(I often get this one wrong.)

What is to knowledge
as courage to power?

Courage is of the heart,
to encourage is to hearten,
______ is of the mind,
to ________ is to mind,
to make or become mindful,
perhaps, to remind.

Courage allows us to do
things despite our fears.
What allows us to see
things despite remorse?

Courage shapes our future
_______ shapes our past.
Or does _______ make a world
as courage makes our history?

_______
Note: mood = courage = mind?
suggsting link to

Also, courage must be to daring what
________ is to caring.

See: "Daring"

The child imagines the tree
as a field of action,
explores its emptiness,
occupies its branches,

while the adult suffers the tree
as an object of perception,
its negative spaces,
and the shade at its feet.

The child's body
reaches right up to reality;
the facts impinge
upon its surface,

while the adult's body
longs for a proper ideal,
and the act recedes
to mere appearances.

The philosopher seeks
the purpose of existence
as the poet seeks
the source of inspiration.

The canon is a history
of their failures.
Would it undo the world
should they succeed?

Emotions make no sense.
Concepts provide no motive.

The arts bring precision
to our suffering.

Philosophy clarifies
our thinking.
Poetry intensifies
our feeling.

These crafts are joined
in imagination.

The difference between knowledge and power
can be neither known nor mastered.

It must be suffered.

Nor can the unity of knowledge and power
be known or mastered,

but it can be imagined.

It is the task

of the scientist
to make us see better,
of the politician
to make us do better,
of the philosopher
to make us think better,
of the poet
to make us feel better.
________
No one says these are easy. But when the politician tries to get us to see something, or the scientist, to do something, or when the poet would have us think, or the philosopher would have us feel, they are, whatever higher goal they may be trying to accomplish, not staying on task. They are invoking an authority beyond their mandate, beyond their method, beyond the limits of their style.

The remark is the unit of philosophical expression.

A strophe is a unit of
poetic composition.

Philosophers are to existence
what poets are to inspiration.

Scientists are to curiosity
what politicians are to ambition.

Doing social science
without the humanities
is like imagining a society
without people.

Without things
you can imagine matter all you like
but without biology
your politics are immaterial.

Nothing matters.
Nobody cares.

Everyone's social.
Everything dares.

Our skepticism is not particularly aroused when we learn that scientists have satisfied their own curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge. Why are we suspicious of politicians who satisfy their personal ambition in the pursuit of power? Should we not expect those who seek power to be ambitious, just as we expect those who seek knowledge to be curious?

A Portrait of Two Women

I was right about us.
She was wrong about him.

We were wrong about him.
She was right about me.

Philosophy is to poetry
as the unspoken belief
to the illicit desire.

Morality
respects
feelings.

Causality
manipulates
thought.

(No. Not
the other
way round.)