When I am in charge, the accuracy of watches will be limited to +/- 15 minutes. They will be designed to speed up, slow down, jump forward, stop and start randomly throughout the day.
Punctuality will go the way of small pox.
Atomized
Business habitually adopts philosophical language with very specific, subtle and valuable meanings, softens the meaning, and reduces the words to banal synonymity. Precisely what most needs saying cannot be said.
1) Each; 2) Sentence; 3) Is; 4) Reduced; 4.a) To; 4.a.i.) A; 4.b) Series; 4.b.i) Of; 4.c.) Discrete; 4.d.) Words.
- The
- Format
- Is
- As
- Inhospitable
- To
- Meaning
- As
- The
- News.
- Separated
- and
- decontextualized
everything
- is
- synonymous.
- News.
The flower arranger
The man and the woman met when they were students. Once or twice a month he would bring her a perfect rose. He would go from shop to shop, looking for one with a perfect color and shape with no blemishes on the petals or stem.
After they graduated and got married, he began giving her bouquets. At first they were conventionally perfect, but gradually they became increasingly eccentric. He began combining selections of flowers in unusual ways, in symmetries she had never seen, but which felt familiar to her.
After the birth of their child, he began arranging the flowers in front of her. He would dump a pile of flowers on the table and, without taking his eyes off her, he would arrange the flowers into a perfect unity, incorporating every one. She sometimes saw him steal flowers from the neighbors’ front lawns as he walked home.
At some point she realized that his flower selections, which had been growing more haphazard by the year, were now random. Some of the flowers were severely damaged and some were rotten–but he used them all, and his compositions gained depth and power. He would finish, and, seeing what he had made, she would cry without knowing why.
Toward the end of their life he would run his lawn mower over a corner of their wildflower bed, and create a bouquet from the clippings.
Being concept-bound
To think conceptually is not the same as to be concept-bound.
One decisive difference is in one’s interpretation of sequence: are the conceptualized elements that constitute the concept understood to precede and produce the meaning of the concept; or do the conceptualized elements follow and attempt to account for the spontaneous meaning of the concept?
To make this concrete: Let’s say that a wife is angry with her husband. He asks her why. She begins to explain, listing reasons. However, each time she lists a reasons her husband calls it into doubt, pointing to an assumption she’s made about his motives. According to him it is these unsubstantiated assumptions that have caused her offense – not his actions as he meant them. He points out to her that since the reasons are faulty, her anger is unfounded. Here’s the crux: the assumption is that her anger is founded on the assumptions.
In this example if the husband actually believes his own argument, he is concept-bound – and this is true even if the wife has in fact misinterpreted the meaning of his actions. And if the wife is not genuinely emotionally persuaded but is no longer confident in her assessment of her husband’s behavior she is also concept-bound. She has been bound-up by her husband’s argument, and made unable to act on her interpretation, not relieved of a painful conception and enabled to act according to a less painful and more persuasive truth. If the wife were brought to see what happened from a shifted perspective and found that her offense has simply vanished this would have been thinking conceptually without succumbing to conceptualization.
The conceptualization of facts preceding meaning is itself one of our deepest concept-binding conceptualizations.
Derivative conceptualizations are sometimes conceived to to relieve a thinker of unwanted conceptualizations. Examples are: 1) Skepticism, the belief that calling all individual elements of a way of seeing into doubt will weaken the sense of an unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive meaningful whole; 2) the notion that conceptual thought is the root of unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive wholes, so avoidance of clear thought is avoidance of concept-boundness; and 3) a favorite of moms everywhere, that we can decide to conceptualize individual elements and the whole in a way that suits us in order to feel how we wish to about life.
The way out of concept-boundedness is to be faithful to one’s full experience and to reflect on this experience conceptually.
Last night
Susan went out with Zoe last night. When they came home Susan looked 10 years younger. Zoe met a Romanian and spent the evening talking with him while Susan danced and played the beard for a friend of hers.
Blank journal
I deleted my old journal and started a new one here.