Poets do not tell you what they feel. They show you how they feel. Philosophers don't tell you what they think, but show you how they do it.

No one can tell you what to think or feel. But some can help you do it better. Our poets make us feel better. Philsophers make us think better.

It's not that they give us better thoughts or better feelings. They hone our concepts and emotions, to make our minds and hearts precise.

"Haven't you tried long enough to understand? Isn't it time, perhaps, to obey?"

The poet arranges strophes to present an emotion. The philosopher arranges remarks to present a concept.

The philosopher makes you think, not so that you'll believe anything in particular, but in order to clarify the concept. The poet makes you feel, not so that you'll desire anyone in particular, but in order to intensify the emotion.

Both articulate our experience. They join us more precisely to it.

Poetry is to politics as philosophy is to science. It is not political philosophy that we need, but a poetics of policy.

We cannot understand the ontology of social science, but we must obey the ethnopathy of social policy.

Money is the fact of value. A price is the value of a fact.

Because ideologues don't really understand the things they believe, they expect others to do the same.

If everyone were decent, tyranny would be impossible. If everyone were honest, genius would be unnecessary.

Genius is the tyranny of the mind. Tyranny is the genius of the heart.

Genius always doubts itself. That is its suffering and its passion.

A Transcendental Aesthetic

The point of a work of art must never be that the beholder become an artist.

"Science is the theory of the real." (Martin Heidegger)
Politics is the practice of the ideal.

The purpose of an idea is to make our work easier.

An ideologue will distort a fact in the service of an idea.

Left of Bizarro

Where punching people in the face is okay and pleading for head is rape.

ἀρετή

You are your virtues, your potential for goodness, excellence. The mistake is to identify yourself with your vices. You are not your vices. Your vices merely prevent you from becoming yourself, from doing what you are capable of, at any given time.

(Christianity is the application of this view of oneself to others through love.)