The Myth of the Chinese Written Character

We wanted to believe in a silent writing. We wanted to believe in a reading that evoked no sounds, only images, so that the text could never be simply read out loud. To recite any text you would first have to form its ideas in your mind. Only then would you choose the words of the spoken language to represent the thought, just as one might recount a memory, or describe a passing scene. The signs on the page could not determine the sounds in the air. Between the poem and the performance there would always be a picture. There would be no reading without imagination.

The function of art is not to get you thinking but to end your thoughtlessness. It is not to make you feel something but to assuage your callousness.

Institutions are the way we do things, immediately, without thinking.

Intuitions are the way we see things, immediately, without feeling.

Experience is what makes us think and feel, i.e., imagine.

Imagination is the means by which our intuitions and our institutions change.

Literature doesn't change you. It helps you live with who you have become.

Explication de Texte

No philosopher is as wise as their art implies, nor poet, as loving.

Ergriffsschrift

Poetry is a sort inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions. (E.P.)

Frege taught us that language has "functions":

Concept(object) = a true or false thought.

Likewise, perhaps

Emotion(subject) = a good or bad feeling?

Note that an object is a possible combination of things and a subject is the necessary isolation of a person. (Cf. Woolf on the loneliness that is the truth of things.)

Do not write a book because you hope it will be read.
Write a book because it must.

What they say about fascism is mostly true.
But what they say about democracy is not.

I am sometimes accused of expecting too much of my students, sometimes of not giving them enough credit, too often, of course, by the same people, in the same breath.

Non supra grammaticos

Do not read poetry to learn about poets or even poetry, but to learn the language, to submit to the grammar of feeling, and do not read philosophy to learn about philosophy, nor, most certainly, to learn about philosophers, but, again, to learn the language, to serve the grammar of thought.

Vice Versa?

Does one keep at it until it becomes a paragraph or

does the sheer
persistence of the prose
produce the poem?

Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus 1-1.21

1 History is all that befalls us. (History is everyone who is on my case.)

1.1 The elements of history are acts, not people.

1.11 History appropriates what happens, thereby making them our acts.

1.12 For the elemental act appropriates both what went down and who did it.

1.13 Acts in a time of pathos are history.

1.2 History gathers the acts.

1.21 Shit happens. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

How is a fact articulated?
Like a sentence, in imagination.

How is an act articulated?
Like a fact.

Philosophy will always sacrifice truth
for precision, as poetry will justice.

It takes courage to reach for the ideal.
Curiosity drives us towards the real.

Pleasure, I have said, is to power,
as certainty to knowledge. But
perhaps it is not mere pleasure
that we seek; perhaps it is felicity.

To see the truth and be sure.
To do good and be happy.

Certainty is the end of epistemology, its goal. (If we were always and easily sure there would be no need for epistemology.)

Felicity is the end of ethics, its goal. (Happiness is the highest good and if it were easy there would be no need for ethics.)

It Is Neither

It displays no intellect,
just makes predictions.
Its output is, not artifice,
but fabrication.

There is a sense in which the Morning Star is the Evening Star. I'm referring to Venus, of course. But there is also a sense in which it is not. Meaning is use.

Sometimes the error is in the concept.
There is nothing more to see.

Sometimes failure is just an emotion.
There is nothing to be done.