Nothing bears scrutiny. Love disarms scrutiny.

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Feeling the Why is certainty of rootedness. Knowing the Why is the poetic condensation of this certainty. But asking “Why?”: this is also a kind of certainty.

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(As I use it): Love is spontaneous (non-rational) valuing. Love is manifested as spontaneous (uninterpreted) seeing-as-beautiful, or acceptance of being-seen-as-beautiful.

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Both the pure eye and the evil eye wish to see persuasively.

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To be human is to see-with. To lead is to see persuasively.

To philosophize is to see experimentally. Infrequently, the experiment ends well. That is the experimentation yields a vision: a more thorough, affirming, inclusive, accessible and practicable seeing-with.

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When we can look out onto the world and see it as beautiful, with nothing offensive remaining, refusing to look closer is the right thing to do. There is nothing virtuous about strip-mining a pristine landscape, whether man-made or natural. Stop courageously at the surface.

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The intellectual conscience is obligated to confront the problems that come to it; but just as much, it is obligated to refrain from confronting problems that have not come to it. The intellectual conscience should resist the temptation to advance into foreign problems when its borders have been secured. However, minds and armies are only human, and the best defense becomes a restless offense. Peace dies of boredom.

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Conservatism at its best preserves the conditions for transcendence. Conservatism at its worst prohibits all change, most of all transcendence. But even the worst conservatism does its good work, it just plays a very different role from the one it thinks it plays.

(To put it differently, “Vishnu” without Shiva is not Vishnu, even if it does Vishnu’s work; and the converse is also true: “Shiva” without Vishnu is not Shiva, even when it does Shiva’s work. Gods have self-awareness or they’re still a brood of conflicting instincts slithering blindly toward retroactive divinity.)

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Sympathize up; empathize down.