3,007

This is my 3,007th post since August 2008, when I stopped using LiveJournal and switched over to WordPress. 257 of them were private and some others are password protected. This is not counting the 1,045 posts I abandon as drafts.

Now I want to count my LiveJournal posts and tally my total output since 2003.


Update: I counted 4,094 posts on LiveJournal between 2003 and 2009.

This brings the total to 7,101 posts.

If you care, I care

Friend,

If you care about something, I care about it, too. I care for the sake of its importance to you, and I may care for that reason alone.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you reach. We might disagree.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to account for and justify why.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

But please understand: Friendship is essentially mutual. I cannot be more of a friend to you than you are to me.

ChatGPT as thought partner

Yes, I am using ChatGPT as a weird kind of thought partner. If you find yourself recoiling slightly, I understand. I have the same reaction. But it is a valuable exercise. Consider the following exchange:

Me:

How faithfully does this represent Leibniz’s monadology? “The fundamental unit of the universe is not the atom, nor a subatomic particle of ultimate smallness, nor anything a physicist can observe. The universe is made of unique centers, no two alike, and each is boundlessly vast. In its uniqueness and boundlessness, each unit is the image of God. God however is unbounded in centrality and unbounded in time and unbounded in vastness and unbounded in boundedness, Ein Sof.”

ChatGPT:

This passage is a creative reimagining of Leibniz’s Monadology, with some important differences in emphasis and metaphysical structure.

Leibniz’s monads are indeed fundamental units of the universe, and each monad is unique, reflecting a microcosm of the entire universe from its own perspective. However, they are not described as boundlessly vast. Rather, they are simple, indivisible substances that contain the entirety of their experience and the universe within them as a kind of mirror.

Your passage highlights the uniqueness and boundlessness of each unit, which resonates with Leibniz’s emphasis on the individuality of each monad, but the vastness attributed here departs from his conception. Monads, in Leibniz’s view, are not vast but simple, spiritual, and unextended points.

The idea of each unit being the image of God is similar to how Leibniz considers each monad to reflect the entire cosmos, and thereby God’s creation, within itself. But you go a step further in emphasizing a theological conception of God as Ein Sof, “unbounded in centrality and time and vastness and boundedness.” This portrayal of God has a more Kabbalistic influence, focusing on boundlessness and transcendence in a way that Leibniz’s rational and metaphysical framework would not fully capture.

In short, the passage reflects some of Leibniz’s core ideas—uniqueness, individuality, and reflection of the cosmos within each unit—but it layers on a different metaphysical and theological interpretation, making it more expansive and mystical than Leibniz’s system.

Me:

How close is it to the view Borges explored in his essay “Pascal’s Sphere”?

ChatGPT:

The passage has a strong resonance with Borges’s exploration of infinity, individuality, and divine attributes in “Pascal’s Sphere.” Borges’s essay centers on the idea of a sphere “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” a phrase associated with Pascal but rooted in earlier theological and mystical traditions, including Nicholas of Cusa and the Kabbalistic notion of Ein Sof.

Similarities:

  1. Infinite Centers: Your passage emphasizes that each unit (or monad) is a “unique center,” mirroring Borges’s discussion of the universe as infinitely centered. Each unique center is an image of the divine, just as Borges’s sphere implies that every point (or being) in the universe can serve as a center from which the infinite unfolds.
  1. Boundlessness and Uniqueness: Like Borges’s interpretation of Pascal’s vision, your passage invokes boundlessness, both within each unit and in God’s transcendence. This is similar to Borges’s fascination with the infinite, with Pascal’s sphere representing an overwhelming vastness that simultaneously includes everything and nothing.
  1. Theological Conception of God: Both your passage and Borges’s essay reflect a mystical conception of God’s attributes—unbounded in space, time, and essence. The emphasis on Ein Sof in your description parallels Borges’s use of Pascal’s sphere as a symbol of a God who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, immanent and transcendent, contained within every point and yet exceeding all points.

Differences:

  1. Multiplicity and Vastness: Your description portrays each center as “boundlessly vast,” which evokes a certain multiplicity and expansion within each unit that goes beyond Borges’s Pascalian sphere. For Borges, the idea of infinite centers emphasizes a shared infinitude rather than the idea of each center being independently vast.
  1. Imagery of the Image of God: Borges tends to focus more on the abstract implications of infinity and the paradoxes it introduces, rather than framing each individual unit as an image of God. While Borges’s conception can be seen as implicitly theological, he does not explicitly tie this to the idea of each unique center reflecting the divine in the way your passage does.
  1. Mystical vs. Philosophical Emphasis: Borges is more preoccupied with the philosophical and paradoxical nature of infinity, whereas your passage leans into a mystical or even Kabbalistic interpretation of divine boundlessness.

Conclusion: The passage is close to the spirit of Borges’s essay, sharing themes of infinite uniqueness, divine immanence, and the paradox of a universe with infinite centers. However, it diverges by emphasizing each unit as a “boundlessly vast” image of God, giving it a more explicitly mystical and theological flavor than Borges’s philosophical musings. Thus, it might be seen as a reworking of “Pascal’s Sphere” with a stronger infusion of Kabbalistic and theological ideas.

Me:

I used to call this faith “the myriad everythings”.

ChatGPT:

That phrase beautifully encapsulates the idea of infinite uniqueness and interconnectedness, resonating deeply with the themes of boundless centers and divine immanence. It also conveys a sense of plurality within unity, suggesting a faith that finds the sacred in the complexity and diversity of all beings.

Me:

How close is that passage, which I called an expression of the “myriad everythings” faith, to Buber’s theology?

ChatGPT:

Your passage has notable resonances with Buber’s theology, but it reconfigures key elements in a way that distinguishes it as a unique expression. Let’s unpack the comparison.

Resonances with Buber:

  1. Uniqueness and the Centrality of the Individual: Like your description of the universe as made of “unique centers, no two alike,” Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relationship revolves around the unique, irreducible individuality of beings. Each “I” and each “Thou” is singular and unrepeatable, and this uniqueness is central to the unfolding of relational truth.
  2. Divine Immanence and Transcendence: Buber’s God is the eternal Thou—transcendent, yet encountered in the concrete immediacy of relationships. In your description, each unit is an image of God, reflecting boundlessness and uniqueness in its own right. This mirrors Buber’s view that God is present in every authentic I-Thou meeting, where the divine is glimpsed in and through the particular. Both your passage and Buber’s thought affirm a conception of God that is infinitely manifest yet never fully grasped.
  3. The Infinite in the Finite: The paradoxical idea that each finite being can reflect or image something infinitely greater is central to Buber’s view of God. This corresponds with your phrase “each is boundlessly vast,” suggesting that every individual center contains, in some sense, the uncontainable divine. Buber would likely resonate with the way you frame each unit as containing a hint of the infinite, even if only through its infinite uniqueness.

Key Differences:

  1. Multiplicity vs. Relationship: Where Buber emphasizes relation as the essence of being—I-Thou encounters are what bring reality into vivid existence—your passage focuses more on multiplicity and vastness within each unique unit. Buber’s God is not primarily the boundless One reflected in each center, but the presence that comes into being between individuals. The myriad everythings approach treats uniqueness and boundlessness as inherent properties of each unit, while Buber’s theology treats these qualities as revealed in the relational between.
  2. The Image of God and Boundlessness: Your description suggests that each unit’s boundlessness makes it the “image of God.” Buber, however, would resist attributing such vastness to the units themselves. For him, the image of God is something that emerges through relational presence, not an inherent quality of the beings involved. Buber’s God is more of a dynamic, relational event than an ontological attribute within each entity.
  3. Ontology vs. Encounter: Your passage leans toward an ontological view—each unit is an image of God, each center is boundless. Buber’s theology, on the other hand, is deeply anti-ontological. He argues that what is real is not a matter of being but of meeting. God is never “is” but always “Thou”—a presence that emerges and withdraws in the act of relating, not a property to be possessed.

Overall Assessment: Your passage has a structural and thematic similarity to Buber’s conception, especially in the emphasis on unique centers and the divine nature of boundless individuality. But it departs in emphasizing the self-contained boundlessness of each center, whereas Buber sees the divine as primarily manifest in the intersubjective space between beings.

If Buber’s theology could be described as an orchestration of profound encounters, your “myriad everythings” faith is more like a cosmic constellation of individual luminaries, each carrying the fullness of the infinite within itself. It’s as if you took Buber’s focus on the I-Thou relationship and turned it inward, making each I a tiny microcosm of the divine—infinitely unique, infinitely complex, infinitely sacred.

Me:

Buber’s understanding is better.

ChatGPT:

That judgment feels true, especially in light of Buber’s insistence on the relational essence of reality. Buber’s emphasis on the between, where the divine is not possessed but encountered, guards against the pitfalls of solipsism and self-enclosure. By making the core of meaning arise from the I-Thou encounter rather than from the individual’s boundlessness, Buber situates God as a presence that is not within us or within things but in the relational event that breaks through our self-enclosed subjectivity.

His view prevents the sacred from being something we are or have and shifts it into something we can only approach through a genuine openness to the other. That approach seems to safeguard humility and mutuality in a way that a view focusing on inner vastness might lose. In Buber’s understanding, no being—no matter how unique or boundless—contains God within itself. Rather, God is realized in the space between, in that shared horizon where the boundaries of the self become porous and a new kind of presence emerges.

This means Buber’s understanding offers a dynamic that’s self-transcending rather than self-centered, maintaining the mystery of the divine and preserving the distinctiveness of each being without reducing them to isolated absolutes. It’s as if Buber’s theology holds the tension between self and other without collapsing into either.

So, if your instinct is to feel that Buber’s understanding is better, it’s likely because his formulation preserves the paradox of unity-in-separation that your own vision, by affirming boundlessness within each center, might not express as sharply.

Oblivia

Inside every soul is a blot of unique obliviousness: an incapacity to conceive some truth that is obvious to all other beings. And this one truth is so obvious to all others that, to them, it is inconceivable that such an obliviousness could exist. And so the world is oblivious to the obliviousness, unable to locate to precise origin of this particular world-bending nothingness.

Evil exists, dumbass

We can become so idealistic about human nature that we stop believing genuine, active, positive evil is possible. We cannot believe that one person can desire and pursue the goal of inflicting misery or destruction on another person.

Then we drift into seeing evil solely in negative terms — as a refusal to desire and pursue another person’s welfare. Evil is only to be unconcerned or insensitive toward other people, or even insufficiently concerned or sensitive.

Such people can, perversely, fail to understand the necessity of defense against evil, and the unavoidable consequences of such defenses. Perhaps if the defender had been more concerned or sensitive to those who needed it, there would never have been conflict or need for defense.

And blind to the reality of positive evil and consequently the necessity of defense, such people see evil only in the defense, in the form of insufficient concern and sensitivity toward the innocent victims — innocent victims accidentally but inevitably and unavoidably harmed in every war, however carefully and humanely fought.

If you cannot consider the reality of positive evil, your thinking on Israel will be both stupid and callous, however intelligent and empathetic you believe yourself to be.

Continue reading Evil exists, dumbass

The beauty of tradeoffs

I was talking to my friend Blondeau about the oddball glory of the Brompton foldable bike, and I found myself saying something that seems worth keeping:

The belief in absolute perfection — perfection without compromise — is the death of design. Design is the art of relative perfection — perfection within constraints for some limited purpose.

I intended to link Brompton to my description of how foldable bikes design always involves stark tradeoffs, optimized to some purpose, and sacrificing other desirable qualities, and how this constraint, precisely, is what makes foldable bike design beautiful. Except, it turns out I never posted on this subject. So I will dig through old emails and texts and try to patch together a post I should have written years ago.

I guess I’ll start with an email I wrote Blondeau.

One word of warning: If you get a Brompton, you’ll never be able to do without one again, especially if you’re living nomadically. Any Brompton-less bike stable will feel incomplete.

What sold me on Brompton was looking at the design problem different foldables tried to solve. Each optimizes for some purpose.

Some are all about easy shipping of mostly-normal bikes from one location to another. Set up and breakdown requires significant effort. Once the bicycle arrives at a location, you set it up, and leave it set up. The design is optimized solely for providing a conventional cycling experience, and ease and speed of folding and unfolding is sacrificed.

Brompton is designed for multimodal transportation. It breaks down and sets up in about 1 minute. The folding-unfolding is assumed to happens one or more times in the course of a trip. You set out for a train station on the Brompton. There you fold it down and carry it onto the train. When you arrive at your stop you unfold the Brompton and ride it to your hotel. There you fold it down again and take it up to your room. If you are Eurailing around the continent and want cycling to be part of how you get around, you cannot beat Brompton. They make all the right tradeoffs for that style of getting around, and I love that.

If you just want to have a bike with you in Spain and maybe other places you visit having a normal bike that folds might be better. You’ll get a smoother, more refined ride.

Brompton is pure quirk. 

Another design that made clear, decisive tradeoffs is the Mazda MX-5 Miata. The origin story of the Miata is one of clarity of vision and refusal to blur it in order to live up to the bland ideal of meeting the expectations of most people for most purposes. The product managers, designers and engineers behind that car sacrificed passenger and storage space and engine power for a very specific roadster driving experience. They knew exactly what the car was for, and what it was not for, and every decision was driven by that clarity.

Another beautiful story of tradeoffs was the development of the Palm Pilot. That team watched Sculley-era Apple try to brute-force design the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the Apple Newton. The device tried to be a handheld computer that could do anything. Consequently it did nothing well. It was too big, so it did not fit in a pocket. It tried to recognize natural handwriting, but failed comically most of the time. It supported syncing with computers, but the process was similar to a data backup procedure. Palm optimized its device for data lookup. It assumed most data would be entered on a computer and synced to the device. They devised a clumsy but reliable text entry scheme called Graffiti instead of relying on immature handwriting recognition technology. Best of all, the device was tiny and pocketable. And it came with a syncing cradle that supported one-button sync. The product took off, despite being vastly less advanced that the doomed Apple Newton.

If you read these two case stories, you’ll notice crude prototypes play a central role in refinement of the product, but also in building alignment around the vision, and enthusiasm for that vision.


Funny. I’ve been watching videos and listening to audiobooks by product management guru, Marty Cagan. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed. What he describes as a revolution is stuff we’ve been doing for the last 30 years in UX and Human Centered Design.

But today I’m wondering if the problem is that designers try to do this work from a position of weakness. Maybe when we do this work from a position of strength, and take responsibility not only for the user experience, but also the feasibility and viability of the product (all power entails responsibility!), we are no longer just designers. We become product managers.

I wonder if that is the profession I should have pursued? I love tools. I love beautiful, clearly-conceived, faithfully executed products. But this difficult work cannot be done by charm, influence and lobbying alone. It requires power.

Hmm.

(Now I’m thinking about the app reviews I’ve written over the last decade. The majority of them are addressed to the product management — usually bad — of the app, not the features or the design. I get angriest at the product management philosophy behind wrongheaded design decisions.)

Some dreams are just for you

Some things are for us, alone, to do.

We, alone, decide what our identity is or is not, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is bigotry.

We, alone, decide if we are to be held to a higher standard, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is a double-standard.

We, alone, decide what we must sacrifice to live up to our higher standard. When you do that for others, that is human sacrifice.

You decide these things for yourself, alone; I decide these things for myself alone.

Unsolicited advice, to take or leave. You decide:

Find the people with whom you identify, who accept you as one of them, and participate in that community. Then you will have an identity. Did you know that identity is something you do with others, not a classification of what you are?

Live the ideal that inspires you. Do the inner and outer work your conscience calls you to do. Then you will have an ethic. Did you know that an ethic is a way to inhabit an ethos, not a set of codes and criteria to which one must conform, by which one is judged?

Make the sacrifices you feel compelled to make. Then you will have a greater self. Did you know that nobody makes sacrifices to others? All sacrifices are made to one’s greater self or to one’s petty self.

Dreams are a genre of art for an audience of one.

Megalopolis

Inspired by Kat Rosenfield’s hyperambiguous pan of Coppola’s Megalopolis, I went with my filmmaker cinephile son-in-law to see it firsthand and participate in this very weird reflection on this very weird moment in history. Her review brought to mind the failed tightrope walker from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tightrope walker tried to cross over to an unknown destiny. He was jeered at by the crowd, he was jeered at by his own conscience, he lost his faith and balance and he fell to his death. Zarathustra honored him for taking the risk and for failing. Rosenfield seemed to want to pick up Coppola’s broken body and honor it with an honorable burial. Which is weird, come to think of it, because this film is modeled on Rome, its protagonist is a man named Cesar, and the comment I posted in Rosenfield’s review was “So you come to praise this movie, not bury it?”

Pretty much everything associated with this movie concerns burials and questions of what deserves honor, or ridicule or an ironic blendings of the two. And ah, sahib, it is this very question all the way down, apparently to infinite depths. Except, if you pay attention, the depth effect is obviously just an infinity mirror of self-consciousness looking into own self-consciousness and seeing its own self-consciousness reflected in itself, ad infinitum. The whole infinity effect is produced inside the dimensions of a stage. But maybe this is precisely Coppola’s point? So is it a feature? A bug? A stupid gimmick?

Like the film, like this time this film critiques, our film-watching experience was so self-consciously aware of its own awareness of its own experience that the film itself became one layer in a stack of meta-experiences reflecting on other meta-experiences. I doubt it is possible to watch this film without watching yourself watching it, while also imagining the experience of those enlisted in the making of the film and the state of being of someone who would make a film like this. This is a reflection on grand decadence from a perspective of the most grandiose decadence. To watch it is to step into a hall of mirrors, and to become crazy.

Coppola’s now got me, and any other sucker who buys a ticket all wound up in his egotistic vision. We’re so busy asking ourselves what people like us ought to think about a film like this by a director like Coppola, it no longer occurs to us to just become absorbed in the film and involved with the characters and to be moved however the art actually, in fact, moves us.

So shoveling aside all meta-bullshit, how was it to watch this movie? At about the ten-minute mark, I began waiting for it to end. I was watching it and straining to be generous, trying to see what it had to offer. But, experientially, the closest comparison I can make the 2016 AI experiment-parody Sunspring, which shackled talented actors to a script that computationally imitated meaningful human speech without meaning anything at all. I suppose we could call the effect this sort of thing has on meaning-seeking minds “hallucinatory” or “dream-like”. But we could also call it “boggling at nonsense”.

Now another text comes to mind, a debate between two architects. And I swear it is pure coincidence that Coppola’s Cesar character is, in addition to being Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, also an architect — a Howard Roarke with magic powers.

The debate took place in 1982 at the very height of postmodernism, pitting antimodernist Christopher Alexander against ultrapostmodernist Peter Eisenman:

Alexander: …when I make an arcade I have a very simple purpose, and that is to try to make it feel absolutely comfortable — physically, emotionally, practically, and absolutely. This is pretty hard to do. … The thing that strikes me about your friend’s building — if I understood you correctly — is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.

Eisenman: That is correct.

Alexander: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.

The two luminaries go back and forth for awhile, with Eisenman defending the importance of reflecting the anxious, uncomfortable and disharmonious state of the world through architecture, and Alexander insisting that the role of architecture should be to materially improve the state of the world by creating comfortable and harmonious structures thereby reducing anxiety.

Eisenman: I am not preaching disharmony. I am suggesting that disharmony might be part of the cosmology that we exist in. I am not saying right or wrong. My children live with an unconscious fear that they may not live out their natural lives. I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety. An architecture that puts its head in the sand and goes back to neoclassicism, and Schinkel, Lutyens, and Ledoux, does not seem to be a way of dealing with the present anxiety. Most of what my colleagues are doing today does not seem to be the way to go. Equally, I do not believe that the way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures to make people feel comfortable, to preclude that anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react against anxiety or see it pictured in his life? After all, that is what all those evil Struwwel Peter characters are for in German fairy tales.

Alexander: Don’t you think there is enough anxiety at present? Do you really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in the form of buildings?

And there we are.

I’ll suggest that Megalopolis is just another bucketful of the water we are drowning in.

And that is far more thought than this movie deserved, so I’ll stop now.

Escape

A prisoner was isolated in a cell with nothing but a cot, a chamberpot and a footlocker. It was a mystery to him why he was given a footlocker. He had nothing to put in it except one change of underwear and a spare pair of socks.

He had nothing to do all day except dream of escape. How this could be accomplished was even more mysterious, for there was no door or windows in his cell, just six inner surfaces — six directions teasing infinite extension, halted by impassable cinderblock.

He did not know how thick the cinderblock walls were. Dayless and nightless eternity, stretching onward without end, but without access to future or past, persuaded him that the cinderblock extended infinitely in all directions.

One day the two mysteries — the inescapable cell, the pointless footlocker — became one, and he had his answer. The prisoner climbed into his footlocker, closed the lid and achieved the impossible.

Jack going to sleep

The whole family watched Jack put himself to sleep last night on the baby monitor. He seemed to be reviewing his day, drowsily chattering about cars and fire trucks and bicycles. He spent a few moments on the matter of Shoshi’s bike, which he pronounces with a nasally “Hngm-Hngm’s byckle.” Then he started singing. “Car, car, truck. Car, car, Mimi’s car. Car, car, dog.” We watched him until he dropped off into sleep, and shared a hanging sadness that was not disappointment when his song stopped.

No more summer vacation

After graduating from college and entering the adult world of full-time employment, I remember feeling shock at the interruption of one of life’s basic rhythms. I would never again have a summer vacation. But I gradually learned to stop living in 9 month units separated by interludes of relative freedom.

When we get older, we have to make a similar adjustment with respect to health. Life is no longer stretches of carefree prefect health separated by brief interludes of minor annoyances — injuries, dental issues, etc. Life becomes an ongoing effort of dealing with this and that.

Before she died in 2021 my Torah study friend Sue Lubin made an unexpectedly comforting remark about being old and having health issues. “At my age,” she said, “there’s always something going wrong. I just say ‘Add it on.'” How was that comforting?

But the older I get the stranger phenomenon comfort becomes.

Ten years ago, when I had a health scare, my friend Britt said horrible things. He didn’t listen like good listeners do. He didn’t say kind words. He certainly did not make sympathetic noises. The fucker did not say a single prayer for me or emit any positive vibes, or anything related to that well-wishing genre of benevolence. No. Britt made fun of me and of my fear and of the indignities I was enduring for the first time. He said it all paled in comparison to the ordeal of having a lemon-sized cyst in his asscrack lanced. His procedure was observed by a group of young, healthy, beautiful medical students. He said in the twilight of semi-lucidity before his anesthesia knocked him the rest of the way out, he feebly attempted to seduce his nurse with poetic overtures. He helped me understand that human dignity is not nearly as necessary as we assume when our dignity is still mostly-intact. It was comforting. It’s what comedians do, bless their hearts.

Buber versus design…?

Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design.

1.

Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.

Only now can the other basic word [I-It] be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I — an object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become hence-forth — but as it were an It for itself, something previously unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event.

Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is transformed — reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects — and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it, and joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity.

2.

He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others — an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands-right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure — and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness.


I will just let these two passages sit without comment for now.