Proximally, and for the most part, your existence (being) belies your existentialism (angst).
That is, your body has solved the problem of existence before your mind raises it.
I'm pretty sure that this is the basic lesson of meditation.
all the usage in the world
Change my life? How easy for a headless
piece of marble to be cut and chiseled!
Why don't you come over here and say it
to my face, Apollo? Ready? Find your feet.
Philosophers who try to change our minds by telling us how they think are like poets who try to break our hearts by telling us how they feel.
Note: how not what they think and feel. They present themselves as paragons of thought and feeling, showing us how it's done. But why would we think and feel like them? For the sake of some philosophical truth? For the poetic justice of it? Is life not hard enough? Can they not just let us get on with it?
Perhaps they are not trying to change our minds, after all, nor to break our hearts. Perhaps they are only trying to help: to suffer more precisely, to get through it cleanly.
Some would reduce the whole of epistemology and ontology to science. What is, they say, is what can be known scientifically. I will grant their point, but only if they will grant mine — that ethics and ethnopathy remain, unreduced. Let philosophy provide the logos of what is; we will still need a poetry to absorb the pathos of who is to come.
Do we want this precision?
I don't mean just: do we want to make the effort?
To actually know the edge where our beliefs give way
to our desires, to master ourselves at the center.
What is the use of this clarity, this intensity?
What of the grammar of our suffering—
do we understand its reasons?
Will we obey its passions?
"from Latin continentia 'restraint, abstemiousness, moderation,' literally 'way one contains oneself'." (EtymOnline)
We countenance each other's suffering by containing our own.
_______
"Master thyself then others shall ye bear." (E.P.)
Caesar non supra grammaticos.
Anon.
I am a grammarian.
We will or we will not cry together.
Gertrude Stein