"Language is conceived in sin," says Quine, "and science is its redemption." Yes, and language is then born in innocence, and politics is its perdition.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Monday, August 18, 2025
Saturday, August 09, 2025
Tuesday, August 05, 2025
Friday, June 27, 2025
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Friday, June 06, 2025
Archaic Torso
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.
Tuesday, June 03, 2025
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.
Monday, May 26, 2025
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.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Friday, May 23, 2025
Monday, May 19, 2025
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?
Monday, May 12, 2025
Thursday, May 08, 2025
Monday, May 05, 2025
How to Face an Other
"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.)
Thursday, May 01, 2025
The Reichenbach Fall
Objection. "Philosophy is not poetry. It is the clarification of meanings through logical analysis; and picture language has no place in it." (Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, p. 145)
On the contrary, Wittgenstein says: "We make ourselves pictures of the facts." (T2.1)
I answer that poetry is the intensification of meaning through pathematic synthesis; and the image is its very locus.
Reply to the objection. Even on the same page, Hans Reichenbach, you tell us that "the motion of the stars is the mirror image of the rotation of the earth." This is not a picture? There is no metaphor in this language? I humbly submit that you, too, are but an "angelheaded hipster burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."
Thursday, April 24, 2025
The Might to Exist
No one has the right to exist.
It is a question of strength.
This goes for peoples as well as persons,
nations as well as individuals.
It is realism all the way down.
You do, however, have the right to inspire.
Take a breath.
It's idealism all the way up.
Monday, April 21, 2025
Any fact can be stated. Any act can be commanded. That is, they are tractable.
It is nonsense to speak of a fact but refuse to say what is thus to be seen. Likewise, it is nonsense to speak of an act but refuse to say who is to do it.
Of course, our statement may be misunderstood; our command may be disobeyed. But what has been misundertood, and who has disobeyed? It must be possible to say.
(It should perhaps be clarified that acts are never in past. Acts, once done, are now facts, to be seen. Likewise, there are no future facts, they are always behind us, in the past, where they may abide up to the present. "Who did that?" always refers to the fact that remains of some past deed.)
Monday, April 14, 2025
The danger of scientific knowledge and political power is that they lead us believe things and desire people without first imagining them. It may sound strange to think of politics as the business of getting us to "desire people". It is less strange, I suppose, to think of science as getting us to believe things. But even the latter must be qualified by method; and to "desire people" is merely to give them a mandate. That is, science and politics are just systems of representation, objective and subjective, respectively. The danger, like I say, is that we represent (and allow others to represent) things and people without the intercession of imagination. There are things that are easier to believe if you don't try to imagine them, as there people who can likewise be easier to desire. The imagination intervenes (when it does) on behalf our own flesh and bones. It always represents the body.
The practical function of language is to let us describe facts and prescribe acts, to make statements and issue commands. The use of language for these purposes, inevitably affects our empirical and normative experience, our sense of what is real and ideal, what is and what should be. Language shapes our imaginations.
The "language arts," philosophy and poetry perhaps most clearly, work upon our imaginations deliberately. Their aim is to improve the accuracy of imagination, our sense of what is possible. They also try to move us to recognize certain necessities.
I say "the arts" here, and I impute a will to them, an intention, because I do not think the immediate aim of artists is always this. It's just that when they succeed, when they produce "a work of art," it is because what they have done, for whatever petty goals they may themselves have pursued, is to help us better imagine the facts and acts before us.
We become better able to see what must be, and do what we can.
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Friday, April 11, 2025
Tuesday, April 08, 2025
The imagination belongs as much to philosophers as to poets. "We make ourselves pictures of the facts," said Wittgenstein; it is an act upon which "so much depends," Williams might add. "The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things," Stevens proposed, speaking, I suppose, as a poet. Would he grant, I wonder, that it operates, as it were, between the mind and the heart, and would therefore appear, to the philosopher, as the knowledge we carry in our hearts of the needs of others?
Wittgenstein imagined a philosopher who speaks only of things that can be thought, but in such an order that thinking itself, which is to say, the possibility of things, comes to the fore, thus presenting our concepts perspicuously.
We can now imagine a poet who speaks only of people who feel, always in a meter such that we feel them ourselves, which is to say, our need for people, our longing for others, is presented intensely as an emotion.
Saturday, April 05, 2025
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Even here, lovers will waste each other's time,
explaining how things work, how the world works.
Everything works, and the world will be fine,
but they will walk earnestly ("as in the day")
dressed like adults, without needs or desires,
and hold forth, like teachers, about machines
and policies and practices and "what they want"
in the upper echelons and why "all we can do"
is one thing (that won't work) or another (that will)
and someone will "just have to understand".
Lovers, I remind you, this is Scandinavia. Relax.
The war is far from here and a hundred years away.
Monday, February 17, 2025
Sunday, February 16, 2025
You will never be free of this love,
she said. It will never leave you.
It will give you, always, more than you
deserve, take more than you can afford.
It will forever mock your suffering
and censure your simplest pleasure.
You did not find this love, she said,
and it was never yours to lose.
Though you have done much for this world,
our love is not among your accomplishments.
It came before us and abides beside us.
It made us and waits here only to unmake us.
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Thursday, February 06, 2025
It is the function of science to extricate the world from our history.
It is the function of politics to implicate us in it.
Philosophy extricates the concept from our emotions.
Poetry implicates us all.
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
Monday, January 27, 2025
Power depends on deference to authority.*
Knowledge depends on a fixed** point of reference.
_____
*Authority, from author, from L. auctor, "one who causes to grow."
**from L. fixus, "fixed, fast, immovable; established, settled."
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Monday, January 20, 2025
Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 09, 2025
Friday, January 03, 2025
Thursday, January 02, 2025
What is there?
The ocean exists.
It also inspires.
The ocean asserts itself and admonishes us.
We stand on the shore and look to the horizon.
It is what it is. We must become ourselves.
The ocean has its reasons, and its passions.