This process eventually results in words overestimating themselves, which is what literalism means. Jacques Derrida was this literalism reduced to a practical joke.
