Aphorisms and Misc. Reflections III
Abstract: I collect some minor reflections and miscellaneous reflections from my 8th notebook. These are primarily philosophical-political meanderings, notes for further pursuits.
1. Can one ever teach another to be creative? Techniques developed to invite the muse—daily, voluntarily, unto another? What we lack is an art concerning the production of art, a science of inspiration: how hardly we know how to invite the muse well.[1]
2. Below each crust of the “particular” seems yet another atmosphere of the abstract “universal”: to grind down the small always sheds light on the big. At stake in every locality are the conditions of the universe writ large.
3. A universe exists between the statements “I have suffered” and “I, too, have suffered.” The first leads to: hate, positivism, resentment, anger. The second: love, negativity, appreciation, compassion. The first: the basis of the authoritarian; the second: the basis of liberalism.
4. Some joined for economic reasons; some joined for social reasons; some joined for political reasons; some joined simply to get to heaven.
5. Much of socialization is an education on how to deliver hidden things, to show and conceal and reveal just enough, to “play it cool,” and by “cool” I mean: distantly. The problem here is related to the “lie” and constitutes a form of dissimulation but in a far more innocent and innocuous way: that is, it is striking how little direct truth and brazen intention enters the “socially-sanctioned.” How much of human interaction is geared to putting what is actually meant in a format that is anything but!—and how this is not always a matter of bad faith.
6. There are Hope Diamonds of the soul. Some gifts, if held or possessed for too long, accrue curse like moss; their histories catch up with them. Some gifts must always be in movement, circulating among others like a coveted hot-coal. The ethics of materiality: enjoy, do not possess; witness, do not own; grow attached, but keep a distance.[2]
7. Action is intention evangelized. The evangelical need not know thoroughly, or understand fully, what they believe in, and submit to, totally.
8. Contemporary advertising for makeup faces this fundamental paradox: it seeks to instill insecurity while simultaneously bolstering confidence. It calls this paradox “empowerment.” “Empowerment” indicates only: we lack an appropriate language of self-love; we do not know how to love ourselves well.[3]
9. On wonder: the trace of reflection follows the arc of happening. All depends on the event—the thought is always and only after-thought. Attention is an emotional, not an intellectual, effort.
10. Every judgment is tinged by the prophetic; to judge is to evangelize.
11. The charge against Thrasymachus cannot be reduced to instrumental reason—it cannot be an accusation against utility. It is remarkable how materially profitable, how resilient, how sustainable living poorly can actually be. All hinges on: the soul.
12. There is a unique form of resentment reserved against those who one feels are burdened by triviality—who are content to live out lives of triviality. Here the “trivial” and the “nihilistic” share a similar root, and forge a similar subject: the final man.
13. On the great amnesia—the self-torturing straw-man of our society: we forget, daily, the basic elements of “man”; we rediscover, daily, the basic elements of “man.” We feign confusion, disgust, shock in the interim, unable to understand how it is that the perennial and permanent can prove themselves only as awake—or sleeping.
14. There is a guilt drawn not from moral fault, but from unintended consequences: that the “best laid schemes…” sometimes do not pan out may be the source of critical self-reflection, but need not carry any moral force or weight. We lack a language to explore this more quotidian form of faulted non-harm.[4]
15. The call of the true skeptic: “I critique all things which feign truth; and, since all things feign truth, my critique is limitless. Above all, I critique myself.”
[1] See Beckett, Milton on the problem of waiting. Socrates in Phaedrus. To sidestep the problem: the answer and reduction to genius; the idiosyncratic habits of bizarre, eccentric and misunderstood—e.g. artistic—minds. The ancient link between the use of narcotics and the creation of art is subsumed under this attempt to induce the presence of an external mythos. The question is whether to “induce the muse” as a form of mastery is in direct contra-distinction to traditional understandings of “inspiration,” which usually sees the source of inspiration as somehow over, above or below the registrar of the “rational.” See Nietzsche, Heidegger.
[2] See Rilke and Pessoa on love; Danielle Allen on mutual sacrifice; Hegel and Axel Honneth. Rousseau on the giving of all to all; Derrida and Mauss.
[3] See Socrates, Symposium; Rousseau—amour propre.
[4] See Bernard Williams on shame—Shame and Necessity. See, also, Mill on the no-harm principle.