When given a gift, accept the gift. Do not steal it. * To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property is to betray the spirit of gift-giving. A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object is … Continue reading Don’t steal gifts
I’ve talked about stealing gifts. Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a … Continue reading Gift thieves
I’m giving a designer friend of mine a beautiful, perfect gift, and it’s got me thinking about gifts, again. I just looked up my old posts on gifts, and two of them have held up pretty nicely. Designs and gifts Don’t steal gifts
When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort. My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service. Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world … Continue reading Gifts of service
An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James: When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.” Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.” Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.” The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to … Continue reading Waa waa waa
My family uses a haggadah from the Jewish Labor Committee. It gets overbearingly, even comically, socialist at many points, but we love it. Before blessing the wine, we read: Consider the cup of wine which we are about to drink. Countless sets of hands played a role in bringing this wine to our seder: the … Continue reading The roots of givenness
From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: … Continue reading Against pure transaction
The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus. The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators. The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure … Continue reading Tricky life
According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches: The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the … Continue reading Kill the giants
I have been thinking a lot about “background philosophies”, the ideas we think with, and “foreground philosophies”, the ideas we think about. I have equated background philosophies with subjects. Whether it is a personal subject, or an academic subject, it does not matter. My thought has brought me to an understanding of subjects that on … Continue reading On the subject of subjects