Susan keeps asking if there might be an upside to the wokeness convulsion our society is undergoing. She hopes it might inspire people to have conversations they might not have otherwise had and to develop real empathy. I’m pretty sure this hope is an expectation widely shared among progressives. I think the entire project is … Continue reading Susan’s hope, my hope
There are positive metaphysics which make assertions about reality beyond what can be experienced, and there are negative metaphysics which deny the possibility of making such assertions. A person who has worked at thinking through problems that started out unthinkable — who had to begin with confronting unthinkability and overcoming it by finding new modes … Continue reading Recognizing possibilities of transcendence
The heart of morality is the call to transcendence: we are meant to exist as ourselves toward reality that is not us (alterity). These are the proper terms of transcendence: self transcending toward alterity within a shared ground of infinite reality. This is very different from that common conception of transcendence that opposes a mundane … Continue reading Esoteric summary
If Levinas is right — and I believe he is — it is no accident that the person I know whose formula for intellectual victory was to “contain and comprehend” the other was also among the most amoral people I’ve known. Whether he behaved admirably or despicably, the only judgment that weighed on him was … Continue reading Contained and comprehended
Something to consider from Bruno Latour: “Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the … Continue reading Re-thinking / re-feeling politics
Two counter-intuitive interpretations of gut feelings guide my ethical actions: The heat of hubris. I always try to catch and interrogate this feeling wherever it happens, especially when it is accompanied by iron-clad justification and and sublimates into majestic righteousness. If it feels like hubris, I assume it is hubris, and if that hubris can … Continue reading Gut feelings and interpretations
Arthur C. Clarke formulated Three Laws of prediction: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into … Continue reading Arrogant thoughts on magic
I am not exactly enjoying the first chapter of Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being, but I am finding it valuable. Levinas’s use of the word “exception” is fascinating, and I think I am going to adopt it for my own work. One thing I believe he is saying: we tend to make category mistakes when attempting to … Continue reading Father-of-pearl
I’ve speculated that the extremes of exoterism (fundamentalism) and esoterism (mysticism) have little do do with the faiths they are thought to exemplify. They are faiths of their own — the former a faith in a divinity who dwells beyond (who demands particular observances), the latter a faith in a divinity who dwells within (who … Continue reading Faithlessnesses and faiths
Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that … Continue reading The torments of religious speech
A question from a couple of weeks ago: Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been … Continue reading How truth loves
Ideally, we would all have a place in the world. What each of us is (role) and who each of us is (way of perceiving, conceiving, feeling and acting) would coincide enough that the world would give us a purpose as it took from us our kind of service. Because of the implicit philosophy we … Continue reading The death and life of philosophies
The following is not an argument. It is nothing more than a way to see things, which can be entertained, tried on or ignored. One person can compel another to accept certain facts through use of logic and empirical evidence (under threat of excommunication from the world of the reasonable), but understanding of worldviews is … Continue reading A new way to see?
We teach children that they’re not the center of the universe, and in doing this we make solipsistic animals into human beings. But wouldn’t it accomplish the same moral goal, but with less intellectual violence, to teach them that they’re not the sole center? * To attempt universal decentering as a means to socialization sets … Continue reading Danger of objectivism
Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be merely or even primarily understood as an object. To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is. However, to attempt … Continue reading Thou dialectic
I indexed all the direct (and some indirect) references to Logos in my wiki. (When prompted enter “generalad”.) Then I indexed several key passages treating what I’ve called “solipse“, or what is traditionally called “spiritual childhood”, “idealism”, and “existentialism” – the dangerous temporary autism (a state in which a thinker needs parental guidance) through which … Continue reading Wiki activity
Gratitude: Gratitude is acknowledging that your own apparently individual successes and good fortune are actually collective, and only illusorily individual. Gratitude is giving others their fair share in your self: shared oneness. Ingratitude is spiritual theft. Apology: Apology is the repairing of damage done to the oneness of a collective self by one or both … Continue reading Some ethical fragments