Folly

It is, let's say, "the wisdom of the heart", the error in thinking that is caused by feeling, the unreasonableness of passion. But it is not simply a defect. Its ground is in something positive, our emotions. And this is why Erasmus was able to sing its praises.

What is the pangrammatical complement? Spinoza talked about "the intellectual love of a thing". What is to passion as folly is to reason? What do we call the loss of feeling that is caused by thinking, the dispassionateness of reason?

Pathology

I few years ago, I came up with the unhappy notion of "anthropopathy" to capture the idea that there can't properly speaking be a "science of man", a scientific account (logos) of the human—no anthropology, that is, not even a philosophical one, because humanity is not a concept but an emotion, not a reason for being, if you will, but a passion to become. But this has not, of course, brought an end to the human "sciences", which are as strong as ever.

One of the means by which they establish themselves is to interpret all passion as a species of suffering on the model of illness. If you want to replace anthropology with a horrid word like anthropopathy (which I granted at the time was a indeed a very ugly word) then perhaps you also want to abandon sociology and psychology by a similar maneuver? But that just makes you either a sociopath or a psychopath.

It's a clever move. If you are not going to be reasonable, rational about your society or your psyche then you are implicitly admitting you're insane, i.e., irrational. But we should push back against this interpretation. After all, a great deal of mental illness simply is to approach emotions (i.e., one's own) as objects for rational analysis, rather than actual guides to who one might become.

If I'm right, the original error was to let philosophers consider the question of our humanity. They treated it as the unknown object of some obscure concept. Then they helped scientists believe that key parts of the object were now known, and well enough to be theorized good and proper. Throughout the centuries, the poets have been gradually pushed to the side, and with them the fundamental point that the self is not meant to be known in theory but to be mastered in practice.

It is not that the human has been conceptualized badly, but that it has been conceptualized at all. The construal of a pathos under logos has turned our passions into so much suffering. Though it may have been done in the name of rationality, there's nothing reasonable about it. I guess I risk being called insane for pointing it out.

See also: "Emotion and Society"

Update: In his 2013 book Intractable Conflicts Daniel Bar-Tal has coined the much less unhappy word "ethnopathy" (p. 344) to describe essentially what I'm talking about here: the suffering of peoples or, less, dramatically, a feeling toward a group. I believe this concept is absolutely crucial to resolving the world's current conflicts, its cultural crises, both in the West and between the West and its Other.

Manners and Causes

A few years ago I suggested that the pangrammatical analogue of "moral order" is "causal order". This would make pangrammatical complements of morality and causality, which sits uneasily with me. But perhaps etymology can help me rest easier. Our morality derives from our manners. It strikes me as plausible that causes are to knowledge what manners are to power. If the thought had occurred, be advised that reasons and causes are on the same side of the knowledge/power divide. So we have something like this:

knowledge/power
reason/passion
cause/manner
epistemology/ethics
______/morality

I've been toying with filling that space in with "verity", but the root meanings don't line up so well. I don't think etiology quite captures the spirit of the juxtaposition. But if it's true that etiology is the study of "origins", then maybe it's something like this:

origins/morals
originality/morality

Seems a bit like a grammatical joke, of course. But we're not above that here at the Pangrammaticon, neither as poets nor as philosophers.

Resolve

Our scientists and our politicians, taken as groups, lack, in my opinion, resolve. They shy away from making their assertions and injunctions explicit. We are mired in the imprecision of irresolute knowers and powers. We are asked to understand vague statements, to obey vague orders.

Clarity of statement. Intensity of command. These are what make our understanding and obedience precise. And our misunderstandings and disobedience interesting. Our scientists and politicians lack the requisite resolve. To inquire. To govern.

What if

"the conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects"

no longer exist?

And the conditions of the necessity of the experience of subjects?