Mandates are to justice
as methods, to truth.

Institutions are our immediate point of contact with culture, the meaning of our acts on their face.

Likewise, intuitions are our immediate point of contact with nature, the meaning of the facts as they appear.

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.

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.