To me, doing philosophy means finding new paths to previously unimagined treasures.
By this I mean not just different paths, paths along different routes, and not just bigger treasures. I mean entirely new sets of possible paths that work differently to previously used paths – to treasure also of a new type, treasure that people focused on known types of treasures couldn’t even recognise or imagine.
reality: What is it? What determines its identity?
Do things ever feel more real than in a moment of danger? And what feels more real than that which exerts fear and unease on us?
Does anything influence the structure of our reality more than its threats and our choices of how to handle them?
What do we do with a danger that is too strange to be understood? How do we try to deal with it – With what mindset and method do we try to face it?
The threats that instill the most fear are those right at the edge of our reality – close enough to sense but too strange to understand and integrate.
What is there that can be sensed but cannot be quantified, cannot be reduced – and how does it relate to reality?
I could be very confident.
I choose not to be.
As a child I knew:
Confidence is for the weak.
Confidence is for fools.
Since writing this, my confidence in this thought has diminished.
The ocean is sleep – dream under high tide;
While life dries and rots on the shoreline, only the machine will truly stink – its abstract resistance having given waste space to live a dead evolution.
summer 22, reading the Dawn of Everything, re. p. 159 on sacred & private property:
maybe history has in fact not whitnessed a de-sacralization, but instead a total sacralization:
[transitioning over millenia] from the sacred being limited to special rituals to the abstract god’s sanctity: omnipresent locally and temporally, extending down to every man & thing through the sacred rational structure/institution called law –
thus replacing the functional, informal {property/safety/freedom}-{ensuring/producing} relationship of inter-personal trust with the alienating/particularizing individual connection to [quasi/de-facto ]monotheistically centralized law … culminating historically in the abstract sacral legal structure of money
– of course, single entities can no longer be sacred per se, but instead only relative to their connection to the one god – i.e. through their ‘value’…
(…and historically this relation spreads automatically, through commerce and rational governance, to everything and anything that exists in [mainstream culture’s consensus ]reality… and once it becomes global and total, it is no longer noticeable that our reality has this sacral, magical property.
summer 2022:
Maybe abstract ownership as per Roman Law is the dialectically de-generated/corrupted/derivative opposite of the original ownership relations which centred around responsibility/care.
The main function* of the news is to distract cogs in the machine from noticing that their life[, i.e. their experience[ and world]] has adopted a structure that fits their function; – that their life is vastly less interesting than it could be and that nothing new is happening[/being experienced] on the global level that will change this state of affairs – that they are basically idling.
*function in this sense doesn’t imply that the machine or news writers are aware of this. Rather: the machine, due to its structure, self-selects for cogs/parts that fit: for individuals and [news-]organisations that do this.
the deeper i understand,
the less i understand.
the more deeply I understand – the higher the dimensionality of my model,
the fewer things I see clearly.
could it be any other way? why do i believe it won’t end in blindness?
reading the chapter on children in Khalil Gibran’s the Prophet, which beautifully says how we should provide for them and care for them but without shaping their ideas/souls after our own, the following occurred to me:
If unconscious ideology exists as described in entry 11, then we unwittingly deny our children the option to re-shape the world to fit the new perspectives that each new generation can bring.
To truly be free to change things so as to live the way they see fit, future generations must be able to freely conceive of how to live, how the world could be. And they cannot freely conceive if they are born into systems with implicit ideology. Which is indeed the case: one comes into the world embedded within systems that implicitly dictate ways of thinking for one to survive or thrive.
We must find some kind of escape from this bind – some way for our children to not be forced into the same ways of thinking as us.
To be clear about what the problem is here: I’m distinguishing between the individual and societal level and stating that Gibran’s vision cannot be fulfilled by an individual family, no matter how well-intentioned they are, as long as the children are thrown into systems that implicitly produce ideology – as is the norm.
Neologisms are a sign of weak philosophy.
True philosophy finds new ways of using existing words.
confronting the harder process of finding more meaningful ways of integrating existing words with eachother – of course aptly, so without loss or degradation of meaning…
to heal those rifts that our words cleaved long ago – instead of creating new words to layer on top of the lacerated body in an attempt to hold it